Long time no blog – I have been working lately on the System Center Service Provider Foundation (SPF), which is part of System Center 2012 SP1

SPF provides a hosted IaaS cloud REST OData API for System Center adding multitenancy and the ability to manage across multiple System Center instances.  My colleague John Ballard wrote an introductory post on the Orchestrator blog about SPF here.

For a demo and overview discussion of SPF, here is a Channel 9 interview I did last week at TechEd North America.

Please come see our webcast on planning, deploying and administering Service Manager -

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032443671&Culture=en-US

The webcast is from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday May 26th.

I am very happy to say that System Center Service Manager 2010 has shipped!

You can download an evaluation copy here. 

It’s been a great experience working with the engineering team, TAP customers and ISV/SI partners on this project.  We have also gotten a lot of great feedback on the TechNet forum. 

Over the next year, there are more upcoming releases:

• Service Manager Authoring Tool in a couple of months
• Compliance & Risk MP in August
• Service Manager 2010 SP1 in early 2011

Updated:  added better evaluation download link

One of the key capabilities around the Service Manager integration with Operations Manager 2007 is the connector that enables Service Manager incidents to be created from Operations Manager alerts.

I thought I would provide some of the details that will be relevant for folks interested in this integration. 

With this bi-directional connector, you can choose to have alerts closed when incidents are resolved/closed and incidents resolved when alerts are closed. 

In addition, you will often want to know when updates to OM alerts will happen due to the connector as many orgs have implemented OM-based email notification subscriptions that will trigger on any changes to the alerts.

When is OM Alert History is Modified?

• When Alert is first forwarded to SM
• When Alert is assigned to a user in SM
• When Alert is closed

What other Alert properties are updated from SM?

• Ticket ID
• Resolution status
• Alert Owner (SM Assigned to User)
• Resolved By
• Resolved Date

Also, I am sure you will be interested in knowing what data flows from OM to SM in the alert.

Which Alert Properties are mapped to SM Incident?

• Incident ID (initially set upon creation)
• All Custom fields
• Resolution Status
• Assigned to User (OM Alert Owner)
• Affected Config Items including Computer (OM Monitoring Object)
• Description

If there is a conflict due to changes at the same time in both SM and OM on the same incident/alert pair:

• If incident is resolved in SM at the same time an update happens for the OM alert and the alert is not closed, the alert will be closed and the updates are applied to  the incident.
• If alert is closed in OM and incident has updates in SM, the incident updates are applied to the alert. However the alert will not be reactivated and the incident will be resolved.

Finally, the OM alert connector is also able to route incidents using a rule that applies a custom incident template based on criteria such as the OM MP containing the Rule/Monitor that raised the alert, computer group, custom field, OM monitoring class, or alert severity & priority. 

Each routing rule will be evaluated in priority order from top to bottom and if none of the rules apply, you can pick a default template to use.

Anyone running Service Manager will need to install this hotfix:  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975332/en-us

It fixes an issue that occurs with Data Access Service (sdk service) or the Management Service (healthservice) when either SM or DWStagingandConfig database servers become temporarily unavailable.

If you don’t install the fix, you will see event ID: 26340 in the Event log of the management server when the problem occurs.