Kicking the tires: Using the production released version of Global Service Monitoring (GSM) in Operations Manager 2012 SP1 (#SCOM, #SYSCTR, #Azure)

With the production released version of GSM, there were a couple of big surprises that I saw. 1) The licensing structure was actually a pleasant surprise. Per the article at http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2013/01/14/system-center-global-service-monitor-getting-started.aspx “GSM is provided by Microsoft as a benefit of Software Assurance. If you have a System Center license, you can use GSM at no…

Top 5 reasons Why Sysadmins Should Find System Center 2012 Operations Manager a Refreshing Alternative to SolarWinds (#SCOM)

For background here, there was an article written entitled: Top 5 Reasons Why Sysadmins Should Find SolarWinds® Server & Application Monitor a Refreshing Alternative to Microsoft® SCOM. This article discussed five benefits they see to using SolarWinds versus System Center Operations Manager. In this article they referenced an article I had written for Windows IT…

Kicking the tires: Connecting App Controller with your Azure MSDN subscription (#Azure, #scappctrl, #SYSCTR)

As part of further learning how System Center 2012 works with Azure, I spent some time recently working with integrating App Controller with an Azure subscription. With App Controller, there are no downloads required to integrate with Azure (such as the management pack for Operations Manager or the integration pack for Orchestrator). This blog posts…