This blog entry will attempt to summarize all knowledge which is currently publicly available on what is coming in System Center Operations Manager 2012. This is a daunting task as there are a whole lot of potential sources of knowledge out there on the topic – the point is to be able to provide what we know and where we know it from. Please note, all of this information is for a product which is currently under development so things can change. So here we go – what are the big changes in OpsMgr 2012?
The RMS is dead!
One of my most used and unpleasant discussions when architecting Operations Manager 2007 was having to explain about the role of the Root Management Server. I often explain it as either kinda like a FSMO role in Active Directory, or as the highlander analogy (see the graphic below).
This is great for large organizations and allowing multiple management servers to balance the functionality that the RMS used to provide alone should also increase scalability.
Integrated Dashboards!
- Easy to create Dashboards from Windows and Web Console
- Easy to customize data visualizations via Widgets
- Dashboard and Widgets delivered through MPs
- Show Dashboards in SharePoint
Integrated as “Feature Packs”
- Dashboard Feature packs for most workloads will be in the marketplace at product launch
- Enhances your current MP’s – shipped as dashboard feature packs
Widgets/gauges include:
- Alert widget
- Performance widget
- Map with State
- Topology
- State
- Top/Bottom N for Perf and SLO
- Availability history over time
- Top N for Alerts
- Perf gauge and SLA gauge
- Others being investigated
Dashboards mentioned for networking include: Network summary, Network node, Network interface, vicinity.
Welcome to the Pool!
A server pool provides the ability to distribute workloads across multiple Management Servers including:
- Group Calculation
- Availability
- Distributed Monitor Health Roll up
- DB Grooming
- Notification
This means that there are changes to both the Configuration Service and SDK Service.
Configuration Service: Runs on all Mgmt Servers, Store config data in DB instead of memory, faster startup, smaller demand on local resources
SDK Service: Runs on all Mgmt Servers, Console can use any
Another example for usage of a pool would include monitoring for web pages through a pool of nodes.
Resource pools used to provide high availability for network monitoring.
Network Monitoring
Integrated into Operations Manager including what servers are connected to various ports on switches. It looks like the EMC Smarts acquisition has been put to use – per Brad Anderson “We are seeing the results in the OpsMgr 2012 network monitoring from the integration of EMC and Smarts”.
- Vicinity Dashboard showing contextual Network Map
- Summary Dashboard of Network Devices
- See Network Device Details and Health
- Out of the box discovery, monitoring, and reporting
- Server to network dependency discovery
- Multi-vendor support
- Multi protocol support
- SNMPv1/v2c/v3
- IPv4 and IPv6
Information discovered by Network Monitoring:
- Connectivity
- VLAN membership
- HSRP groups
- Stitching of switch ports to server NICs
- Key components of a device
- Port/Interface
Up/Down (operational & admin status)
Volumes of inbound/outbound traffic
% Utilization
Drop & Broadcast rates
- Processor
% Utilization
- Memory
In depth memory counters (Cisco Only)
Free memory
Application Monitoring
Addition of .NET monitoring which is assumed to be based upon the AVIcode acquisition.
Java EE (J2E) Web Service Monitoring
- Java EE Application Servers
- WebSphere 6.1 & 7.0
- WebLogic 10gRel3 & 11gRel1
- JBOSS 4.2 & 5.1 (JVM 1.5+), JBOSS 6 (TBD)
- Tomcat 5.5 & 6.0 (JVM 1.5+), Tomcat 7 (TBD)
Console Experience consistency
Desktop and Web console designed to be more consistent with each other from a look and feel perspective. The new web console looks like it is silverlight based.
Gotta-Know architecture
Plan on Windows 2008 R2 for OpsMgr servers.
Outside In Monitoring
There is discussion out there that Outside In Monitoring similar to Gomez is going to also be available but this was not shown or discussed the MMS as far as I have been able to tell.
The following are the summary of sources that I have drawn this blog article content from:
MMS Sessions:
BB03 – Operations Manager 2012 an Overview
BB04 – Operations Manager 2012 Setup and Configuration
BB08 – Operations Manager 2012 Management Pack Readiness and Authoring
BB09 – Operations Manager 2012 Dashboards and Authoring
Links:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_stranger/archive/2010/04/22/what-is-coming-in-opsmgr-vnext.aspx
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/11/scom-vnext-part-iii-network-monitoring.html
http://thoughtsonopsmgr.blogspot.com/2010/12/scom-vnext-part-iv-topology.html
http://systemcentercentral.com/BlogDetails/tabid/143/IndexID/82472/Default.aspx