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Microsoft Previews System Center Operations Manager Assessment Tool
Microsoft today announced a preview of a new tool that will automatically check the status of System Center Operations Manager 2012 products.
The new tool, called "System Center Operations Manager Assessment," is a free addition, but just for users of Microsoft's Operations Management Suite. The Operations Management Suite is a subscription offering separate from System Center that provides access to tools for managing workloads in public cloud datacenters.
The System Center Operations Manager Assessment preview just works with System Center Operations Manager 2012 Service Pack 1 and System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 products. It compares an organization's instance of System Center Operations Manager with Microsoft's best practices and produces "a health check and risk assessment" based on that comparison.
The assessments get displayed in graphical form in the Operations Management Suite. They include numerical weightings on any actions to take (see screenshot):
[Click on image for larger view.]
Screenshot of System Center Operations Manager Assessment preview. Source: Microsoft blog post.
Users of the tool get recommendations that are based on Microsoft's "best practices that were collected over the years from Microsoft Knowledge Base articles and field engineers across multiple environments, industries and scenarios," according to Microsoft's announcement.
The new assessment tool isn't turned on by default. IT pros have to enable the rule for a specific management server, as described in the announcement. They also have to configure a "run as" account within the Operations Management Suite.
Once installed, the System Center Operations Manager Assessment preview is designed to run for seven days to perform a health check. The scan can be reduced to a one-day period, at minimum, if wanted.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.