Update Rollup 1 for SCOM 2019 - What's been announced?

At Microsoft Ignite 2019 it was announced that the Update Rollup 1 for System Center 2019 won't be released this year, but we still received some news on what the Update Rollup 1 will bring to SCOM 2019.

In my previous blog post, I talked about the new System Center roadmap, you can read about it over here System Center roadmap update!

I couldn't make MS Ignite 2019 this year, luckily I was able to stream some sessions, Microsoft had a dedicated session for "SCOM and what's next"

Most of the sessions have been made "available on-demand", so anyone of you can watch them online for free, for the SCOM session you'll find it over here:

SCOM 2019: Customer Success stories and what’s next

What's coming in Update Rollup 1 for SCOM 2019

The System Center product team have put a lot of focus on three areas for SCOM 2019:

We may ask why these areas? A lot of the improvements and new features come from feedback given on the SCOM UserVoice page, which is great!

If you have an idea or feedback about anything, make sure to submit it over at the SCOM UserVoice page over here:

https://systemcenterom.uservoice.com/forums/293064-general-operations-manager-feedback

Let's go briefly through what was announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019.

Version Agnostic Management Packs

The version agnostic management packs are not a new thing, but the System Center product team announced that more of them will be coming in the near future.

Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) management pack

This management pack is not new either, it exists for SCOM 2016, but the existing management pack will be enhanced, it will support SCOM 2019 and have some neat new features.

In the new management pack we will be able to monitor all the way from the physical list, all the way down to the file share level.

I've created a visual comparison between the current S2D management pack and the upcoming one below.

RHEL 8 Support

We will get support for the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, which was made generally available earlier this year.

One click patching experience

A long-awaited feature, finally updating SCOM with Update Rollups will be made easier, or will it? The System Center product team has revealed a One-click installer for upcoming Update Rollups, the Update Rollup 1 for SCOM 2019 will be the first one.

Support for gMSA

gMSA stands for "Group Managed Service Accounts", this is a feature that has existed for a long time, but we are finally going to be able to make use of this feature in SCOM.

A standalone Managed Service Account (sMSA) is a managed domain account that provides automatic password management, simplified service principal name (SPN) management, and the ability to delegate the management to other administrators.

The group Managed Service Account (gMSA) provides the same functionality within the domain but also extends that functionality over multiple servers.

Distro-agnostic management pack

Currently, each Linux distribution has its own management pack, we will finally see distribution agnostic management packs, meaning less management packs to keep track of!

Resource Group monitoring in Azure MP

The existing Microsoft Azure management pack receives updates continuously, the new feature that's coming is that we will now be able to monitor resource groups, which means that we can select the resource groups that we want to monitor, we don't have to monitor everything.