You spoke, Microsoft listened. Ignite 2020 SCOM takeaways
Have you ever looked at SCOM on User Voice - Microsoft’s way of collecting feedback on what end users have to say about SCOM and its future?
Well good news, the top 2 items are going to be addressed!
At Ignite 2020 - System Center session, Dianna Marks (SCOM Product Marketing Manager) told us Microsoft have heard your feedback and will be taking action.
Make SCOM faster!!!
There are many reasons why SCOM might not be as snappy as SCOM admins might like. Some of these are under your control, when planning your SCOM build out, such as:
Consider how many management servers to add in and what spec each management server should be (see the system requirements for a guide).
Turn off monitoring that you aren’t consuming, as generating these alerts will slow SCOM down and storing them can hurt SCOM DW performance - our free tuning solution, Easy Tune, can help with this one.
Speak to any DBA and you will hear many different approaches to speeding up SQL databases and the importance of good server capacity planning. Stoyan Chalakov’s blog “Fly your SCOM Management Group to the sky” gives some great tips specific to speeding up the SCOM SQL database.
Unfortunately, there are also many things about SCOM performance that are not fixable by performance tweaks and good planning.
The good news is the SCOM product team announced they are on the case, working on performance improvements in SCOMs consoles for alert, performance and health views - exciting news indeed! There are no more details on what to expect, but I am sure more will follow soon enough…
Enhanced change tracking
As you will have seen at SCOMathon 2019, SCOM Product Manager Aakash Basavaraj announced that SCOM 2019 UR2 would contain change tracking and reporting for MP History, MP objects and overrides (we blogged about it at the time). This has been a missing feature from SCOM for a very long time!
At the time, Aakash said they will be delivering change tracking features across multiple releases, so what do we expect next?
In the System Center Ignite session, Dianna Marks, SCOM Product Marketing Manager announced that Microsoft are taking change tracking a step further, with change tracking for:
Agent level changes - what agents where deployed, updated or removed from which machine.
Run as Accounts - when they are added/modified/removed from SCOM.
Run as Profiles - modifications.
User Roles - adding/removing permissions.
New and Improved MPs
Management Packs are the life blood of SCOM, adding new monitoring and features is always great to see!
Dianna announced a new Azure Stack HCI MP is being worked on right now also the existing Office 365 MP will be enhanced to cover some additional Exchange, Sharepoint and Teams use cases. We don’t yet know which use cases are covered, but we’ll be sure to let you know once we have all the juicy details.
MPs being worked on right now by Microsoft.