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Microsoft SCOM (System Center Operations Manager)

By Rahul Awati

What is Microsoft SCOM (System Center Operations Manager)?

Microsoft SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) is a set of tools for infrastructure monitoring and application performance management. SCOM is part of Microsoft's System Center, a product that helps simplify enterprises' infrastructure deployment, configuration, management and monitoring. It also enables organizations to improve the agility and performance of their infrastructure and virtualized software-defined data centers (SDDCs).

Microsoft System Center includes numerous tools to simplify data center management, both on premises and in the cloud. These tools ease the monitoring, automation and provisioning of software-defined enterprise data centers and enable data center admins to diagnose and troubleshoot issues across the infrastructure.

SCOM is a flexible and cost-effective tool for infrastructure monitoring and performance management. This software enables IT admins to monitor the operations, installed services and applications, and connected devices on multiple computers from a single, centralized console.

The console displays the health, performance and availability of all these monitored objects, identifies problems and then resolves them using SCOM's list of prioritized recommendations. With SCOM, admins can monitor the data center and cloud infrastructure -- public and private -- and take steps to ensure consistent performance and continuous availability of vital enterprise applications.

Important components of Microsoft SCOM

System Center Operations Manager monitors various computers, devices, applications and services in the enterprise IT environment and tells admins which of these monitored objects are and aren't healthy. It also sends alerts when it identifies problems, provides useful information about the identified problem, finds its cause and implements a possible solution.

To perform all the above tasks, various components work together in SCOM. These components are part of a management group, which is created when SCOM is installed and is the basic unit of functionality. The components may exist on a single server or may be distributed across multiple servers. SCOM components include the following:

Key features in SCOM 2022

In the latest 2022 version, SCOM supports enhanced role-based access control and new built-in roles to enhance user experiences. For example, it supports a Read-Only Administrator role that provides read permissions in SCOM, including reporting. The Delegated Administrator role is similar to the Read-Only Administrator role, except for reporting permissions. Admins can also create custom user roles with specific permissions in SCOM.

Another new feature in SCOM 2022 is organizations with Windows New Technology LAN Manager security protocols disabled can select the Reporting Manager Authentication Type as Windows Negotiate during installation. Further, admins can choose to close an alert of an unhealthy health monitor. They can also upgrade SCOM databases with an existing SQL Always-On setup without having to make post-configuration changes.

In SCOM 2022, the Secure Hash Algorithm-1 certificate is encrypted with SHA-256. Also, groupId is supported in the Get Alert data API, and the source -- fully qualified domain name -- can be viewed while tuning a management pack. Other useful features in SCOM 2022 include the following:

System requirements for SCOM

To maximize benefits from SCOM, it's important to first check system requirements and ensure those requirements are met. That said, SCOM is designed to be flexible and scalable, so the hardware and software requirements for specific scenarios may differ from the below guidelines:

Additionally, when upgrading installations of System Center 2019 - Operations Manager that's integrated with one or more System Center components, admins must ensure that Orchestrator is upgraded first, followed by Service Manager, Data Protection Manager, Operations Manager and Virtual Machine Manager.

Other minimum system requirements to configure Microsoft SCOM include the following:

SCOM Assessment

SCOM Assessment is a proactive service to diagnose potential issues in the Operations Manager environment. These issues may occur in both on-premises and Azure virtual machine (VM) -- i.e., infrastructure as a service -- environments. The goal of the service is to provide admins with specific, actionable guidance to mitigate risks to the SCOM environment. These recommendations are prioritized and grouped across six focus areas so admins and their staff can do the following:

To garner these benefits, SCOM Assessment must be set up. This takes about an hour. It can be done by linking the organization's Azure subscription to Services Hub and then adding Assessment from Health > Assessments in Services Hub. After running an assessment, the results can be viewed in Azure Log Analytics and Services Hub Dashboard. Selecting View all recommendations against the active assessment reveals the results, along with a list of prioritized and grouped recommendations to improve infrastructure health and performance.

See why you should adopt an SDDC architecture with caution and proper planning.

22 Aug 2023

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