Even the month of September is full of news and different updates have affected Operations Management Suite (OMS) and System Center, also thanks to Ignite 2017, the annual Microsoft conference of this week in Orlando. This article contains a summary accompanied by useful references for further study.
Operations Management Suite (OMS)
- OMS Customers are using the solution Security & Compliance are given the option to use the features found in ’Azure Security Center in order to have a unified management of security and protection of their systems, all without additional cost. This is particularly useful to be able to manage workloads across hybrid environments, regardless of where they reside, on Azure, on-premises, or on other public clouds. Within the Azure Security Center will be automatically handle the security of the systems that are already connected to the solution OMS Security & Compliance and you can add additional machines simply by installing the Microsoft Monitoring Agent. To see details of the features offered I invite you to consult the publication OMS customers can now use Azure Security Center to protect their hybrid cloud workloads. In this regard it is worth noting that to enable the features just in time VM access, dynamic application controls and network threat detection of Azure resources you must select pricing tier Security Center Standard for the Subscription or the Resource Group.
Figure 1 – List of features for the protection of hybrid environments
- The Azure portal now includes two features related to Operations Management Suite (OMS): Workspace Settings and View Designer. From the Azure portal you can access the settings of the workspace OMS as shown in the following figure:
Figure 2 – Settings of the Workspace who are accessible from the Azure Portal
Also, the View Designer, that allows you to create custom views, is now accessible directly from the Log Analytics section of Azure portal:
Figure 3 – View Designer available directly from the portal Azure
- As already announced in a dedicated article the update of Log Analytics has introduced a new powerful query language. In this useful article highlighted the main changes introduced by the new language.
- Another interesting new feature is the ability to run query not only on single workspace OMS, but in a transversal way across multiple workspace. To learn more about you can see Query across resources.
- Article Monitoring SQL Azure Data Sync using OMS Log Analytics returns the configuration to be carried out in order to monitor the solution SQL Azure Data Sync using a custom solution OMS. Azure SQL Data Sync allows you to synchronize data in both directions or unidirectional between different Azure SQL database andor to SQL database on-premises. With this procedure you can detect error conditions or warning in the synchronization process so simple, thanks to OMS.
- To help you to track the Big Data application involving different technologies was announced in preview the ability to monitor cluster HDInsight with Azure Log Analytics . In this video there are the details of how HDInsight customers can monitor and debug Hadoop, Spark, HBase, Kafka, Interactive Query and cluster Storm.
Solutions
- In OMS there is a new solution Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) Analytics for centralizing in Log Analytics the jobs of one or more Virtual Machine Manager to have an overall view of the health and performance of the virtualization infrastructure managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
Figure 4 – Overview of VMM Analytics solution
- The solution for the monitor of containers see integration with package manager Helm for Kubernetes cluster in Linux environment. You can then use Helm for the deployment of agent OMS under Kubernetes on Linux.
Agent
- Released a new version of the OMS agent for Linux systems that mainly has solved some bugs and introduced an updated version of some of the main components. For more details and to get the updated version please refer to the official GitHub page OMS Agent for Linux GA v 1.4.1-45
Figure 5 – Bug fixes and what's new for the OMS agent for Linux
System Center
System Center Configuration Manager
- Released the Cumulative Update 6 for UNIX and Linux clients of Configuration Manager. It is a new version of the client that fixes several bugs and adds support for new Linux distributions. This release also removed support for Unix and Linux distributions even obsolete discontinued by vendor. Customers using the SCCM clients with these versions may continue to use the client updated to Cumulative Update 5. The release announcement and further details can be found in this article.
- During Ignite 2017 was announced an interesting feature called co-management that interest the management of the device using either System Center Configuration Manager and Microsoft Intune. With Windows 10 Fall Creators Update there is the possibility to make the join of the device both to the Active Directory domain (AD) on-premises and to Azure AD in the cloud. This expands the possibilities for management of devices using the Configuration Manager client and the MDM agent of Intune. To deepen this topic, you can look in the video section of the Ignite site the sessions with the following reference codes: BRK3057, BRK3075, BRK3076 and BRK2079.
Figure 7 – Co-management devices with SCCM and Intune
System Center Updates Publisher
- The release of the final version of System Center Updates Publisher is imminent and certainly much awaited, since this is a solution for several years not updated. During the month it was released the Preview 2 of System Center Updates Publisher. For more details and to evaluate the preview you can consult the article System Center Updates Publisher September 2017 Preview is now available.
By accessing this page you can select the way you find most suitable to test and evaluate free Operations Management Suite (OMS).
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