We are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Monitor SCOM Managed Instance (SCOM MI). SCOM MI brings SCOM monitoring capabilities and configurable health models to Azure Monitor. A capability within Azure Monitor, SCOM MI provides a cloud-based alternative for SCOM customers, providing monitoring continuity for cloud and on-premises environments across the cloud adoption journey. SCOM MI enhances Azure Monitor to be the comprehensive solution for monitoring cloud and on-premises environments, helping SCOM customers modernize their SCOM deployments to Azure and migrate the monitored applications and infrastructure at their own pace.
As customers go through migrations from on-prem datacenters to Azure, they evaluate Azure Monitor for observability of the applications and infrastructure post migration. SCOM customers often report that issues setting this up and even lack full parity with their existing monitoring rules & health models. They do not want to consider SCOM management group as a specialized workload and migrate it as is to Azure, owing to the cost of managing the infrastructure on Azure themselves.
Azure Monitor SCOM MI is the answer to these needs!!
SCOM customers looking to move to the cloud get the following benefits with SCOM MI.
- Preserve investments made in SCOM: SCOM MI is compatible with all existing SCOM Management Packs and the configurations made on the on-prem setup can be easily migrated to SCOM MI.
- Simplify management of SCOM infrastructure: SCOM MI is Microsoft-managed. All the cloud connected SCOM components (management servers, SQL databases) are managed by Microsoft, removing the responsibility of hardware/software updates and security patches from the customer.
- Monitoring continuity through migrations: SCOM MI facilitates a simple migration and avoids disruptions in monitoring while migrating infrastructure or applications from on-prem to the cloud.
- Monitor workloads everywhere: SCOM MI is hosted in Azure with the capability of monitoring applications running on Azure or off-Azure.
Existing capabilities of Azure Monitor already provide capabilities to monitor different applications, services, and infrastructure, including VMs, SQL Servers, Containers, App services, Arc connected servers and Arc enabled services. SCOM MI enhances Azure Monitor by helping customers preserve their SCOM investments and adopt the cloud with fewer changes and a reduction in operational costs.
In public preview, SCOM MI provides the familiar SCOM Operations and Web Console experiences, provides feature parity for monitoring applications using agents on Windows with SCOM, and utilizes the same monitoring, observability, and management models as that of SCOM. This enables SCOM customers to leverage cloud-based monitoring while incurring minimal upfront training for their personnel. By providing a managed instance, SCOM MI reduces management headache for SCOM admins with many of the infrastructure management tasks being managed for them.
Key capabilities of SCOM MI in public preview are:
- Azure based lifecycle management of the System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) setup, includes deployment, tracking and decommissioning.
- Hands off maintenance of the SCOM instance, including the SQL MI database, management servers, and SCOM updates.
- Modern Power BI reporting, replacing the SCOM data warehouse and the SSRS deployment.
Various customers and partners have tried SCOM MI during earlier previews and had the following to say.
“SCOM MI is useful to keep Azure Monitor and SCOM at one place. SCOM MI is managed by Microsoft and works with Custom Management Packs. I don’t need to be concerned about infra.” - Nestle
“SCOM Managed Instance simplifies management of hybrid datacenters, providing a scalable, secure, managed monitoring service so we can focus on the business goals as opposed to investing time on maintaining the monitoring infrastructure. We are excited to work with Microsoft and our customers to modernize SCOM deployments and accelerate cloud adoptions” - Silect
All customers can now try out the following exciting features in the Public Preview of SCOM MI.
Get started with Azure Monitor SCOM MI