System Center 2012 SP1 – Operations Manager is Generally Available!

[System-Center-Team]

First published on TECHNET on Jan 15, 2013
This morning we announced the availability of System Center 2012 SP1.   You can read more about the release on the System Center blog:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/archive/2013/01/15/system-center-2012-sp1-is-generally-a...

Also, in case you didn't already see it, we have also made Global Service Monitor generally available!  Global Service Monitor is a new service that allows you to monitor your web applications from points of presence hosted by Microsoft all over the world.  The service is provided as a benefit to software assurance customers.  The user experience is integrated directly into the Operations Manager console.  You can read more about the service and how to sign up here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2013/01/14/system-center-global-service-monitor-getti...





New features for Operations Manager in System Center 2012 SP1:

New Monitoring Capabilities

Monitoring Windows Services Built on the .NET Framework

One of the most commonly requested features that was present in AVIcode, but not yet re-implemented in System Center 2012 – Operations Manager was the ability to monitor Windows Services, not just IIS-hosted applications. This is now possible again, and integrated into the APM template.

Automatic Discovery of ASP.NET MVC3 and MVC4 Applications

If the application contains “System.Web.Mvc.dll” in the /bin subfolder, it is now automatically discovered as an ASP.NET Web Application without the need to use the overrides that were documented in the APM.WEB.IIS7.mp Guide.

New Transaction Types: MVC Pages and WCF Methods

New transaction types have been introduced for MVC pages and for MVC methods. This augments the capability to specify more detailed settings for a given feature of your application. How to use this feature is documented in the APM template documentation.

Enabled APM of SharePoint 2010

Operations Manager lets you monitor SharePoint web front-end components. You can monitor standard and custom SharePoint web pages for performance degradation and server-side exceptions. You can set up monitoring for SharePoint applications in much the same way you enable monitoring for other .NET web applications. Use the .NET Application Performance Monitoring template to configure SharePoint application monitoring. When monitoring SharePoint applications for exceptions, the exception call stack contains the relevant SharePoint specific parameters for troubleshooting.

Integration with Team Foundation Server 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2012

To speed interactions between operations and development, it is essential to quickly detect and fix problems that might need assistance from the engineering team. System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) - Operations Manager can integrate with development tools, such as Team Foundation Server (TFS) and Visual Studio, enabling deep troubleshooting and streamlining communications between developers and IT operations. You can synchronize Operations Manager alerts and Team Foundation Server (TFS) work items. Operations Manager integration with TFS introduces a new work item type definition, Operational Issue, which can be embedded into any of your organization’s engineering processes. After enabling synchronization, IT operations can manually assign alerts to the engineering team. Assigning an alert to engineering creates a new work item in Team Foundation Server. The workflow tracks and synchronizes changes made to TFS work items and changes made to associated alerts in Operations Manager.

Conversion of Application Performance Monitoring events to IntelliTrace format

This new monitoring capability allows for opening of APM exception events from Visual Studio IDE as if the exception was captured during the IntelliTrace historical debugging session. Developers can stay within their familiar environment to examine complete exception call stack, for example: method parameters captured at the time of exception, and can navigate between the source code modules that participated in the exception call chain. Tightly integrated with TFS Work Item Synchronization Management Pack, this capability instantaneously brings generated IntelliTrace logs to TFS work items assigned to engineering. This can result in streamlining communications between IT Operations and Development and enriching the development experience with analysis of root causes of the application failure, reducing the mean time to recovery (MTTR) for the problems detected by APM.

Collecting Historical Traces Using IntelliTrace Profiling Management Pack

System Center 2012 SP1 – Operations Manager includes IntelliTrace Profiling Management Pack. This management pack lets you capturing historical traces directly from the Operations Manager console. These traces can help developers investigate problems by giving them visibility to application execution history without the developers needing access to the servers where the applications ran. Developers can use Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate to open collected traces.

IntelliTrace Profiling Management Pack automatically deploys the necessary infrastructure, IntelliTrace Collector, to the designated servers. When traces are collected, they are uploaded to a network file share and attached to Operations Manager alerts. Traces are uploaded to the management server using the same secure Operations Manager channel that agents use to communicate with the management servers. By configuring Team Foundation Server (TFS) synchronization, traces can be automatically added or linked to TFS work items.

360 .NET Application Monitoring Dashboards

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), Operations Manager can show you different perspectives of application health in one place—360 .NET Application Monitoring Dashboards. The 360 .NET Application Monitoring Dashboards display information from Global Service Monitor, .NET Application Performance Monitoring, and Web Application Availability Monitoring to provide a summary of health and key metrics for 3-tier applications in a single view. The 360 .NET Application Monitoring Dashboards show where an application is unhealthy and provide a launch point for detail dashboards that highlight component-level issues.

The 360 .NET Application Monitoring Dashboards display data from powerful monitoring tools. .NET Application Performance Monitoring looks deep into the application to get details that can help you pinpoint solutions from server- and client-side perspectives. Web Application Availability monitoring in Operations Manager monitors internal synthetic transactions. Global Service Monitor monitors the availability of applications from an outside location, measuring availability from where the user is.



Support for CentOS, Debian, Oracle, and Ubuntu Linux

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), Operations Manager has added support for monitoring of the following Linux operating systems:

• CentOS 5 (x86/x64)
• CentOS 6 (x86/x64)
• Debian 5 (x86/x64)
• Debian 6 (x86/x64)
• Oracle Linux 5 (x86/x64)
• Oracle Linux 6 (x86/x64)
• Ubuntu Server 10.04 (x86/x64)
• Ubuntu 12.04 (x86/x64)

Improved Heartbeat Monitoring

Heartbeat monitors for Operations Manager UNIX and Linux agents now support configurable “MissedHeartbeats” – allowing for a defined number of failed heartbeats to occur before generating an alert.  Failed heartbeats will now cause Operations Manager to unload rules and monitors for UNIX and Linux agents until the heartbeat is restored.  This makes it very easy to identify UNIX and Linux computers with failed heartbeats in the Operations Manager console.





For more detailed information on these improvements please see this page:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj656650.aspx