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System Center Operations Manager 2012 provides deep application diagnostics and infrastructure monitoring that can help you ensure the predictable performance and availability of vital applications and offers a comprehensive view of your datacenter, private, and public clouds.

Overview

Operations Manager 2012 provides infrastructure monitoring that’s flexible and cost-effective, helps ensure the predictable performance and availability of vital applications, and offers comprehensive monitoring for your datacenter and cloud, both private and public. Operations Manager helps you better manage your datacenters by:

• Delivering flexible and cost effective enterprise-class monitoring and diagnostics while reducing the total cost of ownership by leveraging commodity hardware, configurations, and heterogeneous environments.
• Helping to ensure the availability of business-critical applications and services through market-leading .NET application performance monitoring and diagnostics and JEE application health monitoring.
• Providing a comprehensive view of datacenters, and private and public clouds.

Feature Summary 

• Setup

 

Operations Manager 2012 has a new Setup wizard. For important instructions about how to install Operations Manager 2012, see Install Operations Manager 2012 Beta.
• Highly Available Management Group Out of the Box

 

In Operations Manager 2012, all management servers are peers; there is no root management server. The workload is split among all management servers in a management group, which provides high availability without requiring a cluster.
• Resource pools

 

A resource pool provides the ability to distribute workloads across multiple management servers, such as availability, network device monitoring, distributed monitor health rollup, and group calculation.
• Agent Configuration

 

Operations Manager 2012 provides an easy method for configuring agents to report to multiple management servers by adding an Operations Manager Agent application to Control Panel on each agent-managed computer.
• Operations Console

 

You will notice some subtle changes to the Operations console. The

Actions

 pane is now the

Tasks

 pane, and includes a new section called

Navigation Tasks

 that makes it easy for you to open views for a selected object. The

Tasks

 pane offers two tabs: one for actions and one for resources and Help links. The

Navigation

 and

Tasks

 panes can be hidden or revealed instantly by clicking the arrow in the title bar of the pane.
• Web console

 

Operations Manager 2012 introduces a new Web console. In Operations Manager 2012, all Operations Manager views are available in the Web console.
• Network monitoring

 

Operations Manager 2012 provides the ability to discover and monitor network routers and switches, including the network interfaces and ports on those devices and the virtual LAN (VLAN) that they participate in. You can also delete discovered network devices and prevent the deleted network devices from being rediscovered the next time discovery runs. For more information, see Monitor Network Devices.
• Application monitoring

 

In Operations Manager 2012, you can monitor ASP.NET applications in server- and client-side environments to get details about application availability and performance. Configure monitoring settings, such as polling frequency and transaction threshold. Then use results, including how frequently a problem is occurring, how a server was performing when a problem occurred, and the distributed chain for a transaction in question to pinpoint problems and solutions. For more information, see Monitor a .NET Application.
• Dashboard views

 

As part of the network monitoring and application monitoring capabilities, Operations Manager 2012 includes new comprehensive dashboard views that combine multiple panels of information into a single view. In Operations Manager 2012, you can add the new dashboard views to My Workspace.
• Display dashboard views using SharePoint

 

The Operations Manager web part displays specified dashboard views and can be added to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites. For more information, see Add a Dashboard View to a SharePoint Site.
• Creating dashboard views

 

Dashboard views have been significantly upgraded in Operations Manager 2012 from their capabilities in Operations Manager 2007 R2, including custom layouts and nested dashboard views. For more information, see Create a Dashboard View.
• Operations Manager Module for Windows PowerShell

 

Operations Manager 2012 provides a Windows PowerShell 2.0 module containing a full set of new cmdlets. The cmdlets in this module are only compatible with Operations Manager 2012. You can recognize the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets by the “SC” preceding the noun. For additional information about the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets, open the Operations Manager command shell and type

Get-Help about_OpsMgr_WhatsNew

. For information about how the Operations Manager 2007 cmdlets map to the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets, type

Get-Help about_OpsMgr_Cmdlet_Names

.To use the Operations Manager 2012 cmdlets, you must establish a connection to an Operations Manager management group. You can establish either a persistent connection in which you can run multiple cmdlets, or a temporary connection when running a single cmdlet. For more information about connections, open the Operations Manager Shell and type

Get-Help about_OpsMgr_Connections

.
• UNIX- and Linux-based computers

 

In Operations Manager 2012, the Discovery Wizard is easier to use for discovering UNIX- and Linux-based computers. You can now use Windows PowerShell to manage UNIX- and Linux-based computers, for more information, see the

UNIX and Linux

section in the release notes. High availability is also supported.

UNIX/Linux Shell Command Template Management Pack
This Management Pack implements authoring templates that allow the creation of rules, tasks, and monitors based on execution of shell commands on UNIX/Linux agents.

JEE Management Packs
These management packs monitor JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) application servers. Management packs are available for IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, Red Hat JBoss and Apache Tomcat.

 

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System requirements

Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008 R2

 

• Any server role
• .NET 3.5 or 4.0
• Management Server, Reporting Server, Web Console, Gateway Server
• Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 bit)
• Operational & Data Warehouse
• SQL 2008 SP1 and above
• SQL Collation – SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS
• Agent
• Windows Server 2003 SP2 and above
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 and above
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows XP Professional SP3 and above
• Windows Vista SP2 and above
• Windows 7