System Center Advisor integration in OpsMgr 2012 R2

Last week I did a Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2012 R2 installation already. One of the new features in Release 2 (R2) is System Center Advisor integration. OpsMgr now includes Advisor as an Attached Service, which will allow you to add Advisor monitoring to Windows management servers in your SCOM environment. Sounds nice isn't it?

Since March 2013 Advisor is free of charge and without the Software Assurance (SA) coverage requirement. Al you need is a Microsoft or Organizational account to start the integration. Then decide which servers will be monitored by Advisor. In OpsMgr console there will be Advisor alerts from now also. Just great to have this integration!

The following workloads are analyzed:

• Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012
• Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2:
• Active Directory
• Hyper-V Host
• General operating system
• SQL Server 2008 and later
• SQL Engine
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
• Microsoft Lync Server 2010
• Microsoft Lync Server 2013 (new in October 2013)
• System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager (new in August 2013)
• Source: Welcome to System Center Advisor

Just some information on System Center Advisor (http://www.systemcenteradvisor.com) is an online service that analyzes installations of Microsoft server software. Advisor collects data from your installations, analyzes it, and generates alerts that identify potential issues (such as missing security patches) or deviations from identified best practices with regard to configuration and usage. Advisor also provides both current and historical views of the configuration of servers in your environment.