Tech Reviewer of New SCOM 2012 R2 Book

I was fortunate to be a Technical Reviewer on another System Center book. This one is about Operations Manager 2012 R2. It is titled Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager Cookbook. Authors include a fellow System Center MVP Steve Beaumont (http://systemcenter.ninja | @StevybSC ), a colleague of mine Chiyo Odika (http://mrchiyo.com | @MrChiyo ), Jonathan Horner, and Robert Ryan (http://scnuggets.blogspot.com). Here is a screenshot of the cover:

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It contains 50 recipes that you can use with your SCOM deployment. The recipes in this book will help you:

  • Optimize SCOM
  • Build out monitoring for business applications, infrastructure and more
  • Work through tuning
  • Build and use dashboards along with reporting
  • Author management packs using MP studio or Visual Studio
  • Overall gain deeper insight into your SCOM environment

The book can be found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Operations-Manager-Deployment-Administration-Cookbook/dp/1782176241

and here:
https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/system-center-2012-r2-operations-manager-deployment-and-administration-cook

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Webinar: Understand what it takes for a successful Private Cloud project

Learn what you can do to ensure a successful Private Cloud project. Attend one of my webinars this week. Details about the webinars include:

-“Service Management’s role in the Private Cloud“- hosted by Microsoft MVP Steve Buchanan. The webinars will be co-hosted by Savision’s co-founder and VP of Product Management, Dennis Rietvink.

 

SMRoleInPrivateCloudWebinar

 

During these webinars you will find out the right tools that IT professionals and management need to provide clean and mature processes that will enable them to become more agile and move down the path of realizing the benefits of Private Cloud. The webinars will also define the Private Cloud, the layers of the Private Cloud, and those layers within which service management operates.

The webinars will be held on two different dates, so register now for the one that will be more convenient for you:

Register for the US webinar: Wednesday, February 25th, 2015 | 2 PM EST / 8PM CET
Register for the EU webinar: Thursday, February 26th, 2015 | 9 AM EST / 3 PM CET

P.S. If you still haven’t, download the Service Management’s role in the Private Cloud whitepaper here.

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Whitepaper – Service Management’s Role in the Private Cloud

I am happy to announce that today Savision just published a new whitepaper authored by me. It is titled:

Service Management’s Role in the Private Cloud
Dispelling the Myopic Perception

 Service-Management's-role-in-the-private-cloud-600x188

This whitepaper sets out to define Private Cloud, the layers of Private Cloud, and those layers within which service management operates.

The whitepaper also explores having ultimate visibility into your organization’s business services. Business services discussed in this paper consist of configuration items (CIs), monitoring, and application maps; they are underpinned with incident, change management, and modern day self-service. In addition, the whitepaper explores the integration between Operations Manager and Service Manager, and the role Savision Live Maps Unity plays in this area. Here is an excerpt from the whitepaper:

“Technology needs of the business are changing, often faster than can be addressed by most internal IT departments.

It is critical for IT departments to shift away from the image of black box cost centers and slow moving dinosaurs that are hard to work with and become viewed as revenue-generating centers that are agile, fast moving, and business enablers with modernized IT services.

From the perspective of internal IT, there are some key steps that can be made to prepare and deliver “modern IT services” – with service management being a critical component of those services. This whitepaper explores these key steps from a Microsoft technology perspective as it applies to System Center.”

A huge thanks to both Kerrie Meyler and Sam Erskine for doing the technical review on this whitepaper!

To download visit:

http://savision.com/resources/white-paper/free-whitepaper-mvp-steve-buchanan-service-managements-role-private-cloud?utm_source=Twitter&utm_content=Whitepaper+by+MVP+Steve+Buchanan&utm_campaign=General

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New UR’s for SC 2012 R2 & SP1, Updated Exchange 13 MP & more

Wow another exciting day for Microsoft and specifically System Center! Microsoft is moving at a fast pace and doing some cool things. There were several announcements today. These included: Update Rollup 4 for System Center 2012 R2 http://aka.ms/yktkfk App Controller is not included in this. I am not surprised by this. Configuration Manager and Orchestrator … Read more

SCOM Cannot initialize report after DB move

After moving the SCOM database, DW database and Reporting database to a SQL 2012 cluster I was no longer able to run reports. I would get a Cannot initialize report error as shown in the following screenshot. More of the error: Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: An error has occurred during report processing. (rsProcessingAborted) —> Microsoft.Reporting.WinForms.ReportServerException: Cannot create a … Read more

MVP Unplugged at TechED Video

Savision just released a video they put together of interviews with several MVP’s from TechEd NA 2014. MVP’s in the video include: Robert Butler’ Cameron Fuller Kevin Greene Ahmed Nabil Mahmoud Rick Heiges Colin Smith and me The video was to gather our opinions on the following topics: System Center & VMM Security Concerns in … Read more

Microsoft Private & Public Cloud Poster

On August 1st Microsoft released a new Cloud Ecosystem poster. Microsoft has a great Public and Private cloud story. With Microsoft technologies On-premises and public Azure and other Microsoft public cloud technologies such as Intune are really tied together. Microsoft Private and Public cloud consist of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 and … Read more

New SCOM DPM Dashboard Download Link

A company named AIO Technology published a SCOM DPM dashboard a while ago. They recently removed it as they no longer offer this. I was the one that built this dashboard. I am posting about it here for anyone that may be looking to download it. You can now find this on TechNet Gallery here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCOM-DPM-Dashboard-8eef9b58

Information about the dashboard:

OVERVIEW

This dashboard shows the overall health of your Data Protection Manager (DPM) backups. It includes all DPM servers in your environment in a central location. Great for daily spot checking of your backup health and getting to the root of any problems faster.

Installing is as simple as importing into your Operations Manager (SCOM) server. You do need DPM management packs and central console deployed to your SCOM before installing this dashboard.

DPM Dashboard Example

FEATURES

  • Centralized health of all DPM servers
  • Protection Group health aggregate
  • Protected Data Source health aggregate
  • Storage Pool health aggregate
  • Tape/Tape Library health aggregate

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Free Hyper-V and System Center Training from MVA

More free training coming soon on Hyper-V and System Center from Microsoft Virtual Academy (www.MicrosoftVirtualAcademy.com). This is going to be one event you don’t want to miss. I am also happy to announce I(@Buchatech) will also be a part of this event answering questions during the System Center 2012 R2 Datacenter session. Here is the … Read more

Monitor Scheduled Tasks with SCOM

Recently I was on a search for a management pack that would let me monitor Scheduled Tasks on Windows servers. A fellow System Center MVP Daniele Grandini let me know that his company Progel has one available. Progel has made the management pack available to the community for free that can monitor Scheduled Tasks on … Read more