SCOM 'Updates and Recommendations' Feature Now Supports External Partner MP's

Earlier this week Microsoft announced that the Updates and Recommendations feature (first introduced in SCOM 2016) will be extended for the new SCOM 1801 semi-annual release to include management pack recommendations from certified external partners - such as NiCE and Comtrade to name a few.

The screenshot below shows this new capability in action where you can see a mixture of external partner management packs offered alongside the typical Microsoft ones.

How It Works

The Updates component of this feature periodically checks for updates to the existing management packs that you've deployed into your environment and then suggests which ones to upgrade.

For the Suggestions component, a discovery scans your monitored servers for workloads/technologies that are supported for monitoring with a SCOM management pack and then suggests which ones you should download for a better monitoring experience. It will also detect and suggest any dependent management packs that you might need to bring in so you don't run into any partial import problems.

This image shows an example of how this all comes together...

I've used the Updates and Recommendations feature a fair amount of times in SCOM 2016 and it's definitely a much better upgrade to the original 'Updates available for installed management packs' option that we had in SCOM 2012 R2 (which never really had a full up-to-date view of all current management packs anyway) and this extended capability for external vendors can only be a good thing going forward.

Here's what Microsoft had to say in their original post on this new capability...

"We are extending this feature to support Management Packs authored and offered by several external technologies and consulting partners of SCOM. Partners have extended their support by signing up with the SCOM team to onboard their Management Packs to ease the Management Pack discovery problem solved by this feature. With the partner support, this feature is now able to recommend Management Packs for both Microsoft and non-Microsoft workloads."

SCOM 1801 is now generally available and you can read all about it here and download an evaluation copy of it from here.