Speaking at the Global Azure Bootcamp 2018

This coming April 21st, I'll be presenting a session on Azure Monitoring at the Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 event in Dublin.

This annual event is now in its sixth year of running and is held on the same date in nearly 200 locations around the globe - bringing together some of the best speakers and contributors in the Azure community.

Organised as a free event by the Irish MVP community with support from the awesome people over at our local Microsoft team, we're running an agenda of three tracks side-by-side covering topics across Azure Infrastructure & Security (Track 1), Azure Compute/General (Track 2) and Azure Workshops/Lightning Talks (Track 3).

If you haven't attended one of these events before, here's the lowdown on what to expect (taken from our official event website):

"Welcome to Global Azure Bootcamp! All around the world, user groups and communities want to learn about Azure and Cloud Computing. On April 21, 2018, tech communities world-wide will come together once again in the sixth great Global Azure Bootcamp event!

In Dublin, we are organising the biggest community lead event yet, with two tracks and in-depth workshops during the day. Bootcamps are happening on the same day all over the world - come to Dublin and join in - please share your experience under the social hashtag #GlobalAzure!

It is important to point out, that while this event is *about* Azure, it is *not* a commercial event. Azure bootcamp Dublin is organised by the local MVP tech commmunity - we are here to share our knowledge, not sell anything."

Registration is filling up fast and if you miss out on a seat at the first attempt, we've put a waiting list system in place to hopefully help you grab a cancellation spot. You can check out the full agenda and list of speakers on the day along with your free registration at our new website here - http://www.azurebootcampdublin.com/index.html

Hope to see some of you guys there!

SCOM 1801 Has Just Been Released!

The latest release of SCOM (1801) has just been announced and it brings with it some major changes in licensing along with some nice additional features and enhancements compared to earlier versions.

Licensing Changes

This is the first release of SCOM in the new Semi-Annual Channel (SAC) model and it will enable Microsoft to deliver much faster capabilities to our favourite monitoring platform than we ever had before - e.g. two product releases per year versus one every three or four years. Due to this faster release cadence, SAC releases only have an 18-month support policy with the concept being similar to how we manage, deploy and get support for service packs to our operating systems and other applications.

If this short-term release cycle isn't something that you fancy, then you can still deploy SCOM using the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) model - which will provide new version releases at a much lower frequency and no new features will be added - mainly just bug fixes. With LTSC, you get up to 5 years of mainstream support followed by 5 more years of extended support - as has been standard with the versions of SCOM we've been using up to now.

Key Features

We get a number of new features with this release with my favourites being the new HTML 5 widgets, Service Map integration and the enhanced performance gains. Here's the full list of everything that's new:

• Improved HTML5 dashboard experience 
• Enhanced SDK performance 
• Linux Logfile monitoring enhancements 
• Linux Kerberos support 
• GUI support for entering SCOM License key 
• Service Map integration 
• Updates and Recommendations for third-party vendor Management Packs 
• System Center Visual Studio Authoring Extension (VSAE) support for Visual Studio 2017

The bits for this new release should start hitting your normal licensing channels for download around about now (if it's not there, give it a day or so to fully populate) and in the meantime, you can download an evaluation copy of SCOM 1801 from the Evaluation Center here.

I'll post back in the coming days with my thoughts on the new release and anything extra that I come across.

Enjoy!

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.

Speaking at CDC Germany 2018

Last year I had the opportunity to head over to Munich and present at the awesome Cloud and Datacenter (CDC) conference organised by my good friend and well-known MVP Carsten Rachfal and I'm delighted to confirm I've been invited back again this year to present at CDC 2018.

I really enjoyed my time presenting over in Munich last year and the conference was packed with some of the best cloud and datacenter-focused speakers from around the world (the plentiful food and quality local beer helped too!). The attendees also came well prepared with some excellent interaction and questions across all of the sessions that I watched or was involved in.

This years event is being held in Congress Park Hanau (just east of Frankfurt) and with nearly thirty speakers already confirmed, it has the makings to be an even better conference than last years one - which will be hard to top!

Held over two days (15th & 16th May) and across six different tracks, there will be a mixture of sessions to choose from - some in English, some in German.

You can register to attend CDC Germany 2018 here and I'll post back with an update closer to the event.

Hope to see some of you guys over there 😊

SCOM 2016 and OMS '101' Series

A few years back, Antoni Hanus (Microsoft PFE) released a really useful beginners guide for SCOM titled 'Operations Manager 101'.

This PDF-style guide contained over 100 pages of information and walk-through's designed to get people up and running with SCOM quickly. It was that useful, that I always recommended it to my SCOM customers as a great free learning resource and the feedback on it was always positive.

The only downside to the guide was that it was authored specifically for SCOM 2007 and along with the retro-style Microsoft logo that you can see in the image above, all of the screenshots and content looked way too out-of-date for people dipping their toes with SCOM 2016. There was also no reference to how SCOM can now connect to OMS.

Thankfully, over the weekend I came across a blog post from Antoni where he has taken the opportunity to update this guide and push it out as a combined web-series for SCOM 2016 and OMS.

He's already got over 20 new blog posts linked to this series with more to come and if you're deploying SCOM (or just want to ramp up your SCOM 2016 administration skills), then I encourage you to check it out at the link below:

https://aka.ms/101

Happy reading!