The OMS Portal is Moving to Azure

Over the last couple of years, I've worked a lot with the awesome Microsoft Operations Management Suite (aka OMS) and at one of the presentations I attended during Microsoft Ignite last year, it was announced that they would soon be retiring the OMS Portal and integrating all of it's functionality directly into the Azure Portal.

Earlier this week, Microsoft confirmed that the OMS Portal would indeed be retired and all it's functionality moved into the Azure Portal. The idea behind this move is to deliver a more centralized experience for monitoring and managing your on-premise and Azure-based workloads.

As it stands, nearly all of the existing OMS solutions have been available within the Azure Portal for a number of months and the only solutions still waiting to be ported over are as follows:

• Upgrade Readiness
• Device Health
• Update Compliance
• DNS Analytics
• Surface Hub

If you're using any of these solutions, then you'll still need to manage them within the original OMS Portal and Microsoft have committed to moving these solutions over to Azure by August 2018. When this happens, Microsoft will then communicate an official timeline for 'sunsetting' the original OMS Portal.

When this happens, the old OMS Portal that looks something like this (depending on which solutions you have enabled)...

Will then look like something similar to this in the Azure Portal...

As you can see from the two images above, they're not too dissimilar and in the Azure Portal, we get the added management benefit of being able to quickly pivot directly into Azure Resources using the navigation menu on the left or by simply drilling down into one of the dashboard widgets.

At the time of writing and along with the five OMS solutions mentioned earlier, there are still a few additional gaps that Microsoft need to address. These gaps are as follows:

• To access Log Analytics resource in Azure, the user must be granted access through Azure role-based access.
• Update schedules that were created with the OMS portal may not be reflected in the scheduled update deployments or update job history of the Update management dashboard in the Azure portal. This gap is expected to be addressed by the end of June 2018.
• Custom logs preview feature can only be enabled through OMS Portal. By the end of June 2018, this will be automatically enabled for all work spaces.

You can read more about these gaps and the planned migration from the OMS portal to the Azure Portal in Microsoft's original post here.

They've also put together a useful FAQ post to help answer some common questions that you or your customers might have and you can access this post here.

All-in-all, I'm pretty happy with this move as I find that lately, I've been spending all of my time in the Azure Portal instead of the original OMS Portal. Having the additional management capabilities inside the Azure Portal definitely makes it a more seamless user experience and hopefully others will see the benefit of this too.