Renewed as an MVP for 2020 - 2021!

The 1st of July is known to Microsoft MVP's all around the world as 'F5 Day' - mainly because many keyboard F5 buttons get worked extra-hard when MVP's are refreshing their inbox and/or online MVP profile to see if they've been re-awarded for another year!

Thankfully for me, I didn't break my F5 button while finding out I've been renewed as a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP for 2020 - 2021!

This is my ninth year in the MVP program and I'm really proud that I made it this far. It's not easy to maintain the high level of standards required for renewal each year, especially with hectic work and family commitments so it's a testament to all of the MVP's across the world who have managed to remain in the program for this coming year.

The Cloud and Datacenter Management (CDM) category I've been renewed in ties in nicely with the Azure projects we've been diving into lately and which we have planned for the coming year. Azure management technologies and services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Governance, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery and Azure Migrate are some of the areas covered by the CDM award and it also includes hybrid management and connectivity scenarios (e.g. Azure-attach solutions) with on-premises environments.

I'm very thankful to have an employer (Ergo) that supports me and my colleagues on this MVP journey where we get the projects, tools and learning time that we need to help us stay current within our specialist areas - which in turn, helps me to contribute back to the community through this blog and my public speaking engagements.

Some of the community contributions I've submitted for award renewal this year and which have kept me busy include presenting at events such as Experts Live Europe, the Global Azure Bootcamp, the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany and even a couple of bucket-list presentation slots at Microsoft Ignite in London. I've also managed to squeeze in some time to complete the authoring process with my MVP friends on the latest edition of our recently released (and free) 'Inside Azure Management' book.

Although 2020 has been a very strange year with the global COVID-19 lockdown affecting community gatherings across the world, the MVP Community have come together with many other community leaders and contributors to re-imagine conferences as digital-only events for now. These have worked out well in many cases however, we all wait in hope for when the in-person events return and we can all catch up again to talk tech.

Thanks everyone for all your support over the last year!

Speaking at Experts Live EU 2019 in Prague!

It's been super-quiet on this blog lately, mainly in part due to the preparation I've been putting in for conference season, which kicked off over the last month or so. This week, I get to represent Ireland while I present a few sessions at one of my favourite conferences - Experts Live Europe - which returns to Prague for a second year after a very successful event last time out.

This year's conference runs from November 20th - November 22nd and is jam-packed with great speakers and content for attendees to hang out with and enjoy.

Speakers

This year, there's 45 speakers flying in from all over the world ready to share their real-world experience and knowledge on a range of topics within the Cloud and Datacenter space. The speaker lineup includes Microsoft MVP's, Microsoft Regional Directors, Microsoft employees and well-known Community Champions. For the Keynote opener, Microsoft's Joey Snow and Rick Claus (aka Patch and Switch) will share their stories about how you can use your existing technology skills to future-proof your career as a Cloud-focused professional.

You can check out the full list of speakers here.

Pre-Conference Day

Following on from the success of last year's introduction of a Pre-Conference Day, this year's event will host four parallel all-day deep-dive sessions - of which, I get to co-present one with my good friend and fellow MVP Robert Hedblom. Here's the list of Pre-Conference sessions available:

• Cloud & Datacenter Management with Microsoft System Center & Windows Server 2019 (delivered by Microsoft MVP's Kevin Greene and Robert Hedblom)
• Microsoft Security lighthouse - how enterprise environments can protect against threats (delivered by Microsoft MVP's Maarten Goet and Alexander Benoit)
• Productivity happens in the cloud: mastering the modern workplace for enterprises (delivered by Microsoft MVP's Jan Ketil Skanke and Ståle Hansen)
• Azure initialization from zero to hero: onboarding, governance & resources deployment (delivered by Microsoft's Phoummala Schmitt and Microsoft MVP Michael Rueefli)

Each of the pre-conference day instructors are highly skilled experts in their chosen fields and well-placed to set you on your learning journey over the full day.

Tracks

The main conference gives attendees 6 parallel tracks to choose from. With over 70 breakout sessions, plenty of community theater sessions and a packed exhibitor area, this conference has you covered for what you need to take your career to the next level.

My Sessions

On Wednesday at the Pre-Conference Day, I get to talk for a whole six hours with my good friend Robert Hedblom on 'Cloud & Datacenter Management with Microsoft System Center & Windows Server 2019'. Here's a description of what we'll cover:

"If like most businesses, you're responsible for managing and monitoring a combination of on-premises and cloud-based workloads, then this pre-conf session will equip you with the tools and real-world knowledge you need to keep things running smoothly. You'll get a run-through of all the new capabilities of System Center 2019 along with an overview of the new Azure-attach features in Windows Server 2019. We'll close out the day with a 'Notes from the Field' section - where we'll share our real-world experiences of managing hybrid cloud environments with System Center, Azure and Windows Server."

Following on from the announcements at this month's Microsoft Ignite conference, we'll also be giving attendees a sneak peek of the new Azure Arc service and we'll show how you can use it to manage your on-prem and cloud-based servers.

Later in the week (Friday morning), I'll be flying solo and presenting a session titled 'Getting Started with Azure Monitor'. Here's the description about this one:

"In this session, we'll take you on a journey around Azure Monitor - Microsoft's one-stop-shop for metrics, logs, alerts and telemetry data across your Azure resources. You'll also learn how to make good use of advanced monitoring integrations such as Application Insights, Virtual Machine Insights, Container Insights and Log Analytics."


Getting Registered

There's still some time left to get registered and if you haven't already, then check out the registration link here.


If you're attending, make sure to come over and say hello to me and some of the other presenters during the conference. See you all there!

Renewed as an MVP for 2019 - 2020!

For all Microsoft MVP's around the world, yesterday (1st July aka 'F5 Day') was the day that we all receive notification as to whether or not we've been renewed as MVP's for another year. Thankfully someone in Microsoft thinks I'm doing a good job for the community and I was happy to see my inbox lighting up with the all-important email stating I'd been renewed as a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP for 2019 - 2020!

I was awarded my first MVP (in the System Center category) in 2012 and no matter how long you're in the program, it's always a welcome relief to see that email land with confirmation that you're good to go for another year.

With many of my MVP peers moving over to the Azure specialty, the Cloud and Datacenter Management category that my award relates to gives me a unique opportunity to work on and present content to the community and my customers across the hybrid-cloud space. This category covers many on-premises management technologies (including SCOM 2019, which is still very much alive and kicking with our customers) and it also includes Azure management technologies and services such as Azure Monitor, Azure Governance, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, Azure Migrate etc.

Through the MVP program, I also get to network and hang out with some very smart people across many different technical spectrum's and I'm very lucky to work for an employer (Ergo) that supports me and my colleagues on this journey (we also have two other MVP's working here!).

In the past year, I've kept myself busy in the community by presenting at events such as Experts Live Europe, the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany, the Global Azure Bootcamp and the Microsoft Tech Summit. I've also managed to squeeze in the time to complete the authoring process with some awesome MVP friends on our recently released 'Inside Azure Management' book.

Hopefully this coming year as an MVP will help me bring more of these contributions to the wider community!

SCOM 2019 Prerequisites Script

I've recently been involved in deploying some new SCOM 2019 environments for our customers and I thought it'd be a good time to publish an updated version of my original SCOM Prerequisites PowerShell script.

This SCOM prerequisites script is a lot simpler than my previous one and I've updated it to remove the requirement for .NET 3.5 Framework components as well as grabbing the new download locations for the updated versions of SQLSysClrTypes and Report Viewer.

If you have internet connectivity, the script will automatically download and install the SQLSysClrTypes and Report Viewer files from Microsoft's download site.

I've created two scripts to assist you (specific to the SCOM role you're deploying) and you can download them directly from my GitHub repo here:

https://github.com/kgreeneit/scom/tree/main/SCOM-2019/prereq-scripts


Enjoy!

Presenting at CDC 2019 in Germany

Next week, I have another opportunity to head over to Germany and visit the lovely town of Hanau just outside Frankfurt - where I'll be presenting a session at the awesome Cloud & Datacenter (CDC) conference organised by my good friend and well-known MVP Carsten Rachfal.

I had a great time presenting over there last year and attendees at the conference were treated to sessions from some of the best cloud and datacenter-focused speakers from around the world.

This years event is being held at the same venue (Congress Park Hanau) and with over forty speakers announced, it's going to be another excellent few days of learning and networking.

Similar to last year, CDC 2019 will run over two days (21st & 22nd May) and span six different tracks with topics covering on-premises technologies such as Windows Server, Hyper-V and System Center along with cloud-based technologies such as Azure, AWS and Office 365.

I'll be presenting on Tuesday in Track 3 and I'll be going back to my System Center roots with a session titled 'Top Tips to Make Your SCOM Deployments Rock!'

Here's an overview of what I'll be talking about on the day:

SCOM can be a complex product to deploy and configure. In this session, we share our top tips and tricks to ensure your deployments and initial administration run smoothly and without issue. You’ll also learn about some of the new features to watch out for with the latest release of SCOM 2019.

If you haven't done so already, you can grab your ticket to attend CDC Germany 2019 here and I'll look forward to seeing some of you guys and girls over there! 😊

System Center 2019 is now Generally Available!

Following on from last weeks post, Microsoft has just announced the General Availability release of System Center 2019.

This release is part of the long term servicing channel (LTSC) license model and comes with a support bandwidth of 10 years.

With full support for Windows Server 2019 across the stack, here's some of the additional capabilities that you get with System Center 2019:

• VMM integration with Azure Update Management for simplified patching of virtual machines.
• Better SCOM integration with Azure services such as Service Map to create automatic Distributed Application models based on server dependencies.
• Azure Management Pack brings comprehensive alert and performance metrics from Azure resources into SCOM.
• Along with a modernized and extensible SCOM full HTML web console, subscriptions and notifications are now modernized with support for HTML based email.
• Maintenance schedules in SCOM with SQL server AlwaysOn are now supported.
• SCOM Update and Recommendations feature for Linux workloads enables discovery of up-to-date MPs for Linux environments.
• Linux monitoring is now resilient to SCOM management server failover.
• All Windows Server Management Packs now support Windows Server 2019.
• Dynamic Storage Optimization in VMM enables higher availability of workloads.
• VMM now provides health and operational status of storage disks in Hyper Converged as well as disaggregated deployment.
• New RBAC role in VMM ensures that IT admins can be provided access commensurate with their role and no more.
• Support for latest versions of VMware in VMM (to enable migration to Hyper-V).
• Faster backups with DPM with a 75% increase in speed and a monitoring experience for key backup parameters via Log Analytics.
• DPM further supports backup of VMWare VMs including to tape.
• Orchestrator supports PowerShellv4+.
• Service Manager has an enhanced Active Directory connector.
• Support for service logon across the System Center suite aligning with security best practice.

You can get your hands on this latest release from all of the normal download channels including Volume Licensing Center, my.visualstudio.com and also the Microsoft Evaluation Center.

Enjoy!

SCOM 2019 Lands This Month and Semi-Annual Channel Is No More!

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that System Center 2019 would be made Generally Available this month (March 2019) and sandwiched into the same announcement came some interesting news about last years previously released Semi-Annual Channel licensing model.

The upcoming release of System Center 2019 is licensed as part of the traditional Long Term Services Model (LTSC) and provides the typical 5 years of standard support and 5 years of extended support that we've come to expect with previous LTSC releases.

New Features and Enhancements

Looking through the list of new features and enhancements to each of the products in the System Center 2019 suite, it's clear to see that the likes of SCOM, SCVMM and even DPM are being shown some developer love by Microsoft but the sheer lack of updates to both Orchestrator (better PowerShell support) and Service Manager (improved AD connector) should now clearly lay down a marker for where these products lie in the priority list going forward.


SCOM 2019

Here's a high-level list of all the new features and enhancements you get with SCOM 2019:

• Service Map integration with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) to automatically create distributed application diagrams based on the dynamic dependency maps in Service Map.
• New Azure Management Pack allows viewing of Azure performance and alert metrics along with integration for web application monitoring in Application Insights. Also, support for monitoring more PaaS services, such as Azure Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory, etc.
• Full HTML5 dashboards and drill down experiences in the SCOM web console.
• SCOM REST API.
• Modernized HTML email notifications.
• New alerts experience for monitor-based alerts.
• Enhanced Linux monitoring leveraging Fluentd and now is resilient to management server failovers in your Linux environments.

SCVMM 2019

Here's a high-level list of all the new features and enhancements you get with SCVMM 2019:

• VMM 2019 now includes a new role, VM administrator, which provides just enough permissions for read-only visibility into the fabric of the data center, but prevents escalation of privilege to fabric administration.
• Manage and monitor HCI deployment more efficiently.
• VMM 2019 storage optimization.
• Simplified patching of VMs by integrating with Azure Update Management.

SCDPM 2019
Here's a high-level list of all the new features and enhancements you get with SCDPM 2019:

• Improved backup performance (75 percent increase in speed).
• Monitoring experience for key backup parameters via Azure Monitor Logs.
• Backup of VMware VMs to tape.
• SharePoint 2019 and Exchange 2019 backup support.

Old vs New Release Cadence

Only as recently as the Microsoft Ignite conference last September, we saw a presentation  that planned out the release cadence of System Center for the coming year (see the following screenshot), which included a direct branch for the Semi-Annual Channel release model up to 190x.

For any of our customers that had Software Assurance on their licensing model and who needed to upgrade, our advice was to go directly to the new Semi-Annual Channel release of SCOM 1801 (and then to SCOM 1807 once that was released). The main reason for this recommendation was that this release contained loads of new features and enhancements compared to older versions and we found it to be much more stable too.

However, with this latest announcement from Microsoft about System Center 2019, if you've previously jumped onto the Semi-Annual Channel model, you'll need to ditch this and move back to the LTSC model instead.


Should You Upgrade?

You might be looking at this announcement for System Center 2019 and wondering if you should upgrade and before you do, there's a few things to consider as the new features and enhancements in this release have to be taken with a certain amount of context.

Looking at an upgrade purely from a supported workload perspective and if you're still running System Center 2012 R2 (which we find most existing System Center customers still do), then Mainstream support for this release ended in 2017 (see here).

Also, if you're running System Center 2012 R2, then the following quote from the announcement might give you some headaches if you plan on performing an in-place upgrade:

"Based on the learnings, we will start to focus our resources on innovation plans for System Center in LTSC releases and stop SAC releases. System Center 2019 will support upgrades from two prior SAC releases so customers running System Center 1801 or System Center 1807 will be able to upgrade to System Center 2019; just as System Center 2016 can be upgraded to System Center 2019."

Taking this statement as-is, I read into it that System Center 2019 won't support an in-place upgrade from System Center 2012 R2 and as such, you'll need to first go to either System Center 2016 or System Center 1801 and then up to System Center 2019 - which is essentially two upgrades that you'll need to perform and validate.

If you're OK with the fact that mainstream support has ended for System Center 2012 R2 or you're currently running System Center 2016 in your datacentre, then to be fair, the features that you get with System Center 2019 are an excellent reason to upgrade. Also, System Center 2016 was my least favourite release of the platform that I've worked with due to lack of new features and agent bugs. Wherever possible, I had recommended to our customers that they skip the 2016 release and wait for the next one!

Those of you who jumped onto SCOM 1801/1807 to take advantage of the new features and enhancements that these releases brought, will probably be disappointed to know that you have no choice but to upgrade to the SCOM 2019 LTSC release and as most of the new capabilities announced for this release were previously available through Semi-Annual Channel, then an upgrade won't bring as much value as you would have expected at this point in time.

Conclusion

For me, this announcement is kind of bittersweet. In one way, I feel that the lack of information and previous heads up about this licensing change from Microsoft could have been handled better (remember, it was only in September that they were all-in with the Semi-Annual Channel release model).

On the other hand, the fact that we're back to only having to manage and promote a single System Center release model makes life easier and Microsoft have also committed to delivering new features to LTSC through the use of regular update rollups (these were previously only used to deliver bug fixes) - which is great news.

Hopefully this announcement and change in release model won't cause too much disruption for those running SCOM 2012 R2 or the SCOM Semi-Annual Channel releases and for more information you can read the official announcement here:

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2019/03/07/coming-soon-microsoft-system-center-2019/

SCOM - New Version Agnostic Naming Convention for Microsoft Management Packs

Microsoft today announced a change for the naming convention of future SCOM management packs.

In the past, when you wanted a management pack for a specific operating system or application version, you would search for something like 'Windows Server Operating System 2008 Management Pack' or 'DNS Server 2016'.

Going forward, all new Microsoft management packs will follow a new version-agnostic naming convention whereby the name will detail the minimum supported version and higher (plus) versions.

For example, the Windows OS MP will be named like - "Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Windows Server Operating System 2016 and 1709 Plus".

This change is required due to the new licensing options people have for Windows Server and System Center where the same management pack has to support two very similar and current versions of the same workload (e.g. Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 1901).

You can see these new version-agnostic naming conventions already in place for some of the more common Microsoft management packs listed on the SCOM MP Wiki here.

If we look on the SCOM MP Wiki site for the DHCP Server Management Pack, we can see that the older 2008 R2 and 2012 versions are still there as separate downloads but the newest version is listed as "Windows Server DHCP 2016 and 1709 Plus".

This new naming convention isn't exactly a show-stopper that you need to consider when deploying or managing your SCOM environments but it should hopefully help you quickly identify the the most current supported workloads that management packs can monitor.

You can read the full post from Microsoft on this topic here.

Speaking at Experts Live Europe 2018

This week, I'm over at the Microsoft Ignite conference learning as much as I can about the many new releases announced in the Azure and System Center world. All this information is an excellent way to prepare for my upcoming presentation at the awesome Experts Live Europe conference in Prague next month.

If you haven't heard of Experts Live Europe or just haven't had a chance to attend in previous years, this is a community-driven conference with a focus on Microsoft cloud, datacenter and workplace management. Hosted this year from October 24th -26th in the amazing city of Prague, Czech Republic - it really is one of the best Microsoft-focused conferences in Europe where attendees get to hang out and learn with top speakers from around the world.

Speakers

With over 40 speakers flying in from across the globe, you'll be treated to deeply technical and highly engaging presentations from Microsoft MVP's, Microsoft Regional Directors, Microsoft employees and well-know Community Champions. You can check out the full list of speakers here.

Pre-Conference Day

For the first time at an Experts Live Europe event, this year will host a Pre-Conference Day on October 24th with the following three parallel all-day deep-dive sessions:

• Cloud & Cloud Security (delivered by Microsoft MVP Pete Zerger)
• DevOps (delivered by Microsoft MVP Damian Flynn)
• Enterprise Client Management (delivered by Microsoft MVP's Kent Agerlund and Marius Skovli)

Each of the pre-conference day instructors are highly skilled experts in their chosen fields and well-placed to set you on your learning journey over the full day.

Tracks

The main conference (running from October 25th - 26th) gives attendees 6 parallel tracks to choose from. With over 70 breakout sessions, plenty of community theater sessions and a packed exhibitor area, this conference has you covered for what you need to take your career to the next level.

My Session

On the Friday morning, I'll be presenting a session titled 'What’s New in the World of Microsoft Monitoring?' and in it, I'll help you get up to speed with all of the latest happenings in the Microsoft Monitoring world. There'll be loads of demo's to see on the newest Azure monitoring capabilities  and we'll also cover what's new in the latest release of SCOM.

Getting Registered

With over a month to go, there's still time to submit your business case to your boss so you can attend this really cool learning event. There's a number of registration options that you can choose from (depending on whether or not you wish to attend the pre-conference day) and there's also an opportunity to get access to the exclusive VIP Party in the Cloud event on the Wednesday.

To choose your ticket and get registered for Experts Live Europe, check out all the information you need here.

If you're attending, please take some time to chat with me and some of the other presenters during the conference. See you guys there!

SCOM - GSM to Azure Application Insights Migration Walkthrough (Part 1)

In my previous post, I talked about the recently announced retirement of the Global Service Monitor (GSM) feature and the need to start migrating your existing web application tests to Azure Application Insights. In this post, I'll walk through the migration process to help get you started.

Prerequisites

The migration script has the following prerequisites:

• Azure Subscription -  your subscription name can be found in the Subscriptions view within the Azure portal.
• ResourceGroupName - refers to the resource group in Azure where all the tests will be migrated to. If you don't have a resource group created in Azure, the script will create a resource group with the name you provided in the parameters.
• ResourceLocation - refers to the location of the resource group metadata in Azure.
• Azure PowerShell Module - needs to be installed (download available here). Be aware that his module requires PowerShell version 5 or higher to be installed so if you're installing on a Windows Server 2012 R2 server, there's a good change that you'll need to reboot to meet this requirement.
• SCOM PowerShell Module - needs to be installed if you're running the script from anywhere other than a SCOM server (installer can be found on the SCOM media).
• Internet Connectivity - you'll need a working internet connection on the computer that you choose to launch the migration script from.

Limitations

You'll also need to be aware of the following limitations in Application Insights:

• Application Insights has a maximum capacity of 800 web availability tests per resource group and there's a limit of 100 web availability tests for each application component you need to monitor.
• GSM allows you to enable alerts based on a specific HTTP status code. For HTTP status code 200 in Application Insights, you will see a Success returned and for all other codes, they will show a Failure.
• GSM allows you to create Alerts on content match. Application Insights only supports the 'Content must contain' parameter.
• GSM allows Performance monitoring for a website based on a number of performance metrics (shown in the following screenshot) however, Application Insights does not have a mapping to automatically collect these performance metrics for websites. You would only see the Response Time for tests; the other Performance metrics on the list will not be monitored.

Reviewing GSM Test Configurations

Before you kick off the migration script, it'd be a good idea to take a note of the existing configuration settings of your GSM tests in SCOM so you can validate those configuration settings come over to Azure Application Insights. For my demo SCOM environment, I've currently got the following two GSM web application tests configured....

One of these GSM tests performs external monitoring for a legacy demo web application (DinnerNow) that I sometimes use in my Application Performance Monitoring (APM) presentations and the other GSM test is monitoring the URL to this blog. In the following few screenshots, we'll dig into the configuration of the GSM test that's monitoring my blog URL.

This screenshot shows the actual URL that is to be monitored with GSM....

Here, we can see all of the external locations that GSM is configured to monitor my blog URL from. I've chosen five different locations around the globe and my expectation would be that if I migrate this test up to Azure Application Insights, these locations would be configured there as external monitoring points for the test.

In the next screenshot, I get a summary of the test locations along with an understanding of the Test Frequency (1 hour) and estimated monthly external transaction count (3,600). The lower I configure the Test Frequency setting here, the higher the number of monthly transactions. Again, these configuration settings are something that I would expect the migration over to Azure Application Insights to retain.

Here's a final summary of the configuration settings for my external blog URL monitor....

Once you've confirmed the configuration settings of your existing GSM tests, it's time to get down to the migration stage.

Note: Keep in mind that if things go horribly wrong with the migration, your existing GSM tests still remain unchanged in SCOM and there's no 'point-of-no-return' stage whereby you have to confirm deletion of them.

Running the Migration Script

The following steps will walk you through what you need to do to get the migration of your GSM tests to Azure Application Insights kicked off (these steps assume you have all prerequisites configured and in place)..

Login to your subscription in the Azure portal and create a new resource group to be used for the newly migrated GSM tests.

Note: Manually creating a new resource group is an optional step and the migration script will do this automatically for you if you have specified a resource group name that doesn't exist. For testing purposes, I prefer to keep control of where my resources are created and if things go wrong with the migration, I can always then just delete the resource group and start again.

Here's a screenshot of a new empty resource group titled GSM2AppInsights - which I've created specifically for this migration demo...

Save the script from the Microsoft Download Center here to a local folder on the machine that you want to run the tool from (we’ll use a SCOM Management Server in this example).

Launch a PowerShell session with Administrative permissions, browse to the directory that you’ve saved the script to and run the following command (example shown in the following screenshot):

.\MigrateGSMToAI.ps1 -SubscriptionName "<AZURE_SUBSCRIPTION_NAME>" -AzureResourceGroupName "<RESOURCE_GROUP_NAME>" -ResourceLocation "<RESOURCE_LOCATION>"

At the Security Warning prompt, type R to run the script once as shown here....

When the Sign in window presents itself, key in the relevant credentials with access to the Azure subscription you wish to migrate the GSM test to.

After the script launches, you'll be presented with various pieces of information on its progress - similar to what's shown in the following screenshot....

The script shouldn't take too long to run (dependent of course, on the number of GSM tests you have to migrate) and soon, you should be presented with a message stating that everything has been migrated successfully along with a reference to where you can find the migration log file.

If I browse to the location on my server where the log file can be found, I can see that there's a specific log file for each migrated GSM test as well as the MigrationLog.txt file shown here...

Clicking in to MigrationLog.txt gives me confidence that my tests have all been migrated to Azure Application Insights successfully.

Confirming the Migration

Once the script has completed and the log files have been checked, it's time to jump back into the Azure portal to take a look at our newly migrated GSM tests.

In the following screenshot we can see that the script has created two new Azure Application Insights web application tests within my GSM2AppInsights resource group.

After a short while of waiting, I can see each of my GSM tests light up with availability data. Here's the two migrated GSM tests now actively monitoring web availability within Azure Application Insights...

From there, I can pivot into the specific web availability test that I had configured to monitor my blog URL. All of the external locations that the original GSM test was configured for can now be seen as monitoring locations within Application Insights as shown here....

If I edit this test, I can see all of the original settings that I had in GSM have been migrated over.

Clicking on any of the green (or red) dots from within the Application Insights availability test view, I'm presented with an End-to-End view of the transaction - including details about each of the response headers the test has encountered (awesome!)

Conclusion

After working through this migration process from start-to-finish in less than an hour, I can confirm that the GSM migration script works really well and as expected. The script leaves your existing GSM tests in place and working back in SCOM so if things don't quite work out for you the first time round, you can always delete the resources in Azure and start it again.

In my next post on this topic, I'll walk through configuring Azure alerts for the newly migrated web application tests along with demonstrating how to get visibility of these tests back in SCOM using the latest Azure Management Pack.

Presenting at Cloud Camp 2018

It’s coming around to that time of year again when conference season kicks into full swing and over the coming months, I’ll be attending and presenting at some of the best Cloud and Datacenter conferences on the planet.

First up is Cloud Camp - Ireland’s best Microsoft Cloud and Windows Server conference. Put together by MicroWarehouse and kicking off on October 17th in Dublin’s National Convention Centre, this inaugural event plays host to 20 speakers over 4 different tracks -all in 1 day! Topics covered include the latest about digital transformation, IT modernization, productivity, security, compliance & governance, private cloud using Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 (Office 365, EMS, and Windows 10), hybrid cloud scenarios – and there's loads to learn about the new features of Windows Server 2019.

Throw in the fact that there’s an after-party hosted in an Irish brewery with a specially commissioned recording of the super-popular Windows Weekly podcast (hosted by Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott) and you just know this will be an awesome event!

Speakers

The speaker line-up is one of the best I've seen in recent years for an Irish event and the selection brings a number of Galáctico-style presenters from the Microsoft world over to Dublin for a day of discussions and learning. With a mix of current and past MVP's, along with some very well-known Cloud-Ninja's presenting on the day - I'm already anticipating the challenge of trying to attend multiple sessions at the same time!

Breakout Tracks

Due to the sheer breadth of cloud-content available to choose from, it makes sense for the organisers to create the following four breakout tracks to run simultaneously throughout the day:

• Azure IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service): Focusing on infrastructure solutions built in Microsoft Azure.
• Azure PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service): Complete the digital transformation using platform and serverless features of Azure for modern business solutions.
• Productivity & Security: Microsoft 365 is the focus area, covering productivity, security and compliance solutions based on Office 365, EMS, and Windows 10.
• Windows Server 2019 & Hybrid: This track is a launch for the latest version of Windows Server, and will include hybrid cloud scenarios and solutions such as Azure Stack private cloud.

My Session

On the day, I'll be presenting a session titled 'All-In with Azure Monitoring' and I'll show you everything you need to know to get started using Microsoft Azure to monitor your IT estate.

You can read the session highlight of my presentation - with write-up from Aidan Finn (event co-organiser and good friend) here.

Tickets and Registration

If you haven't yet purchased your tickets, you can get sign up for them here.

Registration will begin at 08:15 on Wednesday October 17th. The keynote will start at 09:15. Breakout sessions will continue throughout the day with breaks for morning & afternoon coffee, lunch, and sufficient time to move between the tracks. A closing keynote, with special guests Mary Jo Foley and Paul Thurrott, will start at approximately 16:30 and continue until approximately 17:30.

Hopefully I'll see some of you guys there!

SCOM - Global Service Monitor Heads to the Retirement Home

Last week, Microsoft announced that Global Service Monitor (GSM) -  the cool add-on for SCOM that gave us 'Outside-In' monitoring capability - will be hanging up its synthetic transactions and heading to the legacy solutions retirement home on 7th November 2018.

This solution was a very useful addition to our SCOM deployments when we wanted to get an external perspective of the health and performance of our web applications from locations across the globe and I've been blogging about it on and off for the best part of six years now.

The retirement announcement doesn't come as a massive surprise though as earlier this year, myself and a number of other MVP's began to notice that the tool had stopped working due to DNS resolution errors and although those issues were resolved, the writing was on the wall for its end-of-life.

So What Happens Now?

To be fair to Microsoft, they might be retiring GSM - but they're not removing the 'Outside-In' monitoring capabilities that we've become accustomed to and as part of the retirement announcement for GSM, they've also announced a new tool/script that will help you migrate your existing GSM tests over to the awesome Azure Application Insights platform.

This is a nice alternative to have as Application Insights supports the same single URL ping and multi-step web tests that GSM supported, the same frequency of the tests can be configured and the same geo-locations are also supported.

In true Microsoft monitoring fashion and as a final nod to GSM's integration with SCOM, after the expiry date in November, you'll receive an alert in the SCOM console notifying you that GSM will no longer work and that it has been retired!

Integrating the Migrated Tests with SCOM

If you're thinking that this all sounds well and good but a migration away from GSM and into Application Insights means you no longer get visibility of your external web application tests in SCOM, then Microsoft have you covered here too.

Using the brand new CTP version of the Azure Management pack (accessible here), you can integrate with your Application Insights resource group and view the alerts from the newly migrated web tests directly within the SCOM console.

How Much Will It Cost?

The nice thing about this migration process is that Microsoft have committed in their original post on the retirement of GSM that any web application tests that get migrated over to Azure Application Insights will not incur any additional costs! Here's a couple of snippets about this free-of-charge offer that I've taken directly from that post:

"GSM was provided as a software assurance benefit of your System Center purchase. When you migrate to Azure Application Insights, Microsoft will transition migrated tests and alert rules at no additional charge."

"Only the tests which are migrated using the script, would be provided at no additional charge in Azure Application Insights."

Conclusion

I think that with the rapid pace of cloud adoption, the sheer power and scale of Azure and factoring in the guarantee from Microsoft that these migrated tests won't cost anything extra in your Azure subscription, migrating them to Application Insights is a no-brainer.

You can download the new GSM to Azure Application Insights migration script and its associated documentation from here.

In my next post on this topic, I'll walk through the process of configuring and deploying the new script to ensure a smooth migration of those GSM web application tests to Azure. Click the link below for more information:

SCOM - GSM to Azure Application Insights Migration Walkthrough (Part 1)

SCOM 1807 - What's New

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the General Availability of the latest release of our favourite monitoring platform - SCOM 1807.

SCOM 1807 is the second release this year in Microsoft's new Semi-Annual Channel licensing model and it follows hot on the heels of its predecessor SCOM 1801.

As promised by Microsoft, I found the in-place upgrade process from 1801 to 1807 seamless and not much different than deploying a typical Update Rollup to your SCOM environment.

Key Features

This release comes bundled with a lot of new useful features to play with. Here's a rundown on what you get:

New HTML5 dashboard PowerShell Widget

Use this new PowerShell widget to execute scripts for a more customised visualisation within your HTML5 dashboards.

Effective Configuration Web Console Dashboard Drill Down

Clicking on a monitored object from the HTML5 dashboard console now gives users the option to view the effective configuration information of specific rules or monitors.

Scheduled Maintenance Mode from the Web Console

This is a feature that people have been requesting for quite some time and since SCOM 2016, it has been possible to create and configure scheduled maintenance mode from the full console. With SCOM 1807, we now get this functionality in the HTML5 web console.

Create and Manage HTML5 Dashboards from My Workspace

If you wish to use the built-in Role Based Access Control feature of SCOM to restrict operator access to just the areas of monitoring they need to see, then with SCOM 1807, those operators can use the My Workspace area to configure user-specific dashboards that are only applicable to themselves.

Improved Network Monitoring from the Web Console

A key area of monitoring for most customers is to gain visibility of the health and performance of their network devices and although the full SCOM console has some very handy network monitoring capabilites, there was very little you could work with from the web console. This has changed in SCOM 1807 and now, we can pivot from a monitored network device in one of our custom dashboards such as this....

To a new Network Summary dashboard like this....

Then from there, we can drill down even further to an interface performance dashboard like this...

Cleaner Alert Resolution Management from the Web Console

If you drill down into an alert from the HTML5 web console, you now get a cleaner management experience for changing the resolution state and viewing all properties of the alert from one screen.

Icon Sizing in the Topology Widget

This is a simple but very useful new feature for anyone who uses the 'Topology Widget' for their dashboards. With SCOM 1807, we can now re-size the icons that we use to display health status for our objects (small or large are the only two options at the moment)...

Enable/Disable the APM Feature During Agent Deployment

Now, this is something that could have really saved a lot of time and hassle when SCOM 2016 first launched. I blogged at the time about how the SCOM 2016 agent was crashing IIS application pools and this caused a lot of pain for us when we realised it was the APM feature that comes bundled into the agent installer and can only be removed using command line/scripting.

Although that issue was resolved in SCOM 2016 through an Update Rollup release, there are still a number of other reason why you might want to not install the APM component of the agent onto your SCOM-monitored servers and with SCOM 1807, you can now enable or disable the APM feature during initial installation as shown here....

Linux Agent Log Rotation

In the past, customers have complained about the SCX log frequently filling up on their Linux agents - causing the system disk space to run out and the system becoming unresponsive. The only solution then was to manually clear out the logs but in SCOM 1807, Microsoft have introduced a logrotate feature to address this issue and stop system disk space from filling up.

SQL Support

If you're looking to deploy SCOM 1807 as a fresh installation and want to deploy the latest release of SQL alongside it, then you might be disappointed to know that you can't install it directly onto a fresh deployment of SQL 2017. Instead, you must first install SQL 2016 and then upgrade that installation to SQL 2017.

Also, if you're currently running SCOM 1801 with SQL 2016 and wish to upgrade to both SCOM 1807 and SQL 2017, then you must first carry out the SCOM 1801 to 1807 in-place upgrade and once that's complete, then you can upgrade SQL 2016 to SQL 2017.

Conclusion

I was already a big fan of SCOM 1801 and after working through the simple in-place upgrade to 1807 and playing around with all of these new features and enhancements, I'm really looking forward to working with our customers and getting this release deployed on a wider scale. This experience also bodes well for the Semi-Annual Channel licensing model as it's the first time I have performed an in-place upgrade of SCOM in production without it breaking anything!

Awarded Microsoft MVP 2018 for Cloud and Datacenter Management!

Last Sunday (1st July) I received a very welcome email into my inbox stating I'd been renewed as a Cloud and Datacenter Management MVP for 2018!

This email from Microsoft confirms that I'm now moving into my 7th year as an MVP and it's always a relief when it comes in as there's no guarantee that any of us will get renewed - no matter how much you think you've contributed to the community over the past year.

The MVP program enables me to network and interact with some of the best technical brains in the industry and I'm very lucky to work for an employer (Ergo) that supports me on this journey. Each year, they have given me the projects, tools and time that I need to enable me work with Cloud and Datacenter technologies in the Microsoft space - which in turn, helps me to contribute back to the community through this blog, my social media channels and to attend/speak at conferences where I can maximize my learning curve.

Due to some internal changes to the MVP award program, this year is the first time my renewal has come up in July (I'm originally an October awardee) and as such, it's 18 months since my last renewal date. Over those last 18 months, I've kept myself busy in the community by presenting at conferences such as Experts Live Europe, the Cloud and Datacenter Conference Germany, Experts Live NL and SCOM Day Sweden. I've also spent some time authoring with some awesome MVP friends on the 'Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite (v2)' book.

Thanks to my family, to everyone in Microsoft and the MVP community for their help and advice over the last year and also thanks to my friends and work colleagues at Ergo for helping me get this far in the program!

SCOM - New Community MP to Multi-Home Large Numbers of Agents

Microsoft's Kevin Holman has just released a very useful new community MP for SCOM that enables you to multi-home large numbers of agents in a phased and controlled time-frame. This is perfect for any large side-by-side migrations you might be planning from SCOM 2012 R2 to SCOM 2016 or the latest SCOM 180x release.

On earlier versions of SCOM, I've used the excellent 'Extended Agent Info Management Pack' from Jose Fehse and over the last year or so, I've been using Kevin Holman's 'SCOM Agent Management Pack' to meet the same requirement. Although both of these community MP's enable me to add or remove Management Group name references on agents (which essentially multi-homes the agent), it's still a manual task that needs to be kicked off from the console.

With Kevin's newest 'SCOM Multi-Home Management Pack', this process is made a lot easier through the use of a rule that runs periodically and which is targeted at eight pre-created SQL Query-based groups within the MP.

This means that in large environments (think 1000's of agents), the management pack will query the SCOM database and then automatically distribute the number of agents you have across each of the pre-defined groups shown below.

The automatic assignment of agents to the different groups is configured by default to distribute in batches of 500 agents per group however, you can modify this number by editing the group discovery prior to importing the MP into SCOM.

Once the groups have been populated, the MP will then perform a check once a day to validate if the agents have been multi-homed and if any haven't, then it will update those agents using a random time window - thus ensuring your OpsDB doesn't get hammered with the dreaded Event ID 2115 data insertion errors.

To conclude, if you're planning any side-by-side migrations that contain large numbers of agents in the near future, then you'll definitely want to try out this MP to make your job easier and to ensure your OpsDB stays healthy.

You can get the full lowdown on the MP from Kevin Holman's blog here and you can download it directly from the TechNet Gallery here.

Enjoy!