What is System Center Advisor?
System Center Advisor (https://www.systemcenteradvisor.com) is an online service that analyzes installations of Microsoft server software. Advisor collects data from your installations, analyzes it, and generates alerts that identify potential issues (such as missing security patches) or deviations from identified best practices with regard to configuration and usage. Advisor also provides both current and historical views of the configuration of servers in your environment.
Advisor is developed by the Microsoft System Center Advisor product group in partnership with Microsoft Support engineers to ensure that the issues customers report to Microsoft are detected before they affect your environment. Advisor is regularly updated to reflect the most recent experiences of these engineers, who support customers around the world.
The following sections provide additional information about Advisor.
What does Advisor analyze?
The Advisor environment
What does Advisor analyze?
The following workloads are analyzed:
Windows Server 2012 and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012
Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2:
Active Directory
Hyper-V Host
General operating system
SQL Server 2008 and later
- SQL Engine
Microsoft SharePoint 2010
Microsoft Exchange Server 2010
Microsoft Lync Server 2010
Microsoft Lync Server 2013 (new in October 2013)
System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager (new in August 2013)
For more information about the data collected and analyzed by Advisor, see Advisor Data Collection Details.
The Advisor environment
The Advisor environment is made up of the Advisor web service, hosted in the cloud, and the on-premise software, installed in your local environment. The on-premise software consists of one gateway and at least one agent. The agent collects data from your server and analyzes it using a set of rules (similar to a management pack in System Center Operations Manager) known collectively as Advisor knowledge. The analyzed data is regularly sent from the agent to the gateway for upload to the Advisor web service. If the data indicates an issue or a deviation from best practices, an alert is generated. By connecting a web browser to the Advisor portal, you can view the alerts and the associated remediation guidance.
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