What's New in Operations Manager 2012 Beta

Article
01/04/2013

Applies To: Operations Manager 2012

The beta release of System Center 2012 – Operations Manager is your opportunity to try out new features and functionality in the product and to provide feedback that will have a direct impact on the development of the next version of Operations Manager. Please provide all feedback on Operations Manager through the Connect site. We urge you to read the Operations Manager 2012 Beta Release Notes for details about known issues.

Setup

Operations Manager has a new Setup wizard. For important instructions about how to install Operations Manager, see Install Operations Manager 2012 Beta.
Upgrading to Operations Manager 2012

Operations Manager provides an upgrade wizard to help you upgrade your System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 environment to Operations Manager. For more information, see Upgrading to Operations Manager 2012.
Removal of root management server

In Operations Manager, all management servers are peers; there is no root management server. The workload is split among all management servers in a management group, which provides high availability without requiring a cluster.
Resource pools

A resource pool provides the ability to distribute workloads across multiple management servers, such as availability, network device monitoring, distributed monitor health rollup, and group calculation.
Agent Configuration

Operations Manager provides an easy method for configuring agents to report to multiple management servers by adding an Operations Manager Agent application to Control Panel on each agent-managed Windows-based computer.
Operations Console

You will notice some subtle changes to the Operations console. The Actions pane is now the Tasks pane, and includes a new section called Navigation Tasks that makes it easy for you to open views for a selected object. The Tasks pane offers two tabs: one for actions and one for resources and Help links. The Navigation and Tasks panes can be minimized or expanded instantly by clicking the arrow in the title bar of the pane.
Web console

Operations Manager introduces a new web console. In Operations Manager, all Operations Manager views are available in the web console.
Network monitoring

Operations Manager provides the ability to discover and monitor network routers and switches, including the network interfaces and ports on those devices and the virtual LAN (VLAN) that they participate in. You can also delete discovered network devices and prevent the deleted network devices from being rediscovered the next time discovery runs. For more information, see Monitor Network Devices.
Application monitoring

In Operations Manager, you can monitor ASP.NET applications and web services from server- and client-side perspectives to get details about application availability and performance that can help you pinpoint solutions. Allowing you to specify settings, the types of events to collect, the performance goals to measure, and which servers to monitor, Operations Manager application monitoring provides insight into how web-based applications are running. You can see how frequently a problem is occurring, how a server was performing when a problem occurred, and the chain of events related to the slow request or method that is unreliable. This is the information needed to partner with software developers and database administrators to help ensure that application availability and performance are at optimal levels. For more information, see Monitor an ASP.NET Application.
Dashboard views

Operations Manager includes new comprehensive dashboard views that combine multiple panels of information into a single view. In Operations Manager, you can add the new dashboard views to My Workspace and the Monitoring workspace.
Display dashboard views using SharePoint

The Operations Manager web part displays specified dashboard views and can be added to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites. For more information, see Add a Dashboard View to a SharePoint Site.
Creating dashboard views

Dashboard views have been significantly upgraded in Operations Manager from their capabilities in Operations Manager 2007 R2, including custom layouts and nested dashboard views. For more information, see Create a Dashboard View.
Operations Manager Module for Windows PowerShell

Operations Manager provides a Windows PowerShell 2.0 module containing a full set of new cmdlets. The cmdlets in this module are only compatible with Operations Manager. You can recognize the Operations Manager cmdlets by the "SC" preceding the noun. For additional information about the Operations Manager cmdlets, open the Operations Manager command shell and type Get-Help about_OpsMgr_WhatsNew. For information about how the Operations Manager 2007 cmdlets map to the Operations Manager cmdlets, type Get-Help about_OpsMgr_Cmdlet_Names.

To use the Operations Manager cmdlets, you must establish a connection to an Operations Manager management group. You can establish either a persistent connection in which you can run multiple cmdlets, or a temporary connection when running a single cmdlet. For more information about connections, open the Operations Manager Shell and type Get-Help about_OpsMgr_Connections.
UNIX- and Linux-based computers

In Operations Manager, you can perform privileged operations on UNIX-based and Linux-based computers using unprivileged Run As accounts by combining with “sudo” elevation on the target UNIX-based and Linux-based computers. This capability avoids the need for UNIX or Linux root passwords to be known on the management server, and keeps the privilege control entirely within the domain of the UNIX or Linux administrator. Operations Manager also includes new Windows PowerShell cmdlets for performing agent maintenance functions on UNIX-based and Linux-based computers, allowing for scripting and background operations. In addition, the resource pool feature supports computers running UNIX and Linux. If a management server fails, another management server in the resource pool can take over the monitoring, providing high availability.

What's New in Operations Manager 2012 Beta

See Also

Concepts

Additional resources