Operations Manager 2012 SP1 CTP2 is out, and my TechED NA talk (MGT302)

As you might have already heard, this has been an amazing week at TechEd North America: System Center 2012 has been voted as the Best Microsoft Product at TechEd, and we have released the Community Technology Preview (CTP2) of all System Center 2012 SP1 components.

I wrote a (quick) list of the changes in Operations Manager CTP2 in this other blog post and many of those are related to APM (formerly AVIcode technology). I have also demoed some of these changes in my session on thursday – you can watch the recording here. I think one of the most-awaited change is support for monitoring Windows Services written in .NET – but there is more than that!

In the talk I also covered a bit of Java monitoring (which is the same as in 2012, no changes in SP1) and my colleague  Åke Pettersson talked about Synthetic Transactions, and how to bring all together (synthetic and APM) in a single new dashboard (also shipping in SP1 CTP2) that gives you a 360 degrees view of your applications. The CTP2 documentation covers both the changes to APM as well as how to light up this new dashboard.

When it comes to synthetics  – I know you have been using them from your own agents/watcher nodes – but to have a complete picture from the outside in (or last mile), we have now also announced the Beta of Global Service Monitoring (it was even featured in the Keynote!) – where essentially we extend your OpsMgr infrastructure to the cloud, and allow you to upload your tests to our Azure-based service and we will run those tests against your Internet-facing applications from our watcher nodes in various datacenters around the globe and feed back the data to your OpsMgr infrastructure, so that you can see how your application is available and responding from those locations. You can sign up for the consumer preview of GSM from the connect site.

Enjoy your beta testing! (Isn’t that what weekends are for, geeks?)