What's New in System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager

The Fabric Health Dashboard shows a detailed overview of the health of your private clouds and the fabric that services those clouds. The dashboard helps you answer questions like “What is the health of my clouds and the fabric serving those clouds?”

To view the Fabric Health Dashboard, click Monitoring, and in Cloud Health Dashboard, click Cloud Health. Select the cloud you want to investigate, and then, in the Tasks pane, click Fabric Health Dashboard.

For each cloud, the Fabric Health Dashboard displays these aspects of the fabric:

• Host State: monitors the health state of the hosting groups or the computing aspects of the cloud, such as CPU, memory, disks, and network adapters

• Storage Pools State File Share and LUN State: monitors the health state of the storage aspect of fabric for issues, such as disk space capacity and allocation

• Network Node State: utilizes network monitoring in Operations Manager and displays the health state of network nodes (devices) that are relevant for the cloud you selected. Only physical network devices within one hop from the hosts are shown. To see the physical network devices, you must enable the Network Monitoring feature of Operations Manager and monitor the physical network devices connected to the hosts. Virtual networks are not shown in the dashboard.

The Active Alerts and Number of VMs fields on this dashboard help indicate which issues are having the greatest impact on your cloud and can help you prioritize your work.

The Diagram view gives you a diagram of the entire infrastructure and shows the health state of each part of the fabric. The Diagram view helps you answer questions, such as “What is the health of my entire fabric?” Improvements to the diagram ensure that health rolls up and that the relevant fabric components are part of the Diagram View.

To Open Diagram View, click Monitoring, and in Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager Views, click Diagram View for the environment you want to see displayed as a diagram.

In System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, you can synchronize Operations Manager alerts and Team Foundation Server (TFS) work items. When synchronization is enabled, IT operations can then assign alerts to the engineering team. Assigning an alert to engineering creates a new work item in TFS. The workflow will track and synchronize any changes that are made to TFS work items and any associated Operations Manager alerts.

Integration between System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and TFS used the Ticket ID and Owner fields of the Operations Manager alert to store and display which work item is associated with an alert and who it is assigned to. Beginning in System Center 2012 R2 Operations Manager, two new alert fields, TFS Work Item ID and TFS Work Item Owner, hold these values. These fields are read-only in the Operations Manager console to prevent accidental changes of the values that are controlled in TFS.

If you previously personalized any standard alert views or created your own alert views in System Center 2012 SP1 using Ticket ID and Owner fields to display TFS information, you must replace those fields with the TFS Work Item ID and TFS Work Item Owner fields to continue displaying the same information. The previous Ticket ID and Owner fields are still used for synchronization of alerts with incidents in Service Manager Alert Connector.

This monitoring capability now allows the opening of APM performance events from Visual Studio IDE as if the performance event was captured during the IntelliTrace historical debugging session. Tightly integrated with TFS Work Item Synchronization Management Pack, this capability instantaneously brings generated IntelliTrace logs to TFS work items assigned to engineering. This can result in streamlining communications between IT Operations and Development and enriching the development experience with analysis of root causes of the application failure, reducing the mean time to recovery (MTTR) for the problems detected by APM.