On Day one of Ignite 2016, Microsoft has announced a slew of new features for Operations Management Suite (OMS). Coincidentally (or probably not), Microsoft first announced OMS at Ignite 2015 last year. Now the company has returned with an expanded feature set that adds much more to the service.
Operations Management Suite lets cloud customers manage their public and private infrastructure. Features of the service include log analytics, site recovery, and backup. The service is available now through subscription add-on to the System Center.
OMS gives customers the ability to manage their cloud infrastructure on other platforms. Azure is a cloud service that competes with Amazon and Google, but Microsoft is also a provider of software infrastructure. OMS allows Amazon Web Services (AWS) users to access their infrastructures and manage them.
The changelog for the new update really is extensive. Microsoft says it is aiming for a unified core management solution, and the new additions reflect that.
- Insight & Analytics: Gain visibility across your workloads, giving you all the information needed on what’s happening in your environment. Insight and Analytics includes log collection and search, application and server dependency mapping, as well as network health monitoring. Releases this week include:
- New application and service monitoring capabilities for Azure SQL, MySQL, and VMware hosts
- Connector for Application Insights enabling integrated application and workload analytics
- Azure activity log search
- New ingestion APIs for expanded data and log collection
- Automation & Control: Enable consistent control and compliance for Azure, third-party clouds and on-premises datacenters. Automation and Control includes services to assist with process automation, desired state configuration, change tracking and new update management capabilities, as well as hybrid runtime.
- Enhanced Update Management features including insights into time estimates as well as sequencing of updates needed to keep Windows Server and Linux systems up-to date
- Change tracking enhanced with granular file-based tracking to support Windows Server and Linux environments
- Security & Compliance: Drive security across your hybrid environment. Security and Compliance delivers instant insight into security vulnerabilities, uses advanced analytics to detect threats, and offers built-in threat intelligence and rapid search of security data to enable rapid investigation.
- Azure Security Center availability as part of Operations Management Suite
- Expanded security data ingestion using Common Event Format, including new Cisco ASA
- New behavioral analytics designed to detect insider threats and attempts that persist within a compromised system
- Protection & Recovery: Ensure availability of important applications and data. Protection and Recovery helps you keep critical data protected through integrated cloud backup, and applications available, while minimizing the impact of disruptions to the business. Including both Backup and Site Recovery, the service provides an integrated experience for customers.
- Expanded Linux and VMware backup and recovery support
- Integrated monitoring with Log Analytics, including Site Recovery capacity planning
Recent Updates
As we said, a massive amount of changes. Microsoft has also update OMS with some new security features a month ago. Those preview additions included an anti-malware assessment function. Using the Advanced Detection Engine, OMS can find security issues like unusual processes. Users can then be alerted and can manage how to deal with the findings.
