The first version of the new “Management Pack Updates and Recommendations” feature was introduced in Technical Preview 4 release of System Center 2016. This feature recommends Management Packs for downloading based on a scan of servers in your SCOM environment. You can read about the TP4 feature here. Since then we received a lot of feedback from customers like you and based on it enhanced the feature to make it work harder for you. Here are the changes we made to the feature in TP5.
More Workloads Supported
Added support to recognize 80+workloads and recommend Microsoft Management packs to monitor them.
“More Information” screen
We enhanced the “View Machine details” screen and are now calling it the “More Information” screen. This shows more information about why a recommendation was displayed. For recommendations with status “Not Installed”, it displays the list of machines where the workload was discovered. For status “Update Available”, it displays a list of management pack files for which updates are available along with their version numbers. For status “Partially Installed”, it not only displays the list of MPs that may be required for all the capabilities of the MP to work but also displays the list of machines where the workload was discovered.
View Download Center Page
We were told that users would like to see the download center page associated with the recommendation so we added a feature to launch the DLC page associated with the management pack being recommended.
Language Settings
In order to better help users that use non-English management packs, we enhanced the “Get MP” experience to include language settings. If the user wants specific language MPs to be imported, the user can select the language needed and the needed MP files will get added to the list of MPs being imported.
Improved Performance
Our team was extremely cautious of the overheads involved with this feature so they worked very hard to reduce cycles required to discover the workloads. The design to discover the presence of 65+ Windows Server roles was debated many times over until it only made 3 operations instead of the 65 it originally required. We also improved the load time of the screen by caching data that doesn’t change frequently.
Up-to-date MP Catalog
We have enhanced the MP catalog to ensure that it stays up-to-date with Download center and always displays the latest version of management packs.
Recursively delete MPs
On a related note, if you’ve had difficulty deleting a management pack because of needing to recursively track down and delete all of the dependent management packs before deleting the originally intended management pack, please check out this blogpost.
For more information about Updates and Recommendations see the Updates and Recommendations section of How to Import an Operations Manager Management Pack. You can find the System Center 2016 Technical Preview 5 here.
Your continuous feedback helps in shaping SCOM features become more productive for you. We request you to use this feature and let us know if you would like to see anything else added to it. You can submit your feedback at our SCOM Feedback site @ http://systemcenterOM.uservoice.com.
Aditya Goda | SCOM Program Manager | Microsoft
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Main System Center blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
Operations Manager Team blog: http://blogs.technet.com/momteam/