You are probably aware that since System Center 2012 R2, Service Manager comes with a pre-installed Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA) which is perfectly compatible to System Center 2012 Operations Manager. After completing Service Manger setup, you just have to manually configure the agent to communicate with your Operations Manager management server.

However in Service Manager, the Microsoft Monitoring Agent does not just calculate the health state of the monitored computer and reports back to the Operations Manager management server. Instead it’s primary role is managing all the Service Manager workflows, including workflow subscriptions, group calculations, connectors, etc.

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When installing Service Manager Data Warehouse management server you might run into an issue where the installation fails when it comes to configuring SQL server report server. So far I was able to reproduce this with Service Manager 2016 Data Warehouse management server installation but it might be also applicable for Service Manager 2012 version.

When you see the above error message, check the setup log (which can be found in ‘C:\Users<User>\AppData\Local\Temp’) if you see the following error:

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This is the third part of a blog post series called “Installing Service Manager 2016” and will cover how to install a secondary Service Manger 2016 management server and the HTML based Self Service portal on Windows Server 2016 with Desktop Experience.

• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 1: What’s new
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 2: Primary Management Server
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 3: Self Service Web Portal (this post)
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 4: Data Warehouse Management Server
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 5: Scripting the installation

In this blog post series I will describe the installation of Service Manager 2016 based on a pretty simple 3 computer scenario. The first computer hosts the Service Manager management server as well as the Service Manager database. The second computer hosts the Self Service Web Portal and the third one the data warehouse management server and the Data Warehouse databases.

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This is the second part of a blog post series called “Installing Service Manager 2016” and will cover how to install Service Manger 2016 and SQL Server 2016 on Windows Server 2016 with Desktop Experience.

• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 1: What’s new
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 2: Primary Management Server (this post)
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 3: Self Service Web Portal
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 4: Data Warehouse Management Server
• Installing Service Manager 2016 Part 5: Scripting the installation

In this blog post series I will describe the installation of Service Manager 2016 based on a pretty simple 3 computer scenario. The first computer hosts the Service Manager management server as well as the Service Manager database. The second computer hosts the Self Service Web Portal and the third one the data warehouse management server and the Data Warehouse databases.

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Today, Microsoft announced the GA (General Availability) ofWindows Server 2016 and System Center 2016. Those of you interested in System Center Service Manger may wonder what’s new in this long-awaited release.

Inspired by the GA of Service Manager 2016, I decided to create a blog post series called “Installing Service Manager 2016” to get you some first impressions on Service Manager 2016 and to create an up-to-date installation guide for this release. This is the first part the series and will cover what’s new in Service Manager 2016.

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I am excited to share that I have been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) 2016 in Cloud and Datacenter Management!

This is actually the first time I receive this award and I can’t wait to find out what’s in store for me. :-) I am truly honored to be part of this awesome community and I am looking forward to meet a lot of great people!

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In the Service Manager world, review activities (RA) and corresponding reviewers are an important part of most deployments. A review activity is kind of an approval item which is used to control execution of a business process. Often when providing items for end users in the service catalog it is necessary to somehow review input of submitted requests. This is where you specify the actual users that must approve a request. When automating Service Manager workloads (for example by using Service Management Automation or Orchestrator), it may sometimes be necessary to get those user objects by using a PowerShell script.

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As of version v1.1.0-217 OMS Agent for Linux now has support for CollectD. CollectD is an open source Linux daemon that periodically collects data from applications and system level information. CollectD actually brings a lot of very useful plugins. Example applications CollectD can collect metrics from include the Java Virtual Machine, MySQL Server, Nginx, etc. CollectD is often used in combination with Grafana which enables you to create awesome dashboards to visualize the collected metrics.

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Now that the new Service Manager release is just around the corner, more and more customers are asking to deploy Service Manager 2016 TP5 in production. Benefits of deploying Service Manager 2016 TP5 are listed below. For a complete list of new features in Service Manager 2016 TP5, please see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center-docs/sm/get-started/what-s-new-in-service-manager

• New Self-Service Portal
• Performance improvements
• Support for Lync 2013 and Skype for Business
• Changes to Setup supporting SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups installation
• Support for .NET Framework 4.5.1

One cool thing is that Setup now supports SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups installation. No more hacks and workarounds when Performing a fresh installation of Service Manager with SQL Server 2014. :-)

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You probably know that Service Manager has some drawbacks when it comes to the Self-Service portal. Microsoft recently released a new HTML 5 Self-Service portal which is actually a big step forward compared to the Silverlight based portal delivered out of the box with Service Manager 2012. However many customers evaluating ITSM tools are still surprised that there is no better out of the box portal available. Compared to the other ITSM product vendors, the Service Manager portal is definitively not what you are expecting from a state of the art ITSM software.

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