For those that missed Ignite this year in Orlando we provide a summary of key takeaways from the recent System Center session at Ignite last week.
There was a huge amount of interest from the Microsoft community, with it being attended by over 2,000 people which was the 2nd best attended session after Windows Server 2019. So clearly there was a lot of curiosity in what would be presented. For sure System Center remains an important piece of most on-prem Microsoft based environments.
System Center Release Schedules
There is a new major release coming up called System Center 2019. This is part of the Long-term servicing channel and is used by the majority of customers. This release is the first major new release since System Center 2016. In essence this will include most of the new features that have been released in the semi-annual Channel which started at 1801 and has new releases approximately every six months.
However this is not to be confused with another System Center release called System Center 19XX. This is the next edition for the SAC channel and will have some features not present in 2019 version.
So lets focus on the 2019 release where there were major updates for VMM, DPM and Orchestrator but the most new features were actually in Operations Manager where we can provide a summary.

SCOM 2019 New Features
The 2019 release includes some major updates for VMM, DPM and Orchestrator but the most new features were actually in Operations Manager.
Taking a closer look into SCOM 2019 here is the complete list of new features that will available.
Monitoring Experience
HTML5 dashboards
Linux Log file monitoring
Enable/disable APM component during agent install/repair
MP discoverability for third-party MPs
and Linux workloads
Enhanced notifications and subscriptions experience
Better alert management for monitors
Enhanced certificate validation for web application monitoring
Linux log rotation
Improved Fundamentals
No more Silverlight dependencies
Support for SQL Server 2017
Disable interactive Logon
Support OpenSSL 1.1.0 for
Linux platforms
Kerberos support for Linux agent
Enhanced Agentless alerting during failover scenarios
Enhanced certificate validation for web application monitoring
Monitoring Surface ++
Monitor Windows Server 2019
Monitoring latest application servers like Tomcat 9, WildFly 14, WebSphere 9.0 and Web Logic Server 12cR2
VSAE support for Visual studio 2017
Monitor Ubuntu 18 and Debian9
APM—enabled Client Side Monitoring (CSM) on Edge and Chrome browsers
APM—enabled monitoring support for SharePoint 2016
Hybrid
Integration with Azure Service Map
Enhancements to Azure MP
Clearly there are a LOT of new features coming for customers that are currently on 2016. Microsoft has put significant effort on adding features and filling gaps based upon what customers out in the community were asking for.
A new HTML5 web console is delivered, meaning the removal of any Silverlight dependency.
A significant improvement where alerts can no longer be closed until the monitor is reset correctly will be a big benefit.
A big investment in linux based monitoring has been added, together with a range of new technologies that can be monitored now via SCOM.
Summary
Clearly Microsoft has breathed new life into SCOM over the past 18 months and it remains a critical part of their hybrid strategy. We have regular contact with the System Center team in India, and they are quickly adding new capabilities really based upon customer feedback. So this is great news for everyone using SCOM and wanting to do more with the product. The message is clear that SCOM is here to stay for the coming years and our customers can benefit significantly with Savision and SCOM 2019 together.
To see how Savision and SCOM work in tandem check out our latest v10 of Savision Live Maps webinar here