Introducing Microsoft System Center Advisor
IT professionals have to spend a great deal of time and effort dealing with problems related to servers that were configured incorrectly. They are often not aware of these issues until they cause performance and availability issues due the time lag from a configuration change, to awareness and exploration of the issue, to final resolution. This reduces employee productivity and creates a situation where IT staff spend their time reacting to problems—just trying to keep IT systems running—instead of focusing on IT system improvement.
System Center Advisor (formerly Microsoft codename Atlanta) is a new cloud service from Microsoft that enables IT professionals to assess their server configuration and proactively avoid problems. In a nutshell, System Center Advisor routinely scans your Windows Server 2008 R2 (and SQL 2008 R2) servers to ensure that they are compliant with Microsoft best practices. Because the reporting is done on a periodical basis (the typical scan reports arrive in your email each week) it’s easy to pinpoint particular changes before they become larger and tougher to fix.
Currently System Center Advisor is only scans for two products, but we anticipate Microsoft will begin to expand the product line as System Center Advisor takes off. Best of all, by utilizing System Center Advisor, you can proactively avoid problems, resolve issues faster and reduce downtime and improve performance. In the past, keeping up with the latest testing software required a dedicated team of individuals, but now, as best practices evolve, System Center Advisor will be updated in real time to include the latest guidance from Microsoft’s engineers.
Deployment of System Center Advisor is almost as easy as the reporting process. A small software component needs to be installed on one server in your corporate network which will act as the System Center Advisor gateway device. Once that device is configured it will reach out to the selected servers (either Server 2008R2 or SQL Server) to regularly poll them for configuration changes. Within a matter of minutes, you can have up-to-date configuration information on all your key infrastructure servers.
If you’re interested in improving the health of your network, contact the Microsoft experts at New Signature to learn more about System Center Advisor today!