Coffee break: SCOM Update Rollup 2

As you would’ve heard, SCOM Update Rollup 2 is here! But what exactly does that mean for you? SCOM experts Leon Laude and Shawn Williams break it down in the August episode of the Coffee Break webinar. Leon Laude is a SCOM Consultant and the author of the popular ‘The System Center Blog’. Shawn Williams is our very own SquaredUp Technical Evangelist, who was formerly a Systems Admin at Purdue University for 23 years.

Check out the webinar recording to watch the full discussion, or read on for a summary of the key takeaways. For a more detailed guide, check out Leon’s dedicated blog post on SCOM UR2.

To start off, Shawn and Leon give us some helpful tips for SCOM UR2 installation. An authoritative resource they highlight is Kevin Holman’s step-by-step guide to installation, which covers common pitfalls and known installation issues. A few things to remember are that all SCOM update rollups are cumulative, which means you can go straight to the most recent version available. Also, make sure you download and import only the updated MPs that are actually relevant to your installation. Otherwise you just make things way noisier for yourself!

Next, Leon goes in-depth into all the fixes and changes and he and Shawn share their thoughts on them. They cover an extensive number of changes in a good amount of detail, so instead of replicating that here, here are some timestamps so you can skip directly to the part of the webinar covering improvements you are most interested in.

Improvements

• Web Console (07:30)
• Operations Console (12:15)
• UNIX/Linux Networking monitoring (17:50)
• Other (19:30)

Feature Updates

• Change Tracking – new reports (21:40)
  • Management Pack History
  • Manage Pack Objects
  • Override Tracking
  • Leon’s blog post provides extensive examples of these reports and how to use them.
• Web Console (31:30)
  • Support for Favorite Reports / Favorite Views
  • Support for Folders
  • Support for CentOS 8 under the Universal Linux RPM package
• Other enhancements (37:50)

Leon and Shawn also shared some useful resources that explore these SCOM enhancements in greater detail. Check them out!

Resources:

A quick look into the change tracking of management packs in SCOM
https://thesystemcenterblog.com/2020/08/04/a-quick-look-into-the-change-tracking-of-management-packs-in-scom/

Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2019 is out!
https://thesystemcenterblog.com/2020/08/04/update-rollup-2-for-system-center-2019-is-out/

Enhancements made in SCOM Performance
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/system-center-blog/enhancements-made-in-scom-performance-faster-and-more-reliable/ba-p/1592849

The Coffee Break is a monthly webinar series run by SCOMathon, that covers all the latest SCOM news and best practice tips. Stay tuned for next month's topic!