System Center Advisor Becomes Azure Operational Insights, Goes into Preview

System Center Advisor was one of those suite applications that just couldn't get off the ground. Originally, the intent was to pull monitoring information from on-premises and store it in the Cloud for parsing and reporting. Advisor utilized a component for System Center Operations Manager to pull in the information stored there. It would collect things from the environment like registry information, WMI calls, SQL OleDB queries, event log data, error logs, and more, from a variety of Microsoft servers such as Windows Server 2012 and 2008, SQL Server 2008 and later, SharePoint 2010, Exchange Server 2010, Lync Server 2010 and above, and Virtual Machine Manager. The data could be used for log management, capacity planning, change tracking, and update assessments.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a Preview version of a new Azure service called Azure Operational Insights. Azure Operational Insights works the same way, and in fact, is System Center Advisor but adds some additional capabilities such as malware detection reporting and software updates status. It still utilizes the on-premises Operations Manager connection to retrieve, store, and assimilate information. In fact, not much has changed at this point, except the name change. However, with Microsoft's ever-expanding use of Machine Learning, I expect Azure Operational Insights capabilities to improve quickly.

Azure Operational Insights is currently only available in the Azure East region, and is currently offered in Free, Standard, and Premium pricing tiers.

You can join the preview here: Operational Insights