R2 comes!

On TechEd 2008 in Barcelona Microsoft announced the newest release of OpsMgr: OpsMgr R2. Beta will come this month (november 2008), RC Q1 2009 & RTM Q2 2009.

The demo's were really spectacular.

For what I've seen I must say R2 is the grown up version of OpsMgr SP1. Can't wait for the beta release to fieldtest it! And... pigs DO fly at Redmond....

Eventhough much has/will be changed in R2 these are the main issues:

Native support for monitoring Linux/Unix
Out of the box R2 will support the monitoring of 14 types of Linux/Unix distributions. Monitoring of the seven mostly used deamons and all services on a non-Windows box is supported.

Performance Enhancements
Engine has been made more intelligent. It shows only the information queried for. So not everything will be loaded, but just those parts needed. Demovideo was impressive. Like OpsMgr SP1 on steroids!

Service Level Tracking
In SP1 with a special Management Pack. In R2 out of the box and improved.

Process Monitoring
Ever wanted to know about certain (un)wanted processes running on monitored boxes? R2 provides this kind of monitoring and last but not least enables automatic start/closure of these very same processes

Improvement the way Management Packs are imported
Directly out of the OpsMgr UI connecting to the catalog, searching the needed MPs and importing them directly into OpsMgr. When a underlying MP isn't there OpsMgr R2 will notify on it and propose corrective actions

One-click Alert Subscriptions
Back from MOM 2005: with a right-click one can subscribe to an alert

Power to the WebConsole
Health Explorer and the import of MPs are now available in the WebConsole

Overrides
Easy to obtain overview of the applied overrides. View is easily to be customized.

Management Pack Templates
More are available, the ones already present in OpsMgr SP1 are improved. Better Distributed Applications can be built now.

Reporting
No more empty reports because the wrong objects have been selected. With the selection of a report only the related objects will be shown (filtered) so the change of ending up with an empty report becomes very small.

Monitoring non-Windows applications
3rd parties like Novell & Xandros will deliver high quality MPs for monitoring Oracle, Apache, Samba, Linux based DNS, DHCP.