Hello SMS community,
I'm in the process of planning out the next few releases of Server Management Suite and I'd really like to hear from as many of you as possible about features and enhancements you'd like to see. I'd like a mix of short term and long term business challenges you have that we can try and solve for you. I would particularly like to hear from customers using Virtual Machine Manager, Monitor Solution, Network Discovery, Toplogy viewier.
While I can't promise that all of them will make it in I will carefully review all submissions and give you as much feedback as possible.
Best regards,
David and the SMS team
Out-of-band
A working out-of-band solution. ILO hasn't worked in 7.1/7.5 for me, but 6.9 is still working fine. https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/ilo-inventory-not-populating-servers.
-Some ability to work with the Cisco IMC
VMware
-Better integration / management of hosts for ESXi 5.5+. Now that these hosts are more like an appliance it would be good if there was a way to make them managed. VMM is better than nothing but could use a face-lift. It would be helpful if it could bring in the data center, cluster views, etc. Typically right now I end up using vCenter reports and then Altiris reports. It would be great if I could just use Altiris to provide the same level of information from one tool.
Auditing
-McAfee allows the import of standards such as CIS, and IRS SafeGaurds so we can report for compliance against them. If there was something like this to help with audit findings/reports it would be great.
Reporting/IT Analytics
-Some canned licensing reports that help differentiate OS's and physical vs virtual
-Some canned reports that can utilize the AD imported information like tying computers to "Sites and Services"
I also should have mentioned the Server Resource Manager view. That was added after 7.0, and it was a good addition. In fact, I'd like to see more Silverlight parts like those. Maybe allow people to select their own metric per web part, like LDAP Bind/sec, for example. It'd be even better and easier if those web parts just came with the product and would automatically be displayed on the Server Resource Manager home page based on Server Inventory. Server is running DNS - here's a bunch of web parts for DNS. Running Exchange - here's some Exchange web parts.
One more comment in the vein of IaaS. Our monitoring today is totally automatic, in that the Monitor Agent is automatically installed and certain policies always enabled by default. However, application analysts will sometimes ask that we monitor for additional things. Usually it's a request to monitor certain services. Sometimes it's to monitor for certain event log entries. It would be absolutely amazing if there was a way for these people to start monitoring these items themselves. You could do something similar to what Solarwinds does, where you allow people to set up monitors based on data in RTSM. The real-time view shows all of the services and events already. You could add the ability to start monitoring a service from that same UI. You could allow those people to choose what should be done when those monitor rules are triggered. Send and email, restart the service, or whatever.
David, you could check out this thread where some of these items were brought up.
https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/customers-thoughts-about-itms-area-improvements
Everything that I mentioned about Monitor Solution still applies. I was a proponent of Monitor Solution for a long time. When members of my team wanted to look at other monitoring tools I rejected it. Not because Monitor Solution was the best thing out there, but becasue it was all in the same place as our inventory, patch management, and everything else. It's disappointing that the product is essentially identical to what was released in 7.0. There's been added OS support as usual, some new reports, and rule aggregation, but it's mostly unchanged. We're still unable to monitor named SQL instances without setting up separate metrics per name. This was discussed in 2012. https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/downloads/ms-7-monitor-pack-sql-20052008-updated-july-2009
Our DBA started setting up SCOM for SQL monitoring. Maybe someone will look at Active Directory next. If that rolls into a serious System Center discussion I'll be pretty upset.
I've always wanted to see the ability to discard alerts when a server had a maintenance window open. There's a mention of maintenance windows in one of the discard rules dropdown lists, but It's not clear how that works, if it works.
It's not always easy to get the performance data you want from existing reports without creating your own, but there's one thing that could be done that would address this. Add the ability to export from the real-time and historical performance views. You could export the graph as a PDF or JPG, which would be nice to send to the executive types. You could also all export all of the selected data to CSV or XLSX for those that wanted to see the specifics.
I really want to supply better feedback on this. Unfortunately I've been evaluating other monitoring tools that just do a better job in areas, even if I don't want to. I can try and spend more time digging into the pain points again. I know there was something about the web parts I didn't like. Something about it not being easily re-usable with anything other than the default targets, but I've got to look into that again.
I wish I could comment more on VMM, but more often than not the discovery process would fail or return no results. I have noticed that the latest version, along with vSphere 5.5 Update 2, seem to work well together. There is one obvious item I'd point out. When deploying a new VM it would be much better to let the user select a cluster instead of a host. A lot of people will have no idea which hosts they should be selecting, but clusters have name ot help out with this. It would also be cool if you could modify the parameters of a deploy VM task. For example, limiting people to certain number of CPUs, RAM, disk size, etc. Something with a little more IaaS flair.
Is that not what the ides section is for ?