For those of you that have made the move to Azure you are hopefully feeling the benefits of the platform, the range of tools available and the ability to optimise your infrastructure. Operations Management Suite (OMS) is the latest toolkit on Azure and will help you manage your new cloud based workloads and IT infrastructure.  The great thing is that you don’t need to be running anything in Azure to take advantage of this service and you can set it up and try it in a small test environment for free!

What is Operations Management Suite (OMS)?

Operations Management Suite is Microsoft’s IT management solution, it is cloud based and works with Azure, but it also supports on-premise infrastructure. It is technically a number of different services that help you optimise and improve your infrastructure.   For those of you used to the on-premise System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) product, think of this as the start of the Azure cloud based equivalent of this product with new features being added on a regular basis but no need to install an infrastructure to support it.

The services are grouped into 4 areas;

Monitoring and Log Analytics – Provides you with operational insights that allow you to explore, analyse and take action to improve both applications and workloads. This tool helps you collect and act on log and performance data generated by operating systems and applications. It will be your new go to home for this information with the extra ability to quickly take action to improve any areas.

Azure Security Centre – Helps you prevent, detect and respond to threats. The interesting capability here is the increased visibility you have for existing and emerging threats and the ability to mitigate security risks across your infrastructure. It allows you to collect and analyse security events from across your managed systems to identify threats.

Azure Automation – Increases control with automation and configuration management. It automates administrative processes with runbooks that are based on Powershell and run in Azure. Runbooks can also be run on a server in your local data centre to manage local resources. This allows you to deliver continuous IT services and remediates issues quickly at scale.

Azure backup and disaster recovery – Provide simple, automated data protection and disaster recovery in the cloud. It can provide backup and disaster recovery for physical and virtual windows servers, SQL server and SharePoint. It provides you with a strong business continuity tool that orchestrates replication, failover and recovery.

 

Pricing and Licensing

It Is easy to add the license to your existing Azure account. There are a number of options available, you can get the entire package for around £20 – 35 pm per node or you can purchase only the elements you need but it is likely if you need more than one that you would be cheaper purchasing a range package as individually the entire range would cost around £66 pm per node which is more than twice as expensive.  For us the cost is well worth the investment, the ability of the tools to easily identify areas of improvement easily pay for themselves.

 

We have implemented it with a number of customers and we have managed to gain additional insight into environments such as SQL Server and increase performance by implementing the recommendations. The insights we gain are only possible thanks to the Microsoft Azure Artificial Intelligence platform. It is like having an army of highly experienced, well paid DBA’s (Database administrators) available to you taking the burden away from analysing countless log files, looking for patterns and the root cause of the issue. You still need to apply the human touch and confirm the findings but this is where the value add comes in and can be done with a single resource with a good knowledge of SQL.

For more information on Azure, OMS and our cloud services please contact us today.