Microsoft last week announced that it will offer System Center Advisor for free to its customers. System Center Advisor is a cloud service that enables IT Professionals to proactively avoid problems resulting from server configuration issues. It can help you resolve issues faster by providing access to current and historical configuration data for a deployment. Additionally, System Center Advisor reduces downtime by providing suggestions for improvement and notifying users of key updates specific to their configuration.
Currently Advisor currently supports the following workloads:
- Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2:OS, Active Directory and Hyper-V Host)
- SQL Server 2008 (SQL engine) and later
- Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and later
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and later
- Microsoft Lync Server 2010
System Center Advisor can be seen as System Center Operations Manager provided as a Software as a Service offering from Microsoft. While advisor currently only offers advise and best practices, Microsoft could easily expand it to include monitoring as well. That, together with Windows Intune, Microsoft’s device management solution running from the cloud could end up in a System Management solution hosted by Microsoft.