Business Service Management Hub

Microsoft seems to be paying attention to the Business Service Management (BSM) space, at least in its own way.  At the recent CeBIT show in Hannover, Germany, Microsoft unveiled a new PC monitoring tool called Windows Intune, and they also displayed the prototype of a new cloud monitoring system they are calling Microsoft Dynamic IT.

Designed in Microsoft Silverlight, the tool is visually appealing and they displayed it on a huge LCD screen giving it Mission Control feel. Instead of monitoring PCs as with the Windows Intune product, it gives you insight into the overall health of the servers running your cloud services.

If everything is running smoothly, a green check mark appears next to the server name, but if there is a problem a red X appears letting you know there could be an issue that requires your attention. The prototype was connected to three servers located somewhere in Microsoft’s vast booth. A picture of the main control panel is shown below:

As administrator, should you encounter a problem,  you can drill down into the server in question, as you can with Windows Intune, discover the nature of the problem and take action to fix it. In the example shown below, the Redmond server needed a patch installed.

Monitoring tools like BSM of course give you a much more comprehensive view of your systems, but this type of tool proves that monitoring in general is becoming a key task for IT, and that having these types of tools in place will become increasingly important moving forward.

This week at the CeBIT technology fair in Hannover, Germany;  Microsoft was showing off Windows Intune, a cloud-based PC monitoring tool that lets IT pros monitor the health of all the Window PCs in their charge from a simple Web-based interface. What’s interesting about it from a BSM standpoint, is that it brings monitoring of this sort into the mainstream.

The system has a series of tools to enable administrators to see problems at glance, whether it’s a malware infestation or a PC that needs a patch. The administrator can troubleshoot problems by drilling down to the PC in question and going so far as seeing all the software installed, whether it’s from Microsoft or another vendor.

The system uses the same anti-virus engine found in Microsoft Security Essentials, the free anti-virus program available from Microsoft for consumers.

If you’re an administrator, once you see a problem, you can fix it on a single machine, a group of machines (which you can define by type, department or any organization you wish). You can even apply a patch to a test bed if you have defined one to test it before deploying.

Because it’s cloud-based, users don’t need to be attached to the network to receive a patch or remove a virus. If your CEO runs into a problem on the road, you can fix it from the Console and any patches or fixes are downloaded to the monitored machine.

While Microsoft hasn’t developed a mobile application to work in conjunction with Intune, you can configure it to receive an email whenever a crisis happens, and you can define what constitutes a crisis, so that you don’t receive email for every little problem reported by the system.

From the email  notification, you can view the console in your mobile phone’s browser.

The product will be available starting on March 23rd and cost $11 per PC per month with volume discounts, depending on the number of PCs you are monitoring.

While this tool doesn’t have the sophistication of a full-scale Business Service Management console, it shows that there is a desire for this type of monitoring on a broad level, and it puts monitoring within reach of even small businesses (although Microsoft doesn’t see this as being limited to the SMB market by any means).