An organization running System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr, SCOM) is an organization that believes proactive management is an important piece of the overall IT operations. OpsMgr is a key piece of Microsoft's Enterprise management strategy to ensure business operations can meet SLAs through predictive capability.
As more companies are investing in utilizing Office 365, it makes sense that IT staff would find tying the monitoring of the Cloud-based Office system into current operations extremely useful.
Microsoft has now released a Management Pack for OpsMgr that brings much of the same Office 365 Message Center communication directly into the OpsMgr console. The new Management Pack offers status, customizable alerting, email notifications of problems, and full view of active and resolved service incidents with the service.
The Management Pack works with:
- System Center Operations Manager 2012
- System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1
- System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2
Download it here: System Center Management Pack for Office 365
Additionally, Microsoft is also releasing a full Service Communications API for Office 365, meaning you don't have to use OpsMgr to participate. You can use the new API to embed similar monitoring and alerting functions into any monitoring tool that you use. The API is not as robust (yet) as the Management Pack, but you can use it to connect to the Office 365 service to monitor service health, read Message Center communications, and know when maintenance is scheduled.
More information on the API can be found here: Office 365 Service Communication API
