Up to the final release of SCOM 2016 it was not clear what will be within this box. There were even some surprises, like the new web console (almost) without Silverlight. I thought I will write a post, were I put all this information together and link it to blog post which I have previously written or other community members provided, so you will have a single spot to find detailed information. I used the TechNet overview from here and pimped it with additional information. I hope you find it useful.

Improve desktop console performance

• With the release of System Center 2016 – Operations Manager, we have made performance improvements to state and diagram views in the Operations console to improve load performance (these improvements are in addition to the alert view optimizations).

[Stefan Roth] I have not tested SCOM 2016 in a large environment, but in my lab in feels like Microsoft improved these experiences drastically.

Send E-mail notifications with external authentication

• Operations Manager now supports sending notifications from an e-mail server, either within the organization or external and configuring a Run As account to authenticate against an external messaging system.

[Stefan Roth] If you check your Channel configuration you can find a new setting, which allows you to specify a RunAs Profile to specify an account for authenticating against external mail server.

Non Silverlight Web console (except Dashboard views)

• With the release of System Center 2016 – Operations Manager, we have removed the Silverlight dependency from all the Web console views except Dashboard views. This feature provides the following value:
  • No more Silverlight prerequisite to access Operations Manager Web console
  • Operations Manager Web console can be accessed from multiple web browsers like Edge, Chrome and Firefox
  • Performant experience
  • Dashboard views are still dependent on Silverlight, which can be accessed through Internet Explorer with Silverlight plug in.

[Stefan Roth] Fellow MVP Marnix Wolf has already written a blog post about. I hope this console gets updated and finally all Silverlight parts will be replaced with some upcoming URs.

Access Schedule Maintenance Mode from Monitoring pane and maintenance mode from client side

• Schedule Maintenance mode is a feature released in System Center 2016 – Operations Manager to suspend monitoring of an object during regular software or hardware maintenance activities, such as software updates or hardware replacements. Entities can be put to maintenance in older versions of Operations Manager, but they cannot be put into maintenance mode at a future time. The newly created Maintenance Mode Scheduling wizard gives the ability to choose different types of entities to put into maintenance and to schedule maintenance at a future time.
• With the release of System Center 2016 – Operations Manager, Operators can access the “Maintenance Schedules” feature from the monitoring pane without the dependency on administrators to schedule maintenance at a future time. We now supports allowing a server administrator to set the agent-managed computer in maintenance mode directly from the computer itself, without needing to perform this from the Operations console. This can be performed with the new PowerShell cmdlet Start-SCOMAgentMainteannceMode.

[Stefan Roth] Microsoft moved the Maintenance Schedules to the Monitoring section so Operators are able to set schedules. In previous TP versions it was placed within the Administrator section which would not have allowed to schedule maintenance modes other than administrators.

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