What's New in System Center Advisor?

April 2012 introduces the following new features as part of the V1.1 release of Advisor.

• Support for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager. You can use Advisor on the same computer as the System Center 2012 version of the Operations Manager agent. See Planning Considerations for System Center Advisor for more information.
  
  
• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 analysis.
  
  
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010 analysis.
  
  
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 analysis.
  
  
• Additional PowerShell cmdlets to support running Advisor in environments that require action accounts (or Run As accounts). For information, see Set the Run As Account For SharePoint
  
  

As of this release, Advisor is a benefit of Microsoft’s Software Assurance program.

If you are new to Advisor, welcome! We’ve been hard at work the past year making this service everything you see today. Part of our success relies on feedback from you, our users and partners. If you think of something that would improve this service, please do not hesitate to tell us. You can click Feedback on any page to send us your thoughts. Make sure to visit this page regularly for information about our latest improvements.

If you are an existing Advisor user, check out FAQ: System Center Advisor and Software Assurance for details about how this change affects you.

In addition to the V1 excitement, we’ve also added the following:

• Server health view. You can now view more detailed information about the status of your agents and gateways.
  
  
• Remember those PowerShell cmdlets we added? Well, now you can view the help for those cmdlets online.
  
  
• Speaking of cmdlets, we improved the agent and gateway troubleshooting documentation to use some of those cmdlets to perform diagnostics. You can check it out at System Center Advisor Troubleshooting.
  
  

• We beefed up our troubleshooting documentation for the agent and gateway, including some information about those connection issues you’ve been seeing. You can check out the updated information in System Center Advisor Troubleshooting.
  
  

As always, watch this space – more exciting features coming soon.

• Dashboards! When you log into Advisor, you now see an all-up view of alerts and server information. You can drill into alert and configuration details from the new dashboard.
  
  
• Simplified setup and a separate configuration tool. No more relying solely on registration keys to change the configuration of your agents or gateway. You can use the Configuration wizard to change port and proxy information for your gateway or to change the gateway that your agents report to. For information, see Use the System Center Advisor Configuration Wizard.
  
  
• PowerShell. That’s right, Advisor has gone PowerShell.
  
  For information about the System Center Advisor cmdlets, enable them by entering add-pssnapin microsoftadvisorsnapin at a PowerShell command prompt. To list the available functions enter get-help scadvisor.
  
  
• New alerts. We added the following alerts this month:
  
  For SQL Server:
  
  
  • SQL Server msdb system database does not have connect permission for guest user – for more information see You should not disable the guest user in the msdb database in SQL Server.
    
    
  • Virtual host driver detected that can cause stability problems for SQL Server – for more information see Using virtual host drivers could lead to data consistency problems with the SQL Server Database Engine.
    
    
  • SQL Server missing update 2506235 to allow proper I/O processing for encrypted databases on hidden schedulers – for more information see FIX: An access violation may occur when a database is enabled for Transparent Database Encryption in SQL Server 2008 or in SQL Server 2008 R2.
    
    
  • SQL Server feature "Instant File Initialization" is not enabled – for more information see File initialization takes a long time for SQL Server database-related operations.
    
    
  • SQL Server database contains unsupported .Net Framework Library assembly – for more information see Using unsupported .Net Framework assemblies with SQLCLR may cause problems after .Net upgrades.
    
    
  
  
  For Hyper-V Server: Missing Operating System update KB2263829 might cause Hyper-V virtual machines to lose network connectivity on Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 systems. For more information see The network connection of a running Hyper-V virtual machine may be lost under heavy outgoing network traffic on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.
  
  
  
  For Windows Server: Service Pack 1 is no longer supported on Windows Server 2008. For more information see Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 & Windows Vista End Of Support.
  
  

Stay tuned to this space – we have more updates coming soon!

More new alerts! We added the following alerts this month:

For SQL Server:

• MS DTC configuration for “network DTC access” might result in SQL Server linked server errors – for more information see Recommended MSDTC settings for using Distributed Transactions in SQL Server.
  
  
• SQL Server has encountered a database availability error: Msg 17207 – for more information see How to troubleshoot Error 17204 and 17207 in SQL Server.
  
  
• SQL Server has encountered a database availability error: Msg 17204 – for more information see How to troubleshoot Error 17204 and 17207 in SQL Server.
  
  
• SQL Server database contains unsupported .Net Framework Library assembly – for more information see Using unsupported .Net Framework assemblies with SQLCLR may cause problems after .Net upgrades.
  
  

For Windows Server:

• Missing Operating System Update KB 2541014 may cause this computer to not hibernate or generate a machine memory dump when a Stop error condition occurs – for more information see Hibernation does not work or memory dump file is not created after you install Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.
  
  
• Secure channel failure detected – for more information see Event ID 5722 is logged on your Windows Server-based domain controller.
  
  

• We added the following alerts:
  
  
  • SQL Server feature "CLR integration" might result in memory errors or CLR load failures in the 32-bit version of SQL Server – for information, see Various memory errors are logged to SQL Server error log when using SQL CLR objects.
    
    
  • High CPU usage by Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) – for information, see How to Troubleshoot High LSASS.EXE CPU Utilization on an Active Directory Domain Controllers.
    
    
  • Potentially risky audit failure settings detected – for information, see How To Prevent Auditable Activities When Security Log Is Full.
    
    
  • A possible STOP error caused by audit failure has been detected – for information, see How To Prevent Auditable Activities When Security Log Is Full
    
    
• In response to customer issues, we’ve added a new guided deployment that details everything you need to do to get Advisor working in your environment. You will see this guide the first time you log into Advisor – you can also view it from the Servers page, by clicking View on-premise setup guide.
  
  
• Was that alert helpful to you? Or did we completely miss the mark? You can now give each alert a positive (happy face) or negative (sad face rating). We’ll use this feedback to determine which alerts to update or remove in the future.
  
  
• Did you know that you can monitor your Advisor gateway with System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2? For information, see Monitor the System Center Advisor Gateway
  
  

We added two new rules for SQL Server:

• SQL Server missing update KB2491214 to prevent SQL Server hang
  
  
• SQL Server linked servers exist without the required providers installed
  
  

We have also documented how to include Advisor in a Sysprep image, which means you can deploy Advisor with new operating system images. For information, see Include System Center Advisor in a Custom Install Image.

We added a new rule to detect whether the KB982293 fix is installed on a computer running Windows Server 2008 R2. This fix prevents a crash in the Svchost.exe process, which hosts Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). For more information about this fix, check out the KB article (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=215403).

We also added new configuration data points to help run the service. You can download a spreadsheet that lists all available configuration data points here.

The best news about these updates is that you don’t need to install a patch or fix – as long as you are running the RC version of the agent and gateway, we will deliver the updates to you automatically.

Finally, we collected customer feedback regarding agent and gateway deployment and created a troubleshooting topic to address the most common issues. See Advisor Deployment Troubleshooting for more information.

The following features were added to the RC release of Advisor

Windows Server 2008 analysis

Multi-user support

Improved alert management

Email notification

Communication between the agent and the gateway

Concepts