system center advisor released: what's it mean?

since I live in atlanta, it seems totally relevant to at least give a little blurb about a product release that went by the codename 'Atlanta'.

so what is advisor? it's basically a cloud service that "advises" on your server configuration. essentially you get data that's been scrubbed or normalized so that it's relevant to the alert you receive. anyway, it's designed to catch potential problems basically. it has some alerting features (email) that you can set up so that you don't have to go through the portal... though it does look kind of sharp. :)

if you have system center operations manager (opsmgr), you can think of this as kind of a complementary product. what advisor is not is a monitoring system. it's not real time. it doesn't handle the basic monitoring requirements that you get out of opsmgr.

if you want more information, check out this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/server-cloud/archive/2012/01/26/system-center-advisor-released.aspx

there's also a 3-minute primer that you might find useful: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/showcase/details.aspx?uuid=32e32209-71c4-43d2-b2ae-015598bf5b7d

and lastly, you can sign up for your own 60-day trial if you want to give it a spin: http://bit.ly/wK8iMn

if you have software assurance on sql server or windows server, you get the service for free.