Currently I’m experimenting with Microsoft’s Operations Management Suit, which is basically a cloud-based IT infrastructure log-analytic tool. In my opinion it’s real cool stuff, so let’s talk about OMS!

The first time I hear about OMS, I thought “OMG! Microsoft will destroy SCOM and bring SCOM to cloud.” But I was so terribly wrong. A few weeks ago, there was a great session about OMS and SCOM at the SCU Europe conference in Berlin, so I decided to do more with OMS. First of all: OMS does not require SCOM, but you can combine SCOM and OMS for even greater monitoring. But what is the Big-Bang behind OMS? – Simple said, it’s the easy way of analytics. Let’s get a bit more technical. OMS uses, as SCOM also does, an agent, which is the same agent, to gather log- and performancedata from servers. The data will be uploaded and stored inside of your OMS workspace. Now, if the data is in the cloud, there are two cool things to do:

1. You can search these data. So, like a big database you can search in all these events with a syntax that reminds me of PowerShell. So if you want, you can search for all events related to a computer restart.
2. You can use OMS Solutions, which will use the data and analyses your environment. For example, there is a solution which gives you advises to your Active Directory based on these logs.

Sounds crazy, but cool? 😉

So because I’m a crazy guy, and I like cool stuff I decided to do more with OMS and start blogging about it. So this post is the start of series of blog post about OMS, it’s features and so on.

In this first OMS-post I want to give a brief overview about OMS and how to get a look at OMS. First step, go to this site: http://aka.ms/getoms

Here you can start with the “See it in action” function. It’s the simplest way to get a hands-on experience of OMS.

When you have finished the logon process, you will be directly brought to a pre-filled instance of OMS with demo data.

As you can see, the graphical experience of OMS is nearly the same as in Azure.

If you switch to the “My Dashboard”, you can see some other information’s.

This is a really nice feature to get a short overview about how OMS looks and feels like. And now, while you are reading this, and playing around with OMS, I’m working on the second part of this series, which will about how to create your first own OMS instance or as it is called in OMS, your first own OMS Workspace.

Have fun with OMS!