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Exclusive: Services Provider Management Pack

There's a lot of buzz in the System Center community about the upcoming Services Provider Management Pack. Essentially, this Management Pack lets you "manage" a downstream System Center Essentials environment at a customer site from an upstream Operations Manager 2007 environment at a NOC. This solution is being developed for Managed Services Providers who want to deliver their customers a "hosted" monitoring offering. The SC Essentials environment at the customer site can be used in "headless mode" (eg: the customer network admin does not use the software at all) or in "full mode" (eg: the netadmin uses the SC Essentials console also, performing his or her daily tasks).

The only steps that are required to get it working is both the SC Operations Manager 2007 NOC installation and an approved SC Essentials installation along with the Services Provider MP. The Services Provider MP should be imported in the OpsMgr environment, allowing the MSP to enable extra state views (on their customers and partners) and allowing proper identifcation (and separation) of the SC Essentials site. The MP also delivers a wizard which can be run on the SC Essentials environment to "convert" it to a Services Provider mode, essentially letting it act as a OpsMgr gateway server. Only two outbound TCP ports are required at the customer site for communication: 443 (SSL, for certificate based authentication) and 5723 (OpsMgr).

An MSP can provide their customer with an online health status of their environment by leveraging the AD integrated role-based security of Operations Manager and the Web Console. The Services Provider MP also utilizes the SC Essentials reporting to inform IT management or IT staff at the customer site with a "Daily Health Report" and "Patch Management Status". Using the Operations Manager' notification feature, customers can be notified using email or other means (SMS, IM, etc) on critical problems in their environment. Clearpointe, closely working with Microsoft on this MP, is the first MSP who will be offering this NOC functionality for partners and customers in the coming months. Currently, the Services Provider MP is in private beta for TAP partners and there is no information on a more general availability, although it is expected to only become available for MS Partners with a MSP focus.

Note: click the links in the article to see screenshots!

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