Computer says Yes

In this post I’ll give an overview of SC Service Manager:

Service Manager is an IT service management tool which can provide problem,incident and change management while fully integrating with the other System Center products. You need a CMDB? Connect Service Manager to SCCM and SCOM and you have your CMDB. You want to create an incident if an alert is generated in SCOM? Connect Service Manager to SCOM and there you go. Want to see the same distributed applications in your IT service management tool as you’ve defined in SCOM? Import your existing MP in Service Manager and you’re good to go.

Besides being able to tap into the information provided by SCOM and SCCM Service manager enables you to create work-flows to formalize and/or automate your existing processes. Since existing scripts for common tasks can be included in the workflow you can pick up those pesky scripts and put them into Service Manager so that they are visible, documented and manageable. Combined with Opalis you could take all tasks and scripts (defrags, legacy nt backups, third party config exports) and use Opalis to orchestrate these processes and use Service Manager/SCOM to manage and monitor them. But more on Opalis later.

Eventhough the interface might seem a bit quirky for users accustomed to other IT service management or ticket handling systems the fact that you have all this information about your environment, are able to create logical workflows to for instance create a template for standard changes and are able to automate the change and monitor the change will it is being made in your environment makes this a very powerful tool.

Service Manager uses an extension of the SCOM schema and uses Management Packs just like SCOM does. Out of the box Microsoft provides with MP’s for a knowledge base,change and incident management and they are working with partners to provide things such as asset management.

Microsoft positions Service Manager as the focal point for customer\IT interaction and as a presentational layer to expose and act on information from your data-center.

Service Manager is available for free if you have a System Center Enterprise or Datacenter edition license.