Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that the SCOM’s (Operations Manager) GSM (Global Service Monitor) will officially call it quits and retire the service, effectively, November 7th, 2018. As it is a sad day for us, long-time SCOM administrators, the future remains bright, as Microsoft makes way for Application Insights. Over the last year or so, I have done numerous presentations and conferences on Azure’s Application Insights (App Insights), and demonstrating the natural evolution from SCOM APM to Azure App Insights. However, before we start talking about Azure’s App Insights, we need to start thinking about migrate away from GSM.

If you don’t know, GSM, Global Service Monitor in System Center Operations Manager provides the ability to monitor the availability of external web-based applications from multiple locations throughout the world. Microsoft Azure has this feature already within App Insights, called, “Availability“. Creative, I know.. But it does exactly that, measures the availability of your application.

Fellow MVP, Kevin Greene wrote an amazing, and in-depth article on how to migrate your application and GSM to Azure App Insights, so please have a read here. Over the next few blog posts, I would like to provide some detailed demos on Application Insights and how you can start taking advantage of this service to start monitoring your applications.