The Microsoft System Center 2016 Service Manager Cookbook - Second Edition is a collection of recipes from Service Manager experts brought to you from the field. This book sets out to guide the reader through all aspects of deploying, configuring, and maintaining a Service Manager environment. In this book you will find information that is needed to help you leverage the new features and functionality of the Service Manager 2016 version.
This book has value for beginners and experienced Service Manager administrators. A beginner can read chapter by chapter moving from no Service Manager to a fully functional environment or an experienced Service Manager administrator can go straight to chapters containing recipes that pertain to their need.
Chapter 1, ITSM and ITIL Frameworks and Processes, aims to provide a background into the creation of processes aligned with ITIL and MOF (Microsoft Operations Framework) principles and explains some of the key areas and how they relate to Service Manager 2016.
Chapter 2, Personalizing SCSM 2016 Administration, covers the initial process-dependent critical settings and tasks a Service Manager administrator would need to configure after successfully installing the product.
Chapter 3, Configuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs), delves into the Service-Level Agreement areas of Service Manager 2012 and provides you with recipes that simplify the implementation of this complex topic.
Chapter 4, Building the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), shows Service Manager Administrators are how to build the SCSM Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The recipes in this chapter include various options, from a manual approach right through to automating the importing of information from external systems.
Chapter 5, Deploying Service Request Fulfillment, provides recipes to configure the Service Catalog with different Service and Request Offerings in SCSM 2016.
Chapter 6, Deploying and Configuring the HTML 5 Self-Service Portal, teaches you the ins and outs of planning the new HTML5 portal, deploying the portal, overall configuration, and finally how to customize it to have the look and feel you want. After reading this chapter, you will be armed and ready to spin up the new HTML5 portal as a part of your Service Manager deployment.
Chapter 7, Working with Incident and Problem Management, contains recipes related to the Incident and Problem processes. This chapter contains things such as creating tasks, templates, how to configure the Exchange connector, and how to extend the incident class.
Chapter 8, Designing and Configuring Change Management and Release Management, covers the details of Change Management and Release Management in SCSM 2016.
Chapter 9, Implementing Security Roles, explains the details of Security Roles and how they can be used to control access to different objects in SCSM 2016.
Chapter 10, Working with the Data Warehouse and Reporting, walks you through the various options of using the Service Manager Data Warehouse to gain insight into the data stored in the Service Manager database.
Chapter 11, Extending SCSM with Advanced Personalization, is the chapter where you will be able to see how to perform more advanced customizations of Service Manager. This chapter contains recipes around installing and using the Authoring Tool in different ways, but it also includes recipes around how to manually edit the XML of management packs.
Chapter 12, Automating Service Manager 2016, teaches you how to work smart and efficient by automating things in Service Manager. This chapter covers different ways of automating Service Manager with the use of custom workflows, PowerShell, and Orchestrator.
Chapter 13, What's New in SCSM 2016 and Upgrading from SCSM 2012 R2, explains the new features of SCSM 2016 and walks you through the process of planning and performing an upgrade from SCSM 2012 R2.
Appendix A, Community Extensions and Third-party Commercial SCSM Solutions, contains useful community extensions and third-party solutions for SCSM 2016.
Appendix B, Useful Websites and Community Resources, lists some helpful websites and communities for System Center Service Manager.
In order to complete all the recipes in this book, you will need a minimum of three servers configured with System Center Service Manager 2016 RTM, in the following configurations:
Server 1: System Center Service Manager 2016 management server hosting the CMDB and workflow role
Server 2: System Center Service Manager 2016 management server hosting the data warehouse role
Server 3: System Center Service Manager 2016 management server hosting the HTML5 self-service portal
The required software and deployment guides of System Center Service Manager 2016 can be found at the following official Microsoft website:
We recommend using the online Microsoft resource due to the frequency of updates to the products' supported requirements.
The target audience of this book is SCSM administrators and process owners responsible for implementing ITSM processes in the scope of the product. The recipes in this book range from beginner-level to expert-level SCSM administration expertise. The ultimate goal is to provide you with knowledge to enhance your existing skills and, more importantly, to share real-world experience from seasoned technology implementers.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The old work items in the working database (the database name is ServiceManager by default) slows down the console and provides a negative experience for the service management team."
A block of code is set as follows:
$date = $date.ToString("dd.MM.yyyy") # 24.09.2016Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Select Work Items | Review and adjust retention times (in days) to reflect how long the items should be kept in the SCSM database."
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