Exchange monitoring has changed significantly in Exchange 2013. The new Managed Availability service performs numerous health assessments for every server, periodically testing multiple components to establish their viability and determine the health of the components or the entire server. When an issue is detected, a multistep process is initiated and corrective actions are performed to try and bring the server back into an operational state. If Managed Availability is not able to return the server into a healthy state, then it alerts the administrators.
Managed Availability focuses on the experience of end users to guarantee that if issues occur, the user experience is impacted as minimally as possible, if at all.
While SCOM is passive only and requires human intervention, Managed Availability is fully automated, with both being customizable. One of the key differences between the two is not the monitoring itself but the automated actions.
In the next and final chapter, we will explore...