System Center Essentials (SCE) was a system management product from

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targeting

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

systems for small and medium size businesses. The product allows monitoring and alert resolution of server and client

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s, applications, hardware, and network devices. Many Microsoft server products, such as

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Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a proprietary relational database management system developed by Microsoft using Structured Query Language (SQL, often pronounced "sequel"). As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of ...

, and

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the relat ...

, can be monitored with SCE. SCE can manage up to 500 Windows clients and 50 servers. Microsoft has made the decision not to deliver any further full version releases of System Center Essentials.

Central concepts

The basic idea is to place a piece of software, an ''agent'', on the computer to be monitored. The agent watches several sources on that computer, including the Windows Event Log, for specific events or ''alerts'' generated by the applications executing on the monitored computer. Upon alert occurrence and detection, the agent forwards the alert to the SCE server. This SCE server application maintains a database that includes a history of alerts. The SCE server applies filtering rules to alerts as they arrive; a rule can trigger some notification to a human, such as an e-mail or a pager message, or trigger some other workflow intended to correct the cause of the alert in an appropriate manner. SCE uses the term ''management pack'' to refer to a set of filtering rules specific to some monitored application. While Microsoft and other software vendors make management packages available for their products, SCE also provides for authoring custom management packs. While an administrator role is needed to install agents, configure monitored computers and create management packs, rights to simply view the list of recent alerts can be given to any valid user account.

Versions

* System Center Essentials 2007 * System Center Essentials 2010

References

{{Reflist

External links

Getting Started with System Center Essentials 2007
at

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System Center Essentials 2010 software

Central concepts

Versions

See also

References

External links