I blogged earlier this year about a great post describing how the Microsoft AD team was re-engineering the AD management packs. Well, after many months, the mps have been delivered! Even better, they include 2012 and 2016. There are a ton of changes in the new management packs which Kevin Holman covers here. See here for a great behind the scenes description of the changes and process from earlier this year.
Exciting stuff!
A few weeks ago Microsoft released Visual Studio Authoring Extensions for Visual Studio 2015. I personally ran into the issue where VSAE was not compatible with the version of Visual Studio 2015 installed on my device, so this is great news!
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30169
UPDATE: (12/14/2015): Version 6.6.4.0 has now been released and is the current version.
UPDATE (11/12/2015): Version 6.6.3.0 which includes a fix for the issue mentioned below has been released. Please see Released: System Center Management Pack for SQL Server and Replication (6.6.3.0) for more information.
Microsoft has posted a mitigation as a workaround to resolve issues caused by importing the new SQL management pack (version 6.2.2.0). As stated in the SQL Release Services blog, the management pack has been removed for download and will be re-released once the issue is resolved.
The new SQL Management Pack has been released, and by far the biggest change that I have noticed is visualization aspects. The OOB Database Instance and Database dashboards are GONE. These dashboards have been replaced by a SQL Server x Summary Dashboard and the Datacenter Dashboard and Instance View Dashboards, both of which I will detail below.
You can download the new management pack here.
