Integration with Service Manager

by Contributed | Dec 13, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

<Posting on behalf of Cireson>

Cireson has been innovating in the System Center community for almost a decade. First starting with extending System Center Service Manager by bringing the best features to the web and by adding capabilities requested by the community. The result of that innovation is the most cohesive ITSM and ITAM experience on the market with no plans for slowing down heading into 2021.  

By offering apps and integrations to organizations of every System Center shape and size. Our main goal is to help our customers achieve more with System Center Service Manager.

Try Our Apps for Free 

For starters, those who work in the Service Manager console can take advantage of some of our free tools such as: 

• Advanced Send Email a console task on Work Items that provides Analysts a way to send email on Work Items right to their Affected Users 

• Auto Close helps simplify this ITIL process by providing Administrators a streamlined way to automatically move Work Items to a Closed status, set their Implementation Results on compatible Work Items and keep your Service Manager environment lean and in shape 


• Notify Analyst removes the need to configure notification subscriptions and edit management packs by providing a simple interface to choose when to notify Analysts of Assignment Changes, and Analysts + End Users when Action Logs are updated.

Upgrade for Maximum Power 

But for those looking to radically transform their organizations with System Center, Cireson also offers solutions that improve end user satisfaction, simplify automation efforts, and lastly unite your ITSM/ITAM practices in Service Manager. 

• PowerShell Activity lets you run your own PowerShell, call any module, and run with any of your Run as Accounts directly within the context of Service Requests or Change Requests. No external automation tools required! 


• Asset Management enables you to pull System Center inventory up into Hardware and Software Assets to track them across your organization. Not to mention the ability to manage Vendors, Financial information, Warranty, and full Asset Lifecycle management. Coupled with our Custom Asset Import Connectors you can also tap into other non-System Center data sources within your environment to further shape your data 


• Service Manger Portal provides support for full ITIL Work Item management for Analysts, Improved Request Offering experience for End Users, SQL/OData Dashboards for reporting, and Global Search which provides the ability to search across the entire System Center stack. With the Cireson Service Manager Portal, you can wield the power of a unified data center through a single web interface 

 Service Manager Portal

Bring SCSM into Microsoft Teams 

And now you can take your Service Manager investments even further into Azure. Bring the collaboration of Microsoft 365 and Teams to the heart of System Center with integration for Service Manager! 

Cireson has recently announced the availability of Work and Configuration Item management directly from Microsoft Teams. Offering employees at every level of your organization the ability to work with Service Manager in a wholly new way through a familiar Teams chat experience. 

With Support Bot for Teams, you can: 

• Search for Work Items like Incidents, Problems, or Change Requests from chat 


• Find any Configuration Items that syncs in from Active Directory, Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, or custom ones that exist in Service Manager 

• Return search results that auto-expand as feature rich Teams cards 


• Turn any message from any conversation into a Comment on a Work Item 


• Customize notifications you receive through the Cireson Service Manager portal 


• Theme and brand the bot to your organization’s needs

Chat with Support Bot

Chat with Support Bot

Support Bot is just one of our many integrations to SCSM that is driven by our community that customers and non-customers alike can participate in. Connect with peers, get expert advice, or even inspiration for your next piece of automation over at https://community.cireson.com/.

To learn more about our full suite of apps or if you want to see the Cireson Portal for System Center Service Manager in action, drop us a line at team@cireson.com.

What's new: Improvements to the Log Analytics Agent

by Contributed | Dec 13, 2020 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This installment is part of a broader series to keep you up to date with the latest features in Azure Sentinel. The installments will be bite-sized to enable you to easily digest the new content. 

Note: The Log Analytics agent is sometimes referred to as the OMS Agent or the Microsoft Monitoring Agent (MMA). 

We’ve made some improvements to the Log Analytics agent that will make it even easier and flexible for you to use across a wider range of platforms. 

If you’re unfamiliar with this product, the Azure Log Analytics agent collects telemetry from Windows and Linux virtual machines in any cloud, on-premises machines, and those monitored by System Center Operations Manager and sends it collected data to your Log Analytics workspace. You can read more about it here. You can also read the release notes for the agent here.

In Azure Sentinel, it can be used to facilitate the sending of the following events to your workspace: 

• Windows Security events 


• Syslog 


• Common Event Format (CEF) logs 


• Windows Firewall logs


• DNS logs


• IIS logs


• Network connections

Support for new operating systems 

The Log Analytics agent can now be installed on an even wider range of Linux distros. We recently added support for: 

• CentOS 8 


• RedHat 8 


• SUSE Linux 15 

Click here to see the full list of supported OSs.

Support for Python 3 

Probably even more anticipated then our expanded OS support, we are happy to announce that starting from Agent version 1.13.27, the Linux Log Analytics Agent will support both Python 2 and 3. This means that customers now have the option to use whatever Python version they prefer (or whatever comes by default on their machine). This works both for a direct install of the agent and when installing as part of the CEF log forwarder.

Get started today! 

Try out the new connector and let us know your feedback using any of the channels listed in the Resources. 

You can also contribute new connectors, workbooks, analytics and more in Azure Sentinel. Get started now by joining the Azure Sentinel Threat Hunters GitHub community and follow the guidance. 

With thanks to @Jeremy Tan, @Chi_Nguyen and @Ofer_Shezaf for their inputs on this blog post.