Transition to proactive management of IT services

Monitor the health of distributed applications down to the hardware

Synthetic transactions to monitor performance

New service-oriented views, dashboards, and reports

Easy-to-use templates and Service Designer for creating service-oriented management packs

Third-party management packs for network infrastructure and other applications and platforms

Management packs that include Microsoft expertise for over 50 applications, servers, and clients

Proactive problem management of crash and hang data via Windows Error Reporting

Client utilization, reliability, and error monitoring of Windows Vista, Windows XP, and the Office suite

Audit collection service efficiently archives security event logs

Role-based security for secure delegation of access to information

Aggregate monitoring of client systems to focus on high-impact issues

Self-monitoring of servers, database, agents, and connectivity

Leverages Windows Server and SQL Server 2005 clustering and agent failover for high reliability

Certificate-based authentication and encryption is supported across Active Directory trust boundaries

Leverages Active Directory for discovery and agent configuration

Automatically discover and deploy monitoring policies for new systems and applications

New self-tuning thresholds adjust alerting to business usage patterns

Easier to use, customize, and author reports

Understand and easily locate information with overview pages and integrated search

Microsoft Update for downloading server and agent updates