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Role of System Center Datacenter Edition vs TFS 2017 for Operations Use

How do TFS and System Center work together? These appear to be from different product silos in Microsoft. For an organization trying to move into DevOps, how should responsibilities be divvied up between them?

Our ops team uses TFS RM to automate application deployments. Their scripts are source controlled in a separate TFS project where they control all their scripts and pair them to work items - including scripts not tied to a given application (e.g. AD management, etc.).

However, we are looking to roll out System Center Datacenter Edition to use the Operations Manager capability to provide monitoring across our entire environment. However, there is also a great deal of scripting, workflow, and automation processing available in some of the SC modules/solutions, including a built in ISE.

What should go in System Center and what should go in TFS? I'm not wild about the ops folks having to split their scripts, processes, and workflows between the systems. But I also don't see version control and history tracking features like TFS provides in System Center so I don't really like them moving everything to System Center. Plus, I don't see a way for TFS RM to easily pull a script out of System Center.

Solution

  • How do TFS and System Center work together? System Center which is basically a suite of products specifically aimed at corporate IT administrators, assisting them in managing Microsoft server and desktop infrastructure.

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    TFS does have a (Management Pack) which integrates TFS very nicely with System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).

    The Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2017 provides monitoring of Team Foundation Server 2017. It monitors TFS components such as application tier servers, data tier servers, and team project collections.

    So we can monitor TFS and report failures and even go as far as “escalating issues” to TFS in the form of work items. You could also use powershell script/TFS API to handle this, details please refer this blog: TFS Integration Pack and Scripting using PowerShell

    Another integration is around System Center Services Manager (SCSM), for this area, you could take a look at this nice article: Let’s Integrate System Center Service Manager and Team Foundation Server