System Center Advisor is a cloud-based service that collects data from computers and generates alerts based on that data. For example, System Center Advisor can generate alerts about missing security updates, or where the configuration of a computer deviates substantially from best practice. The knowledge used to raise these advisory alerts comes from Microsoft’s engineering support team, and reflects direct customer experiences running the products in production environments.
System Center Advisor includes the Advisor web service, hosted in Microsoft’s cloud, an on premise gateway, and one or more agents, which you deploy to computers in your environment. The agent functions in a way that is similar to the Operations Manager agent. By connecting to the web portal, you can view alerts and advise on how to remediate those issues. Figure 1 shows a typical System Center Advisor deployment, with agents installed on local computers communicating with a gateway, that forwards collected data that is stored and analyzed in the cloud.
FIGURE 1 System Center Advisor
