There's a lot of buzz in the System Center community about the upcoming Services Provider Management Pack. Essentially, this Management Pack lets you "manage" a downstream System Center Essentials environment at a customer site from an upstream Operations Manager 2007 environment at a NOC. This solution is being developed for Managed Services Providers who want to deliver their customers a "hosted" monitoring offering. The SC Essentials environment at the customer site can be used in "headless mode" (eg: the customer network admin does not use the software at all) or in "full mode" (eg: the netadmin uses the SC Essentials console also, performing his or her daily tasks).

The only steps that are required to get it working is both the SC Operations Manager 2007 NOC installation and an approved SC Essentials installation along with the Services Provider MP. The Services Provider MP should be imported in the OpsMgr environment, allowing the MSP to enable extra state views (on their customers and partners) and allowing proper identifcation (and separation) of the SC Essentials site. The MP also delivers a wizard which can be run on the SC Essentials environment to "convert" it to a Services Provider mode, essentially letting it act as a OpsMgr gateway server. Only two outbound TCP ports are required at the customer site for communication: 443 (SSL, for certificate based authentication) and 5723 (OpsMgr).