Using Server Manager as a quick monitoring tool

Sometimes change is difficult for us old school IT guys. You know, the ones who prefer keyboards over mice and command lines over graphical interfaces. In Server 2012 and 2012 R2, Server Manager has changed, a lot. I find that many admins automatically dislike it, even before they have started using it. It looks "cloudy," full of links to click on rather than applications. Certainly more of a web app interface than the Server Manager we are used to.

Let's use this recipe to point out some of the important data that exists in Server Manager, and discover for ourselves that Microsoft may actually have a valid point in causing it to open automatically every time that you log in to a server. No, it's not just there to annoy you.

Getting ready

All we need is a Windows Server 2012 R2 in order to poke around in Server Manager. The server we are using is domain joined with a few roles installed so that we can get a better feel for the layout of data on...