Using Server Manager as a quick monitoring tool

Sometimes, change is difficult for old-school IT guys. You know, the ones who prefer keyboards over mice and command lines over graphical interfaces. Starting in Server 2012, Server Manager changed a lot. I found at that time that many admins automatically disliked it, even before they started using it. It looks cloudy and full of links to click on rather than applications. It's certainly more of a web app interface than the Server Manager we are used to. And the Windows Admin Center that we touched on in earlier chapters of this book – that's a literal web page!

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 into a server. No, it's not just there to annoy you.

Getting ready

All we need is Windows Server 2019 or a Windows 10...