System Center, which is licensed either individually or as a bundled suite, is a series of tools that help organizations manage their servers, client systems, and applications to be more proactive in responding to the needs of the IT data center.

For years, IT departments have struggled with managing their servers and client systems, and hundreds of companies have provided tools for patching computer systems, imaging workstations, pushing out new software, monitoring servers and network devices, and backing up systems. However, over the years, organizations have found that each individual product would require a separate server, a separate set of policies or rules setup, a separate agent to be installed on the computer system, and a separate set of tasks to inventory the systems all doing similar jobs. With several different products installed on a system and no real sharing of information between the management agents and tools, enterprise systems management has been quite a clumsy process.

With System Center, you have access to a unified management platform across on-premise, service provider, and Microsoft Azure environments, enabling the Microsoft Cloud OS. Features span across infrastructure provisioning and monitoring, application performance monitoring, automation and self-service, and IT service management.