Microsoft recently announced it will deprecate System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Management Packs (MPs) for SQL Server Reporting Services, Power BI Report Server,and SQL Server Analysis Services.

While this affects a relatively small subset of SQL Server users, the move could force some organisations into monitoring solutions that expose their server deployments to Microsoft’s licensing auditors, one analyst pointed out.

The affected SCOM management packs will remain available until January 2027, after which they’ll no longer be supported. “No new updates will be released, including no support for SQL Server 2025 or SCOM 2025,” the notice said.

Microsoft said the products would no longer have official SCOM MPs for these products.

SCOM is a popular management tool for Microsoft on-premises server product, supporting not just SQL Server, but also Exchange, Windows and SharePoint to manage updates, security changes, and patches.

Microsoft said the deprecation means existing management packs would continue to function in SCOM 2019 and SCOM 2022, but no new features, fixes, or security updates would be provided. And compatibility with later versions can not be guaranteed.

The software giant recommended affected users plan their migration to Azure-based monitoring solutions using Azure Monitor, Azure Arc and Log Analytics. This creates “a unified alternative that offers centralised telemetry ingestion, alerting, performance monitoring, and dashboarding for hybrid and on‑premises environments,” the vendor claimed.

Andrew Snodgrass, analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said the Windows giant had ignored SCOM for a while, and he was advising clients to move away from it.

“Find a third party if you want to stay on-prem, but Microsoft’s gonna start slowly killing this thing off the way they do”. With the alternative, customers can no longer download updates directly; they can only do it through Azure Arc, and in the process, they have to register their on-prem servers in Azure.

Snodgrass said the Azure monitoring platform offered some “really cool stuff” for managing a SQL Server estate, especially hybrid users.

“What it requires is that – quite reasonably – you install an agent on your physical server or on your virtual server, whether that’s in AWS, Azure or on-prem. This is the Azure Arc monitoring agent that is going to run locally, and it’s going to connect up to Azure,” he said.

From a management point of view it works well, added Snodgrass, because admins can use a single Azure SQL management system and see all the servers and databases, regardless of their environment.

“But those who don’t want to use Azure, or want to remain on-prem, will need to find an alternative local third-party management tool. SQL Server has been out for decades, so there’s some really lovely management tools. There are also a few that will also manage your Windows Server and your Exchange servers as well.”

Although Microsoft has given no indication that the data could be used for anything other than software management, users should be aware that there is the potential for implications when it comes to license management.

“If you use the Azure SQL to manage all of these deployments, wherever they are, whether they’re on prem or in AWS or Azure, then you’re registering every one of your SQL Servers with Azure. That list is going to be out. Doesn’t mean that Microsoft necessarily would, but if an audit comes along, they certainly could go out there and say, ‘You know what, you’ve got this whole list here, and we look at the license count that you bought from us, and you don’t have enough licenses to cover all these servers you’ve deployed’,” he said.

Organisations deliberately using unlicensed software do not have much of a defence, but there are grey areas, such as downloading SQL Server for software development using a Visual Studio license.

“If I were monitoring and managing all this stuff through the Azure tools, it can’t delineate between production and development, and it would assume that all for those are production machines, and therefore I should buy licenses for them.”

Snodgrass advises clients to get a clear picture of the number of SQL Servers in production and those used for development before negotiating with Microsoft over licenses.

Microsoft is continuing its push to make Teams more attractive for enterprise customers, and the company has now confirmed a major licensing change that unlocks several premium-style features for more users.

After adding Brand Impersonation Protection for voice calls, Microsoft is rolling out broader updates to Teams licensing that significantly expand access to modern collaboration tools.

According to the Microsoft Teams Blog, Microsoft is updating its licensing model so that Teams Enterprise customers can use advanced features that previously required a Teams Premium subscription.

Microsoft has teased what it’s calling “a new class” of AI agents “that operate as independent users within the enterprise workforce.”

“Each embodied agent has its own identity, dedicated access to organisational systems and applications, and the ability to collaborate with humans and other agents,” states a Microsoft product roadmap document. “These agents can attend meetings, edit documents, communicate via email and chat, and perform tasks autonomously.”

Redmond will sell these “agentic users” in the “M365 Agent Store” and make them discoverable in its Teams collaborationware tools.

Microsoft licensing specialist Rich Gibbons says he’s seen additional documentation provided to M365 admins that mentions a license called “A365” – he thinks that’s a reference to a product called “Agent 365” – and which states that “Admins assign the required A365 license at the time of approval. No additional Microsoft 365 or Teams license is required.”

A Microsoft MVP named João Ferreira appears to have seen the same document, and also mentioned the A365 license and shared a screenshot of an Agent 365 management page.

Ferreira says agents will have their own email address, Teams account, an entry in enterprise directories (either Entra ID or Azure AD), and even a place on the org chart.

“They can participate in meetings, send and receive emails and chats, access enterprise data, and learn from interactions to improve over time,” he wrote.

Microsoft’s documents suggest the agents will debut later in November. As the software giant’s annual “Ignite” conference kicks off next week, it is fancied that they may be one of the things Microsoft announces at the event. Ferreira said Microsoft will stage a “targeted release” of A365.

Whenever it announces this offering, Redmond will doubtless make breathlessly optimistic pronouncements about their ability to improve productivity and profitability.

Gibbons has looked past that and tried to guess what they’ll cost to run.

“Microsoft recently launched the Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plan (P3),” he wrote, noting that its base tier offers customers the chance to buy 300,000 credits. He says the software behemoth is “moving more and more to a consumption based pricing model, which is inherently much harder to forecast for customer organisations. Here, where we’re going to have AI agents doings things off their own back – how are you supposed to predict usage/consumption in those scenarios?!”

“As well as the licensing and cost concerns, I am also wondering how an organisation manages these agents,” he added. “If they can join meeting and send emails/messages to people – what happens if they go rogue? It could be sending sensitive data to the wrong people, providing incorrect information, or it could be sending strange or offensive messages…how is that to be prevented, monitored, and acted upon?”