What Is Server Manager?

Server Manager is the primary graphical management console built into Windows Server 2022. It provides a single pane of glass for installing and removing roles and features, managing multiple remote servers, reviewing event log alerts, monitoring service status, and running the Best Practices Analyzer. It opens automatically after login by default and can also be launched from the Start menu or by running servermanager.exe from an elevated command prompt.

The interface is divided into a left-side navigation tree and a central dashboard. The dashboard greets you with coloured tiles for each installed role — green means healthy, red or yellow signals warnings or errors that need attention. For a freshly installed server with no roles, the dashboard shows only a welcome tile and the local server properties pane.

The Dashboard Overview

The Dashboard is your real-time health summary. Each role tile shows a count of events, services, BPA results, and performance warnings in the last 24 hours. Clicking a tile takes you to the role-specific page where you can drill down into individual servers. In the top-right corner, the Manage menu gives access to adding/removing roles, while the Tools menu exposes administrative consoles for every installed role — Active Directory Users and Computers, DNS Manager, DHCP, and so on.

The Local Server node in the left pane shows the configuration of the machine running Server Manager: computer name, workgroup or domain, Remote Management status, Windows Update settings, NIC teaming, Windows Firewall state, and more. Many of these items are clickable hyperlinks that open the relevant configuration dialog directly, saving time over hunting through Control Panel.

Adding Roles and Features via the GUI

To install a new role, click Manage → Add Roles and Features. The Add Roles and Features Wizard opens with five stages:

Installation Type — choose Role-based or feature-based installation for standard single-server installs, or Remote Desktop Services installation for RDS-specific scenario-based deployment.

Server Selection — pick the destination server from the server pool. This can be the local machine or any remote server you have added to Server Manager (covered below).

Server Roles — a scrollable list of all available roles. Tick the checkbox next to the role you want. When you add a role that has mandatory dependencies, a pop-up appears listing those features; click Add Features to accept them. Common roles you will install here include Active Directory Domain Services, DNS Server, DHCP Server, File and Storage Services, Hyper-V, IIS (Web Server), and Remote Desktop Services.

Features — optional standalone features not tied to a specific role, such as .NET Framework, MPIO, Windows Server Backup, Telnet Client, SNMP Service, and Windows PowerShell Web Access.

Confirmation — review the list of items to be installed. Tick Restart the destination server automatically if required if you want the server to reboot without prompting when a role needs it. Click Install to begin. Progress is shown in real time; you can close the wizard while installation continues in the background and check status via the notification flag in the Server Manager toolbar.

Removing Roles and Features

Removing roles follows an almost identical path. Click Manage → Remove Roles and Features. The same wizard appears but with checkboxes pre-selected based on what is currently installed. Untick the role or feature you want to remove. Server Manager will warn you if other installed roles depend on what you are removing — for example, removing the File Server role while Distributed File System (DFS) is installed will prompt you to also remove DFS.

Some roles require you to demote or decommission services before removal. For instance, Active Directory Domain Services cannot be removed while the server still holds the AD DS role in a functioning domain — you must run the AD DS configuration wizard to demote the server from being a domain controller first, then remove the role binaries.

Adding Remote Servers to Server Manager

One of the most valuable features of Server Manager is centralized management of remote servers without having to RDP into each one. To add a remote server to your Server Manager console:

Click Manage → Add Servers. In the dialog that appears, you can search for servers in three ways: Active Directory lookup (requires domain membership), DNS lookup by hostname, or direct IP address import. Select the servers you want, click the arrow to move them to the selected list, and click OK.

For remote management to work, the following must be true on each remote server:

# On the remote server — enable remote management
Configure-SMRemoting.exe -Enable

# Or via PowerShell
Enable-PSRemoting -Force

# Ensure Windows Remote Management service is running
Set-Service -Name WinRM -StartupType Automatic
Start-Service -Name WinRM

If the remote server is in a workgroup (not domain-joined), you must also add it to the TrustedHosts list on the managing server:

Set-Item WSMan:localhostClientTrustedHosts -Value "192.168.1.50" -Concatenate -Force

Once added, remote servers appear under the All Servers node and under each applicable role node. If a server shows as Online – Access denied, your credentials do not have administrative access to that machine. Right-click the server and choose Manage As to supply alternate credentials.

Creating and Managing Server Groups

When managing a large estate, grouping servers by function makes the dashboard cleaner and more actionable. Click Manage → Create Server Group. Give the group a meaningful name such as “Web Servers”, “SQL Cluster”, or “Branch DC”. Select servers from the All Servers list and add them to the group. Once created, the group appears in the left navigation pane and has its own tile on the dashboard.

Each group page shows aggregated events, services, and BPA results for all servers in that group. You can remotely start, stop, and restart services on any server in a group directly from the Services tile without opening a separate console. Right-click any server in the list for options including Computer Management, Remote Desktop, and PowerShell connections.

Best Practices Analyzer

The Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) scans installed roles against a database of Microsoft-recommended configuration rules and flags deviations as errors, warnings, or informational items. It does not fix problems automatically — it tells you what is wrong and provides guidance on remediation.

To run a BPA scan, navigate to a role page (e.g., File and Storage Services), scroll down to the Best Practices Analyzer tile, and click the Tasks dropdown → Start BPA Scan. Results appear in the tile after the scan completes. Each result links to the specific configuration item that needs attention.

You can also run BPA scans from PowerShell, which is useful for automation or scanning remote servers:

# List all available BPA models
Get-BpaModel

# Run a scan for the DNS Server role
Invoke-BpaModel -ModelId Microsoft/Windows/DNSServer

# Get the results
Get-BpaResult -ModelId Microsoft/Windows/DNSServer | Where-Object Severity -eq "Error"

Alerts, Events, and the Events Tile

The Events tile on each role and server group page shows a filtered view of the Windows event logs from all servers in that context — by default showing errors and warnings from the last 24 hours. Click the tile header to see a full list. You can filter by event level, event ID, log name, and time range. Each event entry shows the server it came from, the log, the event ID, the time, and the first line of the description.

Double-clicking an event opens a detail pane with the full description, which is often sufficient to diagnose the problem without opening Event Viewer separately. For deeper investigation, right-click any event and choose Open Event Viewer to jump directly to that event in the classic Event Viewer console on the appropriate server.

Deploying Roles Across Multiple Servers

The Add Roles and Features Wizard supports deploying to multiple servers in sequence, but if you need to install the same role on many servers simultaneously, PowerShell remoting is far more efficient:

$servers = @("SRV01", "SRV02", "SRV03")

Invoke-Command -ComputerName $servers -ScriptBlock {
    Install-WindowsFeature -Name Web-Server -IncludeManagementTools -IncludeAllSubFeature
}

# Verify installation on all servers
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $servers -ScriptBlock {
    Get-WindowsFeature -Name Web-Server | Select-Object Name, Installed, DisplayName
}

After a remote role installation completes, Server Manager will automatically pick up the new role on those servers and add the appropriate role tile to the dashboard. Server Manager is ultimately a graphical front-end for the same underlying WMI and PowerShell providers, so changes made via PowerShell remoting are fully reflected in the GUI without needing to refresh manually.