Principal ICT Architect with 501-1,000 employees
Ensure you have processes and technical resources in place to address issues.
What is most valuable?
It would have to be the ability to monitor services, devices, and operations for many devices from a single console leveraging a wide variety of Management Packs available.
How has it helped my organization?
Ability for support staff to know when there is a problem, identify where the problem is, and figure out what is causing the problem, ideally before the users of the applications encounter the problems.
What needs improvement?
If it could have SysLog capabilities and if the Microsoft Management Packs were out of the box instead of a separate download.
For how long have I used the solution?
Our current project is still ongoing, its been at least 7 years.
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SCOM
March 2025

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What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Yes, but only if you decide to integrate ACS with OpsMgr. Then storage could become an issue depending on where the customer believes the security logs must come from.
How are customer service and support?
If you have Microsoft Premier Support, then all is well.
What other advice do I have?
Understand what is critical in your environment first and what needs to be monitored.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Valuable features include availability and dashboards but reports need to be improved
What is most valuable?
Availability, Performance and Application Monitoring, Dashboards.
How has it helped my organization?
We were supporting a bank infrastructure using SCOM, and their application availability improved a lot as we had the real time monitoring of the applications due to which application issues were fixed before the end user comes up and complains.
What needs improvement?
Too small of a scope in reports, need to improve a lot.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
No, we have been using SCOM only as it has given satisfactory results.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup is quite simple, you need to be aware of the prerequisites which are required to start the deployment.
Deployment is straightforward as we have the application installer available, whenever any failure is there, resolution is shown along with the results.
The sizing tool is always available whenever planing for the hardware recommendations.
What about the implementation team?
Most of the time we implement in house and reach out to experts in our organization in case any assistance is required.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Please go through the documentation once, which is available on the Microsoft Website- Technet to understand what SCOM actually is. It looks like a single console, but very deep and interesting to learn. You can end up becoming SCOM Admin, SCOM MP Author etc. Go for virtual labs before implementing SCOM which are available on Microsoft technet.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
There were many- IBM Tivoli, CA products, but the best came out to be SCOM for a number of reasons.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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Updated: March 2025
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