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Mohammed Badowi - PeerSpot reviewer
IT system manager at NBO
Real User
Feature rich, scalable and user-friendly, but open-source products are free and do the same thing
Pros and Cons
  • "It is a user-friendly product that requires almost no maintenance."
  • "It would be a much better product if Microsoft provided management packs with the product."

What is our primary use case?

We are using SCOM for service monitoring integrated with some third-party dashboard. It is our end-to-end service monitoring solution.  

What is most valuable?

The feature I like most about SCOM is that it is easy-to-use. I find it very user-friendly. I also like the knowledge base which it has. You can find the resolution to questions or issues directly within the SCOM itself. It will alert you with a recommendation of what you need to do at the same time. This sort of self-diagnosis or prompting is one of the great values you get from SCOM compared to other solutions.  

What needs improvement?

The dashboard is one place where the product can be improved. We finally needed to get a customized dashboard from the NOC (Network Operation Center) team. The dashboard that was included with the product just did not do what we wanted it to do.  

I am not sure, exactly, what should be included with future releases. There are already a lot of features there in the product. The main thing I can suggest is that Microsoft also provides management packs for monitoring third-party products with the product. If that were included with SCOM, that would make the product even greater. For example, to monitor an Oracle database, you need to look around to get a management pack separately. It could just be included instead.  

You can monitor any non-Microsoft product with Microsoft SCOM if you have the management pack for that product. You need to purchase that management pack. You can get them sometimes from Microsoft and other times from the third-party vendor.  

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) from Microsoft for almost five years.  

Buyer's Guide
SCOM
December 2024
Learn what your peers think about SCOM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
829,634 professionals have used our research since 2012.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

From the time we did the configuration, the product has been stable. It may be different in other cases. It really depends on the design you implement. If you want to add functionality, you can add it. It depends on the business. If you want Apache or you want a singular-server implementation you configure it as you need to. If it is configured correctly it should remain stable.  

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

SCOM is scalable. We do not have an issue with the number of users or with the number of machines and the devices we are monitoring. It does not have any issues in that respect.  

We support the product with a system admin team which is the only group that deals with SCOM directly for maintenance issues. Right now, the team is only five people. Even there, these five people do not use the product on a daily basis. The configuration is something that you do one time if you do it correctly. There is monitoring, which is done by the NOC team and that is ongoing. 

In case some maintenance is required like a change in business requirements or addition of services, then the SCOM team will do it. This does not happen all the time. But monitoring is done by another team separate from the maintenance.  

How are customer service and support?

We have not had to use the Microsoft support since maybe four or five years ago. It was during the time we were doing the implementation. We had a few calls with them — maybe two or three calls — for some configuration-related questions. That was all. It was handled efficiently and we got the answers we needed. But we have not had to use the support team since.  

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have had the opportunity to use other products in this category. Not at the current organization, but in other organizations before this. One was WhatsUp Gold. If I were to compare these two solutions, SCOM has more advantages and is really the better product.  

How was the initial setup?

It is actually pretty simple to do the setup. I think it really can be implemented on the same day that you get it. You can do the complete installation and configuration in one day.  

But adding services, that takes time. It depends on the business and your scope, what you need to add, what you need to configure when it is added. I consider that as a separate part because it is not the fault of the product that you have additional requirements. The additions made for service monitoring depends on the customer, the requirements that they have, and what they need to add.  

What about the implementation team?

The installation was done by our company with an in-house team. We did not need help from the vendor or an integrator except for some basic questions.  

We do maintenance as required also in-house and we handle the upgrades from one version to another version. All those maintenance details are managed by the system admin team.  

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

If you compare the pricing of SCOM to some solutions now available — like ManageEngine — I think it is a bit more expensive. But at that price, you get more in Microsoft System Center. SCOM is a bundled product, it is not only SCOM. You get a complete suite of Microsoft System Center products. There are five products in the bundle. There are no additional costs for SCOM itself and everything is included in the license. The only additional costs that you may have is in getting management packs.  

On the other hand, open-source solutions are available that are mature or maturing and they are very good. They may pose a better solution because they are free.  

What other advice do I have?

My advice to people who are looking for a solution like SCOM would actually be to advise them to move from licensed software to open-source. You can go to Nagios or most other open-source products and they do the same thing as SCOM. There is no need to pay additional money to get the same services.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SCOM as a seven-out-of-ten. It is a good product, but so are the free open-source products it competes with.  

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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    Amar Sharma - PeerSpot reviewer
    Monitoring Systems Engineer at Monster Worldwide
    Real User
    Helpful in monitoring web servers, database servers and alerts
    Pros and Cons
    • "The ease of deployment, especially on Windows platforms, is valuable."
    • "The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."

    What is our primary use case?

    It is used for monitoring on-premises servers, and we deploy it on-premises.

    How has it helped my organization?

    The solution helped monitor web servers, database servers and alerting, which is very useful.

    What is most valuable?

    The ease of deployment, especially on Windows platforms, is valuable.

    What needs improvement?

    The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage. Currently, a lot of people do not use SCOM because it is limited to strictly being on-premises, and many organizations are moving to the cloud.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    We have been using the solution for approximately 11 years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    The solution is very stable.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    The solution is scalable. It has an excellent capacity to monitor 100 to 1,000 servers, based on how the SCOM servers are provisioned. You can easily scale up your monitoring capacity.

    How are customer service and support?

    I rate my experience with customer service and support a ten out of ten.

    How would you rate customer service and support?

    Positive

    How was the initial setup?

    The initial setup was straightforward, and only one person was required for deployment and maintenance.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We did not evaluate other options.

    What other advice do I have?

    I rate the solution a nine out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by adapting to a cloud environment. I advise users considering the solution to use it if they have on-premise servers and more of a Windows-based environment.

    Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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      Buyer's Guide
      SCOM
      December 2024
      Learn what your peers think about SCOM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2024.
      829,634 professionals have used our research since 2012.
      Hussein Taha - PeerSpot reviewer
      IT Enterprise System Administrator at Nafeza
      Real User
      We can monitor all the VMs in our environment and access full insight reports for all the VMs, but the solution is not stable
      Pros and Cons
      • "SCOM has helped us to monitor all the VMs in our environment, especially the Windows servers."
      • "The GI is difficult to work with and the reporting servers are also difficult."

      What is our primary use case?

      SCOM is used as a monitoring solution for managing Windows-based IT infrastructures within our organization.

      How has it helped my organization?

      SCOM has helped us to monitor all the VMs in our environment, especially the Windows servers. This is our scoop, we monitor all the VMs that have OS Windows servers. The best part of SCOM is that we have a major comeback with it and can apply something that could act as a counteraction. Once an action appears, there is a counteraction in order to avoid any interruption to the service. This is the best way the solution has improved our organization.

      What is most valuable?

      The solution provides a full insight report for all the VMs in our environment. SCOM also tells us whether the VMs are healthy or not, as well as provides brief information about the management console in each site and the agents under these management consoles.

      What needs improvement?

      There is no room for update or enhancement in SCOM because Microsoft has retired it as an on-prem solution and moved it to the cloud. The current version will be the last on-prem given Microsoft's push to move all their solutions to the cloud.

      The GI is difficult to work with and the reporting servers are also difficult. Another dimension that makes SCOM difficult is the number of components. The reporting server, the database, and the two components of the database (operational and warehouse) are all difficult to work with. This is why SCOM is a difficult solution to implement, configure, and troubleshoot.

      For how long have I used the solution?

      I have been using the solution for two years.

      What do I think about the stability of the solution?

      The solution is not very stable. Sometimes we find alerts in the event viewer that we don't understand. we have to spend hours trying to figure out what the events mean. Sometimes we have to request support from Microsoft engineers, who may take a long time to respond, and the case may take longer than expected to resolve.

      I give the stability a six out of ten.

      What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

      The solution is scalable. We currently have six members, but we should add management consultants depending on our workload. We need to go through the Microsoft documents first. We need to calculate and prepare for our Virtual Machine (VM). We need to identify the storage, memory, and CPUs for our VM. This is important because we don't want to lose our solution or have bad performance. A bad performance will affect our environment. We also need to make sure the latency is less than 12 milliseconds. This is important because the management console needs to communicate with the database. If the latency is more than 12 milliseconds, it will affect the outcome of these records and the management console will be unhealthy.

      Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

      Previously we used SIM by SolarWinds.

      How was the initial setup?

      The solution is difficult to implement and troubleshoot. Sometimes we need the prerequisites for a task, but we encounter issues that we don't understand or that are not reasonable.

      The first time we deployed the solution, there were three of us, but now that we have more experience, we can do it on our own without the requirement of additional people. 

      What about the implementation team?

      The implementation was completed in-house.

      What was our ROI?

      We have not seen a return on investment. We have a lot of latency issues with the solution that is related to the network coverage between the sites. We have ten data centers using a management console but our database is centralized in the capital of Cairo. 

      What other advice do I have?

      I give the solution a six out of ten.

      First-time users of SCOM need to be well prepared. There should not be too many management consoles. The SCOM gateway can be used as a way to transfer data to the management console, and the management console will have low latency so it can act as the management console for these sites. It will handle the queuing for the data through the centralized database. This is the best practice given to me by the Microsoft team because of an issue that occurred in our environment that took some time to be resolved.

      Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

      On-premises
      Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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        Trevor Watkins - PeerSpot reviewer
        Server Applications Senior Administrator at Home Hardware Stores Limited
        Real User
        Top 5
        Helps us monitor the health of our servers and has improved our ability to restart services
        Pros and Cons
        • "The solution has improved our overrides and the ability to start services if they're stopped."
        • "The price could be improved."

        What is our primary use case?

        Our primary use case for the solution is monitoring the health of our Windows servers. We deploy the solution on-premises.

        How has it helped my organization?

        The solution has improved our overrides and the ability to start services if they're stopped.

        For how long have I used the solution?

        We have been using the solution for approximately one year and currently using the latest version, SCOM 2022.

        What do I think about the stability of the solution?

        The solution is stable. I rate it a ten out of ten.

        What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

        The solution is scalable. I rate it a ten out of ten.

        How are customer service and support?

        We have had a good experience with customer service and support. I rate them a ten out of ten.

        How was the initial setup?

        The initial setup is straightforward.

        What was our ROI?

        We have not seen a return on investment.

        What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

        I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The price could be improved.

        What other advice do I have?

        I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I recommend it for users considering implementing it and advise them to do some research.

        Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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          AJITHH G - PeerSpot reviewer
          Solution Engineer at AppSmart
          Reseller
          Useful for monitoring, logging purposes, and mounting configurations
          Pros and Cons
          • "The monitoring features are the most valuable. We have seen a major benefit from that so far."
          • "There could be more integration of SIM in the solution."

          What is our primary use case?

          We mainly use SCOM for logging purposes and mounting configurations. It alerts us when any services have a problem. It really depends on the products that are being used in the backend. There are different kinds of virtual machines and different kinds of environments like VMware and Hyper-V.

          One customer deploys the solution on a hyper conversion input service, and two customers deploy the solution on-premises.

          The solution could be used in any sized company. It's been used in the manufacturing, IT, and telecom sectors.

          What is most valuable?

          The monitoring features are the most valuable. We have seen a major benefit from that so far.

          What needs improvement?

          There could be more integration of SIM in the solution.

          What do I think about the stability of the solution?

          The solution is stable.

          Previous versions were not very stable. There were some issues while we were configuring the hierarchy.

          What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

          The scalability is of medium difficulty.

          How are customer service and support?

          Overall, support is not great but it's not bad. Microsoft's standard support is good. Sometimes, there aren't specific engineers who can help us with SCOM when we have an issue. A knowledge-based environment would help us more.

          I would rate technical support 3.5 out of 5.

          Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

          We have also used ManageEngine OpManager to monitor the environment and Solar Wind. 

          They don't support integration of multiple products. Considering the stability and scalability, Microsoft is a better option. It depends on the use cases.

          How was the initial setup?

          I would rate the initial setup 4.5 out of 5.

          It's a complex process. When we deploy any other solution, it comes with a built-in SQL database. With SCOM, it was more of a complicated process.

          If it doesn't have a hierarchy, then it takes about one hour. It's a standard installation. If there are hierarchies, like multiple site deployments, then it would take about three to five hours.

          What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

          I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side.

          What other advice do I have?

          I would rate SCOM as 8 out of 10. 

          It depends on how the customer is using the product. My advice is that if you're interested in SCOM, you need to consider the environment, the business case, and what kind of business you are running.

          Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner

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            it_user937584 - PeerSpot reviewer
            Manager, Principle Systems Engineer and team lead at BCX
            Real User
            Best all-around, multi-features single interface, cross-platform monitoring solution for complex environment groupings
            Pros and Cons
            • "This is a product that does more generally than any of the competing solutions."
            • "It lacks certain details that other products do better, like granular access and better application monitoring."

            What is our primary use case?

            Our primary use case is to monitor the extensive system of services that we operate for clients.

            How has it helped my organization?

            SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) has helped improve our organization through reporting capabilities. The reporting is very good. We're an outsourcing company, so we provide services and manage service and as a service. We have a multi-service environment, so it is complicated to monitor and maintain. 

            The alerting with SCOM is incredible. The product works well with multiple environment integration, and if there is an issue, the system forwards alerts to different service desk systems so that the issues are handled appropriately. There are actually numerous things the solution does for our company to automate processes, and, to top it off, it's a stable application.

            I'm the operational manager for Business Connections Monitoring Toolsets. We do installations of this product. We do the configuration. We take care of changes in threshold if needed, and supply additional expertise for critical projects as needed. We monitor everything to be sure things continue to work optimally and do things like monitor hard drive space, etc.

            The integration with Power BI from the SCOM database offers incredible possibilities for enhancing user experience. That integration is added value to our services because of what it can do and what we can make it do for clients.

            People don't have to log on to the console to see what's going on. They get all the data through the integration between Power BI (Business Intelligence) and SCOM. It is extremely flexible and can be adjusted to meet specific operating criteria. 

            If I compare the SCOM solution with the CA UIM (CA Technologies Unified Infrastructure Management) products, the CA products are horrendous in comparison. It's not stable in the way that they do their aggregation and their roll-ups. Really the methodology doesn't make sense. SCOM handles these things without a problem.

            What is most valuable?

            Many of the features in the SCOM product have been valuable to us as an organization. Basically most of the main features like the alerting, the reporting, the discovery, the automation, the auto-discovery of products installed on a server and the grouping that it does automatically have all simplified the way we work. The automation in SCOM is incredible, and because I have some exposure now to other, similar products, I can make a good comparison between them. 

            The CA products — which is in direct competition with SCOM — is not as good at all. I also have exposure to SolarWinds and a local product here called Syntelligence. None of those products can touch SCOM as far as general versatility. It is just a far superior application for general monitoring.

            You can expand on the SCOM automation. But its power is more than just in the segment of automating things. If services stop, you can run recovery tasks and you can use disaster recovery scripts. That is just an example. There are numerous things that you can do with this product.

            There are so many features in SCOM it has possibilities that are essentially longer than your arms can reach. You can monitor third-party applications, you can monitor services, you can collect events and you can trigger reports and send alerts based on those events. It's integration capabilities are very good. For me, it is the ultimate unified solution. It is a very nice product and I love it because of the capabilities it provides. The unification of services makes it easier to deploy and maintain.

            What needs improvement?

            Even though I think there are ways that this product is superior to most other solutions on the market, there are quite a few things that it does not do alone. This is where the product can be improved. One of the facets is in network monitoring. In fact, it can use quite a lot of improvement in that area. That's where products — like CA Technologies Performance Manager — are much better. You can do a lot with it that you can not with the reporting in SCOM. However overall that CA product is not as well rounded and complete.

            The Scrum files that you set up can be made better. For example, you may want accounts that have access to the SCOM console to have more granular access. For example, you may have a situation where you prefer that only certain engineers will be able to add agents to the server — and only the server. But you can't set up the permissions that are this granular. Likewise, it may be that you want to assign someone the right to do threshold changes or to the environment of certain places of certain management groups. It is not part of the standard solution.

            With other monitoring tools, you have the ability to set the permissions granularly, which SCOM actually doesn't do. So I hope that they would add that feature and support granularity. There are other ways in which to do it, but if you can do it in the monitoring tool itself and in the administration, then it'll make things much easier and make it a far more complete, unified solution.

            One more thing would be better application monitoring. Products like AppDynamics do that very well and exceed the capabilities of SCOM. What I think I would like to see is for SCOM to be more of a complete end-to-end solution so there is no need to look to other solutions or work outside of the singular product. 

            For how long have I used the solution?

            I've been working with it since 2006 with different clients in different versions.

            What do I think about the stability of the solution?

            SCOM is stable. We have never had a problem with system stability.

            What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

            I think that SCOM is a very scalable solution. It depends on what hardware or virtual environment you're running on, but the scalability of SCOM is practically endless, I think. You can certainly go very far with it. 

            I know of a client in a banking institution that's working on 12,000 servers and their SCOM system is humming along without fail. So scalability on the environment of SCOM itself is very good, or at least it has proven to be scalable in that instance. 

            How are customer service and technical support?

            Technical support from Microsoft for SCOM is always excellent. 

            By comparison, I've been fighting with CA Technologies and how they do things. It is not the same kind of experience. If you log requests for technical support to tell them what the problem is, they ask a few questions in the investigation. You supply them with the information and from there on you do not know the response time. Depending on the severity of the issue you report on the call, it will be handled more quickly. If it's urgent, then they react very quickly. If it is not urgent, it is not quick even if the answer is simple.

            What I like about the SCOM technical support is that they tell you what causes the issue when they find the resolution. They give you a report, they tell you what caused it and what the solution is. That helps make the solution make sense and maybe can help avoid other issues in the future.

            Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

            We actually have not switched to this solution from another as we are evaluating and using several at the same time. We have used SolarWinds and then there's a new product called eSight that we have to use. The latter product is from Huawei and it is their monitoring tool for their network equipment. We basically were forced to start to support it because of client need. So there are four products that we supporting in our server for various reasons. 

            But if I have to choose any one product for server monitoring to take care of all aspects of monitoring out of the box, SCOM is number one. That is it can do application monitoring, like SQL Server Stack Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, third party stats, VMware or VLAN — you name it. It's really an excellent product.

            So that is why my number one choice is SCOM. Put simply, it is the most complete.

            How was the initial setup?

            The installation of the product was the easiest thing about using it. If you just follow the instructions and do exactly what it tells you, you don't have to be a trained network surgeon to do it. You can teach a seven-year-old to do the installation. If you can read, you can do the installation. It's really that easy. 

            Managing the system depends on the size of the environment for the most part, but I think it depends on the environment and the client as well. When their needs are more demanding or specialized the work will be harder. We've got a client that's got nearly 2,000 servers and they have only one engineer working on the entire thing. There is no need for additional personnel.

            What about the implementation team?

            We work on our own systems and installations.

            Which other solutions did I evaluate?

            We, as a company, are using four products for monitoring, one of which is SCOM. We use multiple products because we are an outsourcing company and not everyone needs or wants the same thing. The other products are from CA Technologies. That is Performance Management, NFA, and UIM Unified Integration Management. These products just enhance the options we have to service our clients.

            What other advice do I have?

            As far as meeting our needs for a solution, I give it a nine out of ten. But it is interesting to rate the tool. My rating doesn't really have a context. It is mostly engineers that are using the product. In a sense, it doesn't matter what monitoring tool you use, the success of a monitoring tool is dependent on the engineers using it. The engineer has to make it work.

            I'm really not aware of the total number of users that we service and with SCOM I don't really need to know. I don't know much about the actual numbers except that we've got 28 clients. Each of the 28 clients has a different number of employees and different engineers that are working on different environments to solve different issues. If I had to guess, I'd say there are really only 100 to 120 only. I wish it was more, and I think we can easily scale to meet additional demand. But the point is that we are responsible for monitoring and identifying issues in a variety of environments, and that is exactly what SCOM helps us do, with efficiency.

            We basically use everything we can that is included in the package and have found a real use for every module that's available. That said, we don't do a lot of network monitoring. Server monitoring, absolutely. That we use extensively. Reporting, we use a lot, event collections we use quite extensively. But we bring to the clients what they need most.

            We have confidence in the solution and we are going to put all or most of the clients on to Scrum 2019 if they are willing to accept the upgrade path. We are busy working on that in a project to upgrade it to 2019. It all depends on how well test upgrades go and the willingness of clients to enhance their services. We need to test it in the development area first, and then, depending on the type of environment that is running, we have to plan the upgrade in the proper sequence. Say the environment is a 2012 version, the upgrade path is to 2016, from 2016 to 1801, from 1801 to 1807 and then you must make sure that you're on the correct sequel version for 2019. But to do it at all depends on the license agreement that the particular clients have with Microsoft. Right now we are busy taking the environment up to 1807 and then we going to upgrade the sequel version, and then from there, we can go to 2019.

            So we are busy the whole time trying to better service our clients. We do our UI updates quite often. We are quite busy with our upgrade paths and testing to make sure everything goes smoothly for the clients in the implementation. 

            Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.

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              Managed Services - System engineer at Brennan IT Pty Ltd.
              MSP
              Top 20
              Provides excellent auto-remediation features and is the cheapest product in the market
              Pros and Cons
              • "The product’s auto-remediation feature helps with automation."
              • "Application monitoring must be improved."

              What is our primary use case?

              One of our customers is an Australian delivery company. They use SCOM to manage their servers, hardware, applications, NAS devices, hand devices, hypervisor, and virtualization environment. Another customer uses SCOM to monitor their clients. They have more than 3000 Windows and Linux servers.

              What is most valuable?

              The product’s auto-remediation feature helps with automation. It is very good at monitoring Microsoft Stack.

              What needs improvement?

              Application monitoring must be improved. The product must provide support for monitoring virtualization. It is a complex tool. It is not easy to configure it.

              For how long have I used the solution?

              I have been using the solution for five years.

              What do I think about the stability of the solution?

              I rate the tool’s stability a seven out of ten.

              What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

              I rate the product’s scalability five out of ten. Scalability must be improved. The solution is suitable for enterprise businesses.

              How was the initial setup?

              I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten. From planning to POST checks, the whole process takes one week.

              What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

              It is the cheapest product available in the market. I rate the pricing a one out of ten.

              What other advice do I have?

              I work for a managed service provider. We provide services for SCOM. We provide in-house support and services to our customers. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

              Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

              Hybrid Cloud
              Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: MSP

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                Lead specialist at OKCIUS (Pty) Ltd
                Real User
                Good reporting and flexible customization, but application monitoring needs improvement
                Pros and Cons
                • "This solution helps our application teams by allowing them to drill further into issues and perform a root cause analysis."
                • "The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved."

                What is our primary use case?

                We use this solution for infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring. Predominantly, it is for infrastructure monitoring in the Microsoft space.

                How has it helped my organization?

                This solution helps our application teams by allowing them to drill further into issues and perform a root cause analysis. This is possible because we first built out the monitoring platform and made sure that all of the components were being monitored. Then, we created a distributed application view, which is a drawing of all of the components being monitored for each application. This is what we then provide to the application teams. 

                What is most valuable?

                The most valuable feature is the reporting, and the customization is quite flexible.

                What needs improvement?

                The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved.

                I would like to see more focus on application monitoring in the next release of this solution.

                For how long have I used the solution?

                Approximately seven years.

                What do I think about the stability of the solution?

                The stability is pretty good, although it depends on the infrastructure. We normally end up having issues with hypervisors and SQL servers, but it comes down to how those platforms are being administered, as well. From an application point of view, this solution is pretty stable.

                What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

                This solution is scalable and very good in terms of availability and performance capability. It is very flexible, but you need to have your training properly done beforehand. If so, then it will benefit you a lot. If you need to expand at a later stage then you can do that as well.

                We currently have more than three thousand users that vary from managers to developers and engineers.

                How are customer service and technical support?

                I have never had to contact technical support.

                Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

                Personally, I have used an in-house solution and I have used SolarWinds before. It was not a case of switching because these were with different companies.

                How was the initial setup?

                The initial setup depends on the size of the environment, but on average, it will be more complex than straightforward.

                The complexity comes from understanding the various components that contribute to monitoring a specific item on the server. First, you have to understand the Management Pack. Then, you move on to the workflows, and this leads to understanding the rules and monitors. There are bits and pieces that you need to understand in order to make it work properly in your particular environment. This will further depend on things like whether you have restrictions in place, or whether the networking is good or bad. All of these things play a role.

                While the deployment time varies depending on the environment, on average, deployment takes about five months.

                What about the implementation team?

                All of the companies that I have worked for have handled it internally.

                One person is suitable for deployment, although this again depends on the company and the environment. If one person is in charge of the SQL environment and the hypervisors then they can do it alone. Obviously, if other departments are in charge of these things then they will need to be relied upon, but generally, it can be done with one person.

                With respect to maintaining the solution, a team of three people, with two juniors and one senior, might be ideal.

                What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

                If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement.

                What other advice do I have?

                My advice to anybody looking to implement this product is to plan properly.

                Overall, this is a good solution, but there is room for improvement in application monitoring and the dashboard.

                I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

                Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

                PeerSpot user
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                  Updated: December 2024
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