SCOM Reviews

It is easy to deploy and configure, has rich out of the box monitoring capabilities for windows environments, and can be easily extended with base XML and scripting knowledge.

As any helpful monitoring tool, SCOM improved vision of core problems of the IT environment for the technical support team, helped locate causes faster and consolidated monitoring functions in fewer hands. With some reporting and dashboarding additions, SCOM helped the IT department show its value for business users.

As I see in the SC 2016 roadmap, the product development team understands that main improvements for product should be: cross-platform and network monitoring features including stability and extensibility, wider support of dashboarding and cool widgets, the web console should be greatly improved, along with more handy development tools including custom widget development.

I have been working with SCOM and projects on it since 2007.

There were some deployment and configuration problems with the gateway server and overall this feature works a bit sloppy with other monitoring. Many problems occurred with configuration updates due to many MPs and failing DB maintenance tasks. Unix resource pool server heartbeat failures is another pain, as well.

General support is not helpful enough but Premier support engineers work good and fast. Mostly there is enough information to solve problems on TechNet and other web and community resources.

Previously, we - as well as our main SCOM customer - used HP OMW (and also free open source tools like WhatsUp, Nagios), SCOM was chosen for it's simplicity in deployment, out-of-box packs and easy administration. Other customers have SCOM for Windows monitoring purposes co-existing with other monitoring tools.

Initial setup is very clear and straightforward, especially when taking into account the MVPs' blog posts and advice.

We implemented SCOM by ourselves and the main advice is as simple as that: Follow the instructions, pay attention to details, be generous with SQL Server resources (disk) which looks like the main bottleneck of all product.

To get enough ROI and full advantage of licensing, one should use the datacenter type of enterprise licences and use as many of Microsoft System Center products as possible.

SCOM should be a good choice for fresh IT environments based on Windows servers or switching from open-source monitoring tools. By adding e.g. SCCM and SCOrch, you get a fast-to-deploy and easy-to-manage bundle of enterprise-class tools.

We use it to monitor Linux systems. It has performed well.

We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes. 

Graphing processes. It can send messages to our ticketing system. It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.

I would like to better be able to monitor Oracle processes.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

I have not used technical support.

We did not previously use a different solution, so I asked my manager to look into it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We evaluated Zabbix.

If you are using Linux, do not discount SCOM just because it is a Windows or Microsoft product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Features
2. Price.

• Monitoring with No Downtime
• Integration with System Center Products/OEM/SolarWinds
• Live Dashboards

Ticket Automation has taken a considerable load from the NOC.

Custom Tasks allows NOC to perform all basic troubleshooting from the SCOM console itself.

I’d like to see cross-platform support that would make SCOM a single enterprise monitoring application.

I’d also like to see support for direct monitoring of Oracle databases, DB2, etc.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

I have not encountered any major deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

Implementation was done in-house.

Design well in advance and the planning plays the most vital role. Implementation is simple.

We evaluated other products, and we chose this product because of its licensing and cost efficiency.

• Agent based monitoring
• Agentless monitoring
• VSAE
• Rules
• Monitors
• SLA
• Server monitoring

All our environments are automated to automatically install the SCOM agents across different domains which helps us to check the health of the server, to get the server details like IIS, app pools, Performance counters like CPU, Memory, Disk usage, etc.

SCOM needs improvement in phasing out the Silverlight based web platform and instead provide web access for all browsers using HTML5 probably. The API and the knowledge base needs to be improved by Microsoft.

I've used it for two years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

SCOM server needs periodic maintenance to make sure the disk/database has enough space and a lot of alerts across a big environment might come fairly quickly. At times it needs server and service restarts.

We've had no issues with scalability.

5/10

5/10

I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.This was the first monitoring solution we used, but we have moved out the URL monitoring away from SCOM to StatusCake and VictorOps as StatusCake has an easy REST based endpoint for monitoring and VictorOps provides us on call support. We are continuing with SCOM as we need agent based monitoring for our SAAS solutions.

The initial setup is fairly simple if you read the installation documents beforehand and install all the prerequisites properly, otherwise it can be a fairly long task.

I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.

It has a good ROI.

Pricing and licensing is fairly OK. If you have a MSDN license, then your dev environments can be set up for free as you can get a dev SCOM license from MSDN. You only have to pay for production SCOM server if you have a MSDN license.

Implement a prototype management pack on the dev environment and analyze all the pros and cons before buying the product. You can get a free six months trial on this also.

Real time monitoring/alerts. Pro-active response to warning alerts are invaluable and have saved disasters quite a few times.

We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool. We have prevented various problems and have been able to resolve issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, it assists our department in being pro-active in regards to resolving issues with servers/services rather the reactive. The level of monitoring from overview health to granular object monitoring is excellent.

I've been using it for four years.

I wasn't involved in the deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

We have needed to increase the VM resources as we’ve added more servers and increased monitoring packs, but that’s to be expected.

Microsoft support is generally excellent, we’ve never raised a call for SCOM though.

We have some in house monitoring that’s looked after by our NOC team, however, this is basic SNMP monitoring, so nothing in comparison.

It's not straightforward, SCOM is relatively “noisy” out of the box, so time is required to tailor the alerting, adjusting threshold triggers and over-riding alerts that are not required to ensure alerts captured are relevant and require action.

It was done in-house.

Very difficult to gauge. Using most or all of the Security Centre Suite ensures that the license cost is very reasonable considering what’s in the suite. To just use SCOM would be a very expensive license per server in my opinion, best to use multiple products in this suite.

Ensure you have plenty of resources to throw at the environment, space for data warehouse and SQL as it will be resource hungry for SCOM (server estate size relevant of course). Be prepared for some initial time investment and ensure regular updates and management packs are applied to make the product as useful as possible.

SCOM is a monitoring tool that looks after the vast majority of your private and even public cloud. In my experience having a good insight into specific product monitoring surrounding the Microsoft suite such as Exchange, Active Directory, Lync, SQL and the System Center suite is something that all my clients seek. For me the addition of Microsoft knowledge base articles that point to the cause, explanation and resolution to a product specific issue is invaluable and the ability to add your own knowledge base articles that specifically relate your environment is awesome!

Having a round the clock watchmen offers great peace of mind. Typically my organization uses it for monitoring our virtualisation environments specifically Hyper-V and VMware as well as all the services we run from it. We've had outages at two am and three am that was automatically resolved by SCOM saving us time and money. The saving came from not having to rely on highly priced out of hours staff to resolve any potential issues.

In the world that is monitoring, sometimes the decision makers want to see and hear all the issues that may occur during business hours (as well as out of hours) and (rightly or wrongly) SCOM gives you exactly that! Its revered to as an "Alert Storm". SCOM uses something called "Management Packs" and that is where the alerts come from, but, managing these can be a little convoluted to say the least, I'd like to see these made a little simpler but still keep the same functionality, basically these management packs need to become a little more user friendly. Almost always, these alert storms can put IT managers and operators off the product and give the impression that everything is broken or not working properly, so making them easier to work with will help SCOM administrators (especially if they are new to SCOM) manage and understand what the product is showing them.

I've been using it since 2007.

There were no issues with the deployment.

From a stability point of view, personally I've rarely seen SCOM fall over because of SCOM, I've seen SCOM fall over and die due to hardware issues, visualization issues or resource issues. But the good news is if you've setup SCOM correctly, the product will tell you why it fell over! This means that you can put the preventative measures in place to stop it happening again.

SCOM is "highly available" out of the box (those are Microsoft words not mine) but it really is true, so scaling your SCOM set-up is easy, just install more SCOM servers!

I've had such a mix of technical support scenarios with SCOM it’s a difficult one to answer. Microsoft support of the product is pretty good, with regular updates and good internal knowledge and relatively fast response times. However, other vendors have created software the plugs into SCOM and support for these add-ons can differ wildly! But overall its pretty good.

Personally no, I stared in IT in 2007 and it's all I've ever used. However some of my clients have made the jump from other products to SCOM. Depending on their requirements, SCOM can offer a wide range of monitoring solutions and more often than not, it’s been a successful transition.

It never use to be, but since the 2012 release the deployment side of SCOM was simplified greatly. This was obviously great news for I.T pro's like myself as the client conversation became a little more straight forward. However, installing SCOM was the easy part, making it work after the install is where the fun begins, this side of the setup however remains a little more challenging.

System Center Operations Manager is basically for windows monitoring. We use SCOM to monitor metrics, such as CPU and memory disk, and a lot of applications, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Office 365, Active Directory, RDBMS, Skype, and Citrix.

It discovers the components automatically, which is a fantastic thing. The discovery works in an automatic way, and it has a dynamic way of discovering the components, assets, and applications. It doesn't require any manual intervention.

They can focus more on cloud monitoring instead of on-premise monitoring. We should be able to monitor cloud-related applications. They can include this feature in the next release.

If it is in the cloud, we can have scalability by using Kubernetes. The container is containerized, packaged, and managed using Kubernetes. This feature is not there in SCOM. Going forward, if they can focus on that, it will be great.

Its scalability works well. In our environment, we are monitoring 150,000 Windows Servers by using System Center Operations Manager. Its usage keeps increasing.

I am satisfied with their support.

Its initial setup is straightforward. It doesn't take long.

We evaluated other options. We found SCOM to be suitable for Microsoft Windows applications, so we decided to go for it.

I would rate System Center Operations Manager an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is to perform server monitoring in the Windows environment.

This solution has improved our organization from an insight point of view. We have gained valuable insight from a holistic level to inform us what's happening with infrastructure, across our data center, servers, and client environments as well. It also integrates into our service desk systems, so it is a vital part of the organization.

The reporting capabilities of this solution are amazing.

We also make use of APM, Application Performance Monitoring, and this gives us valuable insight into our application level, where we could experience problems.

The ability to integrate into Azure services, as well as the old OMS that now forms part of Azure Monitor, is a good feature that we might make use of.

On-prem network monitoring is something that could be improved drastically. In fact, it should have better end-to-end monitoring from the physical layer up to the software.

The stability of this solution is great.

Obviously, monitoring more devices requires upgrading your SQL backing and adding new gateways.

I have worked with many monitoring solutions including CA Unicenter and SolarWinds, and the scalability of SCOM is really great. Especially compared to CA UIM, from a scalability point, Microsoft has done very well.

Given that SCOM 2019 is the last iteration of on-prem SCOM solutions, we are looking to expand into Azure with Azure monitor.

The vendor support from Microsoft is fantastic. I've dealt with many consultants from Microsoft before and I would rate my experience a ten out of ten.

I have worked with several products including CA Unicenter and SolarWinds, and we currently make use of more than one solution. From a network monitoring point of view, we have found that other solutions perform this task better than SCOM.

The initial setup of SCOM is very easy. It is packaged in a great fashion and it is a very simple process. I have done it many times over the years, and the installation process has been made very, very easy.

There is some preliminary work that needs to be done in terms of an envisioning phase and technical design. After this, all of the hardware needs to be provisioned, the service accounts and the required access for these all need to be in place. Once we completed all of this, implementing the solution took us about two days.

Beyond the setup, we have a team of seven administrators that look after the monitoring role. In addition, we have between twenty and thirty operators. There is a command center that looks at that part of the business, which purely consumes the SCOM control. We provide the monitoring service for them and they've got the operators.

I handled the design and implementation of this solution for the company.

We have always had SCOM, and it is one of our preferred Windows monitoring solutions. However, from a network point of view, we are making use of other products.

I really know this product quite well, and I would highly recommend it. It is highly customizable and the automation is great. It takes a lot of the headache out of managing your data centers and software in other places. It's a fantastic product.

If the network monitoring were improved then this product would be a ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.