SCOM Reviews

SCOM's greatest attribute is that you can customize every monitor to specifically match the intended system. For example, you can monitor two servers for high CPU usage and customize it so one alerts if it goes above 95% and the other only alerts over 98%.

If SCOM is implemented correctly, it can take away the need for administrators to constantly monitor things or perform health checks. SCOM can be set up to alert when an issue occurs and SCOM is often easy to link to a ticketing system so a ticket will be generated automatically when issues occur. SCOM can even be set up to send emails/SMS when a problem occurs in your environment.

The System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) is great at alerting you when something breaks. It's not so great at reporting. For all of the information that SCOM collects and stores it has no good way to put this information into a useful reporting format. For example, it would be fantastic to be able to have a historic view of the memory usage on a server to assist with pinpointing the root cause to the issue.

Also, SCOM comes with many built-in monitors. Anything that isn't already there can often be add by installing a management pack. These management packs include a heap of monitors for a specific item (EG exchange). The main issue is that by default most items alerts are enabled. This means when you install SCOM or add a management pack you will need to tweak all of the sensors or you will be over run with alerts. It's a turn off what you don't want situation rather than, the more sensible, turn on what you do want.

There were no issues deploying it.

There have been no stability issues.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Microsoft offers many partnerships to businesses. These partnership agreements can get you some great discounts on software/support. To become a Microsoft partner you often only need to have staff with Microsoft certifications. The more certificates you have the better your partnership. Microsoft are great to call for support as they have a wealth of knowledge. They may not always be the most helpful, but by logging a ticket to Microsoft you will often get your management temporarily off your back.

We use SCOM to deploy images.

We like the deployment of the machines and the features that they have.

It's easy to use.

The management of the servers could be better.

Also, the user interface could be improved.

We have used SCOM for a couple of years.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution.

It's a scalable product. We have 1,000 users in our organization.

We have plans to continue using this solution.

Technical support is fine. We have no issues with them.

We did not use any other solution. It's a group standard for us.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy for us.

We have a team of four to deploy and maintain it.

We completed the installation ourselves.

It took one week to deploy and customize it.

We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

• 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.

This product features allows me to monitor other systems including Windows and Unix systems as well as monitor various Network devices. It monitors these systems and can have all of the alerts displayed in one single GUI. It also allows me to setup notifications for the alerts, which can be emailed or texted to individual users. Another good feature, is as long as you have the necessary management packs installed for specific applications/technologies, this product will discover the systems running these applications/technologies and automatically start monitoring them.

My organization is used to install this product at various companies. But after installing this product at various companies, I have seen these companies improve as far as day to day problems. This product helps companies detect problems before they cause any real problems like downtime. It also helps companies to determine where a problem might exist in their current environment and helps the companies correct these problems with the knowledge base that it uses for each of the problems it detects.

This product has room for improvement in the way that it is administered. It doesn’t give you details on Monitors/Rules as far as what is being monitored and how it’s being monitored. It also can improve on letting you know what is being monitored on each system that it monitors.

This is an excellent monitoring tool, especially for Windows servers, as the technology developers are usually the ones who build the management packs for SCOM. You must plan out your environment before implementing this product in large environments and build very beefy SQL servers one for the OperationsDB and the other for the OperationsDB Ware House. As this product is very SQL intense and any slowness is usually caused by the SQL servers trying to keep up with all the requests and updates from the product. Limit the number of admins that will administer this product, as too many cooks in the kitchen can cause more harm than not enough cooks. This product gets better in time with tuning, otherwise it is a very chatty product and users will start ignoring it, if it’s not tuned correctly.

We're using SCOM to monitor the health checks for the Windows servers in our organization.

It would be hard to talk about features. In maybe four months, in January, there is downtime for service, where we're able to look for the issues and proactively check everything.

The stability has been very good so far. 

Technical support has been very responsive.

We have found the scalability capabilities to be okay.

What we need in SCOM is the ability to share a lab console with our customers so that our end-users or customers in SCOM can navigate by themselves. It could be similar to how we use DRDG in PRTG where all of our customers can set up their monitoring on their own. Right now, in SCOM, only our team can set up their monitoring. 

The initial setup could be easier. 

The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface.

I've been dealing with the solution for two years. 

The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The scalability potential is good. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

The technical support on offer has been great, generally. When we have questions for Microsoft, they respond to us quickly. It's good for our end. We are quite satisfied.

The initial setup could be more straightforward and the deployment could be simplified in SCOM.

In terms of pricing, I'm not sure how much the company pays. As far as I know, our company gets a Microsoft package and SCOM is already included in the package. It's not separated out.

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

SCOM is a great monitoring tool. It's just pretty complex to set up, however, if you invest your time in learning SCOM, you can understand how it works and it will make things much easier.

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 of SCOM is for monitoring deployments of Windows. It is also used for monitoring applications, and it reports information if there is a problem.

It is very good at monitoring Microsoft Server.

SCOM is not a flexible product.

The initial setup should be easier to complete.

We have been working with SCOM for three years.

This is a very stable product and we plan to continue using it in the future.

This solution is very scalable. It can change the configuration for management and performance. We have two people who use it. One is a manager and the other is an engineer.

When I need external support, I can open a case with Microsoft. I have opened between two and four support cases and I am satisfied with the support I received.

We don't use any other product for deployments. 

I would say that the initial setup is 50-50. It is not easy and it's not hard to set up. It should be easier to install. It took us between three days and a week to deploy.

The length of time for deployment depends on the size of your environment. If I am installing a new System Center Operations Manager for 100 servers, it will take maybe two weeks. The process requires implementing monitoring agents, and I need to change the configuration as well.

I deploy this product myself.

We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it.

This is a good product and I recommend it. When it comes to monitoring Microsoft servers, it is very useful.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.