SCOM Reviews

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.

SCOM is capable of so much that it can actually be somewhat overwhelming. But if you know how to use it effectively, one of the great things about it is that you can really tailor it to your specific environment and get as much (or as little) alerting as you need.

SCOM also provides for administrative roles and selective alerting, so if you have a team that only monitors a specific subset of servers or a specific application, you can create designated roles for them and give them limited console access for just those resources that they are responsible for.

In my previous position, there was basically no true infrastructure monitoring at all – they were relying on alerts configured per system or device, and consequently there was a lot of firefighting and working reactively to problems that occurred.

My first priority when I started was to implement enterprise monitoring and alerting, and SCOM was approved. Once it was in place and tweaked to that environment, we experienced a lot less firefighting and were able to prioritize issues as they came up. Less late nights, too.

In some ways, SCOM is a double-edged sword. It can do so much, even by default -- monitoring and alerting of everything from Windows servers and applications, to Linux machines, to network devices including routers and switches. However, because of this, you can get overwhelmed fairly quickly, and if left unchecked, you’ll get too many alerts for too many objects. When that happens, your team starts ignoring alerts because they simply can’t get to them all, and that is just as bad as not having any alerting at all.

For SCOM to be really great, I’d love to see Microsoft come up with a quick and simple way to enable common critical monitoring and alerts by default. Then, as you get more familiar with SCOM, you can gradually tweak and enable the more customized and intricate stuff.

I have been using Operations Manager for almost three years. I set up and deployed it (with assistance from a consultant) at my last job, and it was already in limited use at my current position, where I currently administer it.

SCOM can be somewhat tricky to implement.

There have been no issues with the stability.

With SCOM 2012 R2, a single management pool deployment can handle up to 150,000 objects - according to Microsoft.

Tech support and customer service depends on your relationship(s) with Microsoft, but Microsoft support, whether you like it or not, is pretty consistent across the board. If you've dealt with it previously, at least you know what to expect.

I have used and evaluated other enterprise solutions. I will say that, while Microsoft sometimes does things that seem oddly questionable, SCOM truly makes sense once you get familiar with how it works. SCOM uses management packs, which are basically pre-packaged building blocks of rules and monitors, to allow configuration and tweaking of monitoring for each service or application

SCOM can be somewhat tricky to implement, and if you’re implementing more than one System Center module, you definitely need to be careful about the order you deploy them in. However, there is good documentation online from Microsoft and other sources, so take your time and read the documentation completely to avoid having to start all over. I have worked in mainly small to mid-size environments, but scalability, from my understanding, is generally not an issue for SCOM.

In both cases I was involved in, we had a consultant work with the internal team to deploy and configure SCOM. As I mentioned before, implementation can be tricky, and it’s mainly because there are a lot of smaller details to pay attention to (specific user & group creations, proper installation order, etc.). So I would advise bringing in a consultant to do initial deployment if you don’t have the experience in-house.

I don’t know specifics about pricing and licensing, but if you’re familiar with Microsoft, you can get very good deals buying a certain level of licensing and getting System Center thrown in.

SCOM is capable of providing full-featured infrastructure monitoring, alerting and reporting, especially for Windows-centric production environments.

I have heard a lot of people say that to do SCOM right, you really should create a full-time position, or at least a full-time System Center admin who works only on System Center stuff. Because you’re only going to get out of it what you put into it. If you don’t put any time into it, it’s not going to work well for you.