SCOM Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We use it to monitor our internal work.

The feature I have found most valuable is the book feature. While we run the Sprint one we can add some setups for multiple sprints.

Some checking issues could be improved. Checking some activators. It would help if we could export in some cases, because it may be that some people want to move the screen from the book to share reports. If it was possible to embed it in a report, that would be good. In other words, I would like more customized reports.

I would definitely like to see the ability to go through the total life-cycle in the next release of SCOM, to cover everything. But in some cases, especially retrospectively, this is not happening, or not happening well. I'd like to see the retrospective outcome in the knowledge base. It would be good if it could accommodate some learning out of the box, together with information from the recording session. There are levels to it, but some of the records we keep often go to quickly deliver the project. But in most cases, they skip the retrospective part and lessons learned. It would be good to declare something in the knowledge base where people can easily put it and access their input of lessons learned. We've yet to see that in previous projects. But I'd like to get to the level where whenever a new person starts a project, they could visit the knowledge base and the retrospective section, and get some knowledge out of the box, which was not covered in the process.

On a scale of one to ten I would definitely rate SCOM an 8. That's because people should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately.

I have been using SCOM for almost three years.

There are less than 100 people in my organization using SCOM. It is not widely used in the company. Just some individuals from different departments.

Before SCOM we were using Microsoft Project or Excel. The advantages of SCOM are that it is definitely user friendly and a more appropriate solution for what we need.

The initial setup did not take more than five minutes. It was activated in general, initially. 

The setup was implemented with help from our internal colleagues.

One thing I would recommend to anyone considering this solution is to give more people access to it so that whenever people want to use the solution they can get information from past experiences and what's currently going on. Say for example I raised one concern in your query box, I don't know how it's progressing because it doesn't record that. You should give some ticket number to it and update it. In other words, sharing feedback even on issues you are not directly working on.

• 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.

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.

SCOM features object-based monitoring based on classes and discoveries and it gives you a lot of power and flexibility when you design and implement monitoring. For the advanced users you have full freedom in creating your own custom monitoring solutions with Visual Studio, but there are also a lot of production ready monitoring packs from Microsoft as well as 3rd-party providers that are easy to implement.

I've done multiple implementations of SCOM and once you have it technically tuned, have your methodology and processes implemented it really makes a difference in how aware Operations becomes and how fast they can discover and act on incidents both pro- and reactively. Distributed Applications enables you to give developers and business valuable insight into their IT infrastructure.

Reporting could be improved, you get many reports out-of-box but they can be difficult to interpret and drill down into. You can build custom reports in report builder or Visual Studio but both alternatives are difficult to use, not well documented and requires extensive knowledge of the SCOM databases.

Besides managing other System Center products SCOM has been my main focus for 9 years.

SCOM is very easy to deploy and get running, most of the work is tuning management packs together with subject matter experts and in bigger organisations you have to put work into establishing methodology and processes.

Since the original version of SCOM 2007 a lot has happened in the code base, SCOM 2012 R2 is a very stable and reliable product.

I have not seen or heard of scalability issues with SCOM, the infrastructure is distributed and can be tailored to your needs at any time.

If you have a Microsoft Premier agreement (which is my only experience) you get a lot of valuable attention from Microsoft. They help you do service checkups of your installations, give you valuable advice and are generally available when you need it.

My experience with Microsoft support has been good, Microsoft has different tiers of support but they are all very professional and if something needs to be escalated it will get the necessary attention. I've had a few complicated issues in the past that I could not solve myself which got solved by the help from either entry and senior level support.

I've had some experience with SiteScope and other in-house monitoring tools, I've also seen but not worked with a couple of other monitoring tools so I do not have the means for comparison.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy to understand, the first thing you do is size your enviornment and do all the preparations after that installing SCOM itself is very easy.

My very first implementation of SCOM 2007 was togheter with Microsoft, other than that I've done the implementations myself.

ROI is difficult to calculate with a product like this but being able to monitor your infrastructure is essential at any rate.

Licensing is based on how many and what type of agents you have installed, in my experience it is difficult to calculate licensing and pricing without help from Microsoft.

Since the organisations I've implemented SCOM in have been mainly Microsoft and Windows based choosing SCOM and other products from the System Center suite has been a natural choice.

SCOM is a great monitoring tool if you have an enterprise level infrastructure that you need to monitor and manage, it's mainly designed for Windows but it does have cross-platform and network monitoring support something which Microsoft keeps expanding. It is technically easy to implement and maintain but it requires an initial time investment for tuning and customizations.

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.