SCOM Reviews

Our primary use case is to monitor infrastructure and the Windows ecosystem. We also create distributed applications within SCOM to monitor our custom applications. It is deeply integrated into our systems.

The most valuable feature is the extensibility, as there are really no limits as to what you can do with it.

The fact that you can use PowerShell is a big plus.

SCOM has a lot of powerful features but it is not simple to use. We are using a third-party presentation layer to show all of the data because SCOM does not show it in a very nice and easy way. It is not an interface that you would expect to see in 2020. 

The interface is a little bit cumbersome and certain actions could be simplified. For example, many of the things that we do require clicking through many menus.

Maintaining this product is very hard to do.

We have been using SCOM for about four years.

This product is quite robust.

I don't have much experience in scaling out and adding more servers, although I think that it's fairly straightforward. It may not be great, but it's better than many products.

I have not personally dealt with official technical support, but non-official support from various blogs and websites is excellent. There are a few bloggers that are really dedicated to the products, as they are Microsoft people, but this is not official support per se.

Overall, I would say that product support is good and better than expected.

Deploying SCOM itself is of medium difficulty. I would say that it is not too easy and not too complicated. However, configuring all of the monitoring and all of the management packs is somewhat complex. It's an ongoing job and requires more than one person. Actually, in our case, it requires that everybody contribute.

If you want to configure SCOM to work properly and bring value to your organization, it is very hard, which is one of the bad things about it.

SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing. The entire suite is expensive but it comes with a lot of functionality.

Overall, I find that this is a good solution but the presentation layer is really bad. If the interactive part of the console were improved then it would be better.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Its flexibility, the ability to create Management Packs to monitor different programs or devices. No matter what it is you want to monitor or how you want to monitor, it can be done. You may have to create the code using VBScript or PowerShell, and XML, but it can be done. There are always lots of examples online that you can work from that will save you lots of time.

The company to which I am currently contracted is in the process of creating SNMP Management packages for our network devices. Very steep learning curve but the results are fantastic. Anything that can be accessed via SNMP commands, SCOM can retrieve via SNMP Gets. This fulfills the network monitoring need extremely well and now we are getting alerts that allow us to pre-empt problems before they become service issues. This is making our network much more stable.

There are always areas that can be improved in any product, but overall SCOM has matured very well over the years and appears to be at the point where only minor improvements need to be made. Since MS sends out updates regularly, these improvements can be made on the fly with very little interruption in service.

I have used this solution for 10 years.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment. This is one area where there is plenty of documentation. It would be nice if more companies actually retained a PME for rollouts instead of just letting their brightest take a shot at it. I have had to clean up behind a lot of best efforts that could have been avoided by just bringing a contractor in for a couple of months. It seems that the biggest mistake is putting all of the management packs available in at the same time before talking to the owners that will be getting the alerts. Off-the-shelf MPs are very verbose and need to be tuned for the environment and the way in which alerts are going to be handled.

Technical support is pretty good: very responsive, good level of understanding, rare to have to go beyond second-level support.

I chose it after investigating Nagios, SiteScope, and SolarWinds. Initially, the thing that sold me was the Authoring console for creating MPs. It made it very easy to get started and produce right away. Now that MS has discontinued it, I use Visual Studio. It didn’t take long to figure Visual Studio out and now I can produce MPs as quickly as I did with the console and with more flexibility and understanding of what is going on. Most of the other programs aren’t ready off-the-shelf to the extent that SCOM is, and require a lot more work to get alerts coming in. MS has created the basic packages with all the possible monitoring and collections that they think the average company will want to use. Many of these are disabled by default and up to the implementer to go through them to see if his/her company can benefit from them. In many cases, companies will decide that anything that isn’t actionable needs to be turned off. That’s not always a good idea, as many of the alerts are preemptive to help you fix an issue before it becomes a major problem.

I am a contractor and work exclusively with SCOM, I have implemented at many different companies, including MS, so it’s pretty easy for me to come into an environment and know what needs to be done. Probably the most important part of the design that most companies forget about is the processes that need to be in place before you stand it up. What are we going to monitor? How are we going to handle requests for custom monitoring, and tuning or disabling of existing monitoring and collections? Who and where are we sending alerts? Are they aware of what is going to be coming at them? Did you sit down with each and every group that you are installing MPs for and go over the monitoring and collections to see what they want and don’t want? DBA’s, for example, don’t want to see endless alerts about SPNs, or even permissions. Get this worked out before installing the SQL package and the DBA group will be much easier to work with. How are you going to route alerts, are you going to send them to a ticketing application? If so you have to decide how to do that. Are you going to send all alerts and have the ticketing system decide what is an actionable alert, or are you going to create subscriptions in SCOM to handle it?

As compared to some of the others that I have been exposed to, SCOM has its good and bad points. Documentation is poor, but the community makes up for it with good blogs and lots of how-to examples.

Get knowledgeable help, not someone off the street that says they know SCOM, but someone that can show a track record of working with it. You will save lots of time and money.

It is so flexible and easy to learn if the right processes are put into place.

The flexibility which Operations Manager (SCOM) gives to monitor anything in any way is the main valuable feature to me. A big second would be the amount of management packs for Microsoft and other products which can be plugged in and give you a fast start to your monitoring.

In every case so far we managed to move from a slow reactive type of non-monitoring toward a proactive monitoring for different layers within the organization and real insights into their IT environment from different angles. Including helpdesk, system admins, IT management, company management, departmental staff and managers. Creating good dashboards makes the monitoring come more alive as well and move it over and above a long list of mixed alerts.

Areas for improvement in my opinion are the resource footprint of the SCOM infrastructure side, the web console (drop Silverlight please!) and a few of the management packs.

I have been using MOM and SCOM since the year 2002.

During the years we did see deployment issues. Often related to people not reading the documentation and not installing the prerequisites correctly (for instance SQL). In some cases it was related to in-place upgrades between major versions, which we have been warning against for years in the community. And one of the previous versions had some bugs in the command-based setup version in not accepting one of the setup parameters correctly (which the setup wizard did do correctly).

The stability of the product is fine as long as the scaling is done right according to the types and amounts of monitored objects. There are calculation models for it, but experience in designing SCOM implementations helps a lot with that.

We did encounter scalability issues when monitoring a large amount of network devices which turned out to have more monitored objects than expected (for instance a switch stack which is seen as one switch but turns out to have a few more ports and interfaces than a simple switch). In such cases a scale out or a second management group might provide what is needed.

SCOM is part of the System Center Suite and part of the datacenter management solutions provided by Microsoft. The amount of customer service depends on the amount of licenses and software assurance for instance you aquire.

Technical suport is given by Microsoft for their products through the usual channels. Next to that there are the Technet Forums where also a lot of community members answer questions. There are a lot of blogs run by community members and community leaders and MVP's which provide a lot of information.

Yes we used several products and also customers we are new to have existing solutions. Often a whole lot of them. The reason for switching is always to try to get as much as possible monitoring and dashboarding and reporting and alerting and therefore insights into as few products as possible. This is one of the reasons we standardize to SCOM.

The initial setup is very simple if you follow the documentation, best practices setup guides and use the sizing calculation models. Install the prerequisites right the first time and the rest flows from there.

We are a consultancy for the System Center products and I specialize in SCOM. I usually work with one or more people at a customer to get the basics done and installed and next work with the rest of the organization to make it friendly and accessible for all.

I think this depends on the organization and their wishes. In general a lot of organizations of a certain size already have the System Center licenses. The ROI comes from reacting more proactively to upcoming disruptions, current disruptions (and being able to inform users calling helpdesk) and being in control.

SCOM comes as part of the System Center stack. So if you buy one product you will have them all. Some organizations already have the licenses needed. Some have special pricing (education organizations for instance).

Yes other products are in evaluation. There are several big monitoring products which have been around for years and years. And there are niche players for monitoring specific parts of the infrastructure. With those last you may get deeper insights into one aspect, but lose the ability to add it all together.

I do like this product a lot and have followed its advances since the MOM2000 version and continue to do so toward the 2016 version and beyond. One thing to notice lately is there are more possibilities when combined with Microsofts OMS solution in a hybrid scenario to get even more value out of both products.

We have installed SCOM in our Windows Server 2020 system. We use the solution to monitor any issues that might happen in our infrastructure and keep them in good health. We have SQL Servers, web servers, and web interfaces.

The most valuable feature of SCOM is real-time alerts.

In a future release, they should add email notification alerts.

I have been using SCOM for approximately three months.

SCOM is stable.

The scalability of SCOM is good. We can add other servers or services.

I have approximately eight IT personnel that use the solution in my company.

I have not used the support but others in my company have many times.

Before I used SCOM I used Microsoft Azure.

There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually.

We have two system engineers who do the maintenance of this solution, but the number of people needed depends on their knowledge or qualification.

I recommend this solution to others, but I would suggest having some training.

I rate SCOM a seen out of ten.

We use it mainly for partitioning systems. All the systems' utilization and compute, uptime, and downtime. I also monitor a few applications through it.

Because it's Windows-based, it actually reports quite well. It reports everything you can think of on the Windows server and allows you to monitor anything. It's excellent for those in the Windows world as it's very good at it.

The configurations could be better. There are multiple tests where you can do something, but they can be a trigger as well. The overriding methodologies are not that easy. The configurations are difficult. The configuration and thorough day-to-day operations to get them to the level you want takes some time. It's very difficult.

I think certain things, like management packs, should also be built into the solution. They should be built into your installation or deployment so you can decide whether to keep them in the list of products that you want. You can just unpick the ones you don't want and install this with the latest management technologies. Installing the solution and then looking for management technologies and custom solutions, like your HP and the hardware, you have to go through an HPE port file to download that management pack and add it. I think their whole packaging of the software can be made a little bit easier.

I have been using SCOM for about three years.

SCOM is a stable product. Once you get it off the ground, it's very stable.

Technical support is fine. Not that I need it that much, but normally they do help.

The initial setup is straightforward. But configurations and maneuvering around it and getting things to a level you want is very difficult. Installing and deploying it properly takes close to a week. It takes time to take out things that are just unnecessary. It also takes time to customize things according to the environment. You need to read a lot of documentation, even with the management packs. You need to go back to the documentation all the time.

It doesn't take many people to implement this solution. You have to know math and the Microsoft server platform for you to manage it properly.

We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA.

If new potential users want to monitor a Windows platform or Microsoft Server-related platforms, I would recommend it. But if they want to manage anything else, they have to create a lot of custom things for them to work properly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SCOM an eight.

We use SCOM mostly for server performance monitoring in historical metrics.

I like the historical reporting of observer metrics. It's a fairly user-friendly solution.

It'll help if they can provide real-time or closer to real-time monitoring.

I've been using SCOM for at least five years.

SCOM is a stable solution.

SCOM is scalable, and it's easy to add resources.

I believe we have had issues. I'm not the primary administrator of it, but in general, I think they've been able to get back to us relatively quickly.

The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite. I believe we pay for the license on a yearly basis.

I would tell people looking to implement this solution that it's great for any historical tracking. But if they're looking for real-time, within-the-minute monitoring of servers from a console, then I would say that it falls short there.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SCOM a seven.

This is the main monitoring system for our company. We use it for monitoring, reporting, and analytics.

The most valuable features for us are the monitoring, the health explorer, and the console.

The console feature is very poor, and it would be very good for us if this were improved. The application monitoring feature is also poor.

I would also like to see better training materials. What we currently have is very light.

The ability to connect to cloud-based solutions would be very good.

We have approximately fifty users at this time. The IT operations team uses this solution, and there is a manager who uses the reporting functions as well. 

I like the service that we receive from the Hungarian technical support team. It is very useful and has good coverage. 

This is an easy solution to install.

I like SCOM and have used it for many years.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

First of all, this product is designed to monitor Microsoft products and does that very well. It covers monitoring SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, and the Operation System (2003-2012 R2 version).

IT management experienced a big improvement after implementation of this product. We use very tight integration with service desk software. SLA of IT services increased significantly.

At this point, only monitoring a network device is not good enough. But in the new version (it is a release candidate now), this function will be improved.

Our company have been using SCOM since it appeared (more than nine years).

We have been using this product for a long time, so we had some problems in the past, but it was a long time ago. The product is now very stable, and it has a lot of articles, documentation, internet community, internet resources and so on.

Technical support is very good if you have an agreement with MS.

At the beginning of this monitoring system project, we tested a few options. We tried IBM’s monitoring system, but we did not find a good specialist in our country and it is difficult to use a very complex, new product without good support. So we chose SCOM.

Nowadays, the initial setup is quite simple and straightforward. It is very well-documented. The installation process checks a lot of parameters and provides tips about what we should do.

We implemented our solution a very long time ago, and have had a few upgrades. Now, I think it is quite easy to implement this product without a vendor team.

The licensing is simple. The price is very low in comparison with other products with same functionality.