SCOM Reviews

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.

SCOM is a very powerful tool if deployed and eventually maintained correctly. It is an improvement over MOM 2005. It no longer monitors just a node like MOM 2005 used to do (eg: a server) but it can be made to monitor a whole service.

SCOM 2012 monitors each node and advises you that a particular node is unreachable/down in a very short time. This time a.k.a as the polling time is dependent upon number of nodes, network traffic and the speed of the scom servers and network equipment. Having a short time helps to meet the SLA target.

Unfortunately, when you need to monitor member servers which are not joined to the same domain as the SCOM servers, you need to go through the certificate route (so that you can have the required trust through the certificate). This is very time consuming and very prone to error.

3years.

SCOM requires that all servers are from 2008server upwards. Does not work with Server 2003 or lower. Moreover, the respective service packs need to be installed.

As regards Linux servers, a specific file must be configured so that SCOM is allowed to communicate to.

No particular issues were encountered. If it is allocated the required resources, service pack installed etc, it should have a reasonable performance.

SCOM 2012 was implemented and monitored 300+ servers and various network connections. Issues that were encountered is with respect to servers which were not on the same windows domain as the SCOM servers.

Customer service was fine. However, a trained support team is required so that the SCOM is handled correctly and in a timely manner.

Technical support from Microsoft was always given in a timely manner when required. Technical support advice was analyzed and taken on board when required.

MOM 2005 was used but this supports up to 2003 Server. Having upgraded all servers to Server 2008 upwards necessitated this switch. Finally it proved to be a good choice.

MOM experience helped a lot since the basics are the same. You have to open the required TCP ports and allocate the required resources so that setup succeeds.

It was implemented in-house. A group of engineers designed, planned and implemented SCOM 2012. Their level of expertise was very high and they were MCSE engineers.

The ROI is in the form that the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is met and downtime minimized as possible. This reduced the penalties incurred to us from customers.

Cannot comment on this. I was on the technical aspect of SCOM. However this was given "for free" as part with the SCCM package.

There are various other options, like OP5 and Zabbix but being in a Microsoft environment, SCOM was the way to go.

No comments so far. SCOM has a lot of potential and can give a helping hand in maintaining a healthy network.

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.

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.

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.

The agent for both products is solid and reliable and does not require post-deployment maintenance/restarts, as required by other products I have used.

Also, the way objects are discovered by class allows for quick overrides without much rework.

Managing a fleet of 9000-plus servers across multiple time zones and administrative domains, the ability to alter a threshold across the entire fleet within seconds has improved how my organization functions.

It has reduced the amount of time we spend in an operational support role, allowing us to focus on designing and building custom monitoring.

It would be nice to see the old MP Designer come back as you could quickly design and build a MP without a deep understanding of the XML code behind it.

Having to use Visual Studio requires a much deeper understanding of MP coding and limits the audience base capable of building custom monitoring Management Packs.

We have been using 2012 R2 for two years, and 2007 R2 for five years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. None, whatsoever.

I previously used NetIQ AppManager. Another great product, taking a different approach to monitoring. But if you have Microsoft System Centre licenses at your disposal, why pay for another product on top of that.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We implemented it in-house. Follow the rules and it will work.

We were already paying for System Centre licensing, so rolling out SCOM only cost us in time and materials, and not in licensing.

Having been in IT for over 20 years, with Microsoft, you know what you are getting. I have not logged a single support case for this product, whereas with other, similar products, I would log cases every month. It’s extremely well-tested and you know what you are getting: quality.

It integrates with your Windows environment seamlessly and provides a lot of visibility on your Windows environment. If you use SCCM as well, it integrates beautifully with it.

The interface doesn't provide any graphical view of your topology, you only see a bunch of alerts, monitors, etc. Humans are visual creatures and if you can see at a glance what's going on in your infrastructure, that's added value to me.

You can create dashboards to create views of your infrastructure but I feel that this should come out of the box.

It generates a lot of false positives, probably due to misconfiguration or because it doesn't have an intuitive algorithm to pinpoint the root of the problem

You need to add a lot of management packs in order to manage different devices, instead of SCOM containing these already out of the box, I'm talking about vendors such as Citrix and VMware. Even Exchange and SQL Server monitors are not configured out of the box, it requires configuration. This should come straight away configured for you, especially as SQL Server and Exchange are Microsoft products!

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It lacks capabilities to properly monitor other devices or infrastructure that is not Microsoft based, stuff like Linux, UNIX, Cisco routers, switches. I mean, since it is not the core of the product, the monitoring capabilities on these devices is very basic if I compare it with CA Spectrum which it used to be a network product that evolved into something else to cover other critical and important areas like Application and Systems performance and Servers/Systems in general.

In New Zealand, it's 4/5.

Configuration of alerts and monitors is very convoluted. You need to configure four or five different places to make a monitor work.

The price is OK, and I think the licensing works the same as any other Microsoft product.

I find this product very clunky and not very intuitive to use, it took me a while to find my way around and understand where I needed to go to configure or even get a report is a bit complicated.