SCOM Reviews

• Ease of deployment capability
• Role-based automatic monitoring threshold deployment via MP

We used SCOM as our centralized pane of glass. We had other tools that were also directed to SCOM. Our NOC analysts were able to quickly see alerts and resolve. SCOM was able to monitor our Windows environment very well.

SCOM will allow you to go from firefighting mode to a more proactive stance when finding issues.

SCOM agents have a heavy footprint. Would like a lighter, more-efficient footprint. It takes a developer’s mindset to fully utilize SCOM’s potential. I would like easier deployment of MP and custom monitors.

I have used this solution for five years.

We had no issue during deployment and SCOM was pretty stable. We did run into a database limitation that brought us down every day for a week until Microsoft isolated the issue. Once they sent us a hot fix, we were up and running with no issues.

I rate technical support 7/10.

Setup was straightforward, not hard at all.

We installed SCOM with an in-house team. If you have a good relationship with Microsoft, they will have chalk talk conversations with you and tell what their best practice would be. After we had these talks, we installed and deployed ourselves.

We also evaluated HP OpenView, Zenoss, SolarWinds, and CA UIM.

SCOM works well for Windows, but if you need a broader solution and have a heterogeneous environment, SCOM is lacking.

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.

Distributed applications, application performance monitoring, dashboard view, network monitoring, auditing services are the most valuable features.

Proactively monitoring the infrastructure servers and applications and reporting issues. Dashboards are very valuable to enable day-to-day monitoring.

Customizing management packs, fine tuning of alerts, monitors and creating new tasks reflected on the required group of servers.

9 years

Yes, installing some prerequisites sometime produced issues, installing SQL on a remote server as well might produce some challenges in installing SCOM

Yes, the console was not stable at the early versions of 2007 product, opening multiple consoles might cause a crash. web console might hang when opening multiple sessions as well.

Usually no, you can easily scale SCOM by adding a new server to the exiting pool of servers, it was much of a challenge in the old versions of SCOM

The level of customer service provided is very good, you will be supported for installation issue, configuration and usage.

The level of technical support provided is very good, technical support team will always provide the needed support.

No, it was always SCOM the primary monitoring solution used since it always fit the requirements.

It was straightforward, with the guide documentation it is easy to deploy and configure SCOM servers and components.

We are a service provider company and we implemented SCOM over 100 times at different customer premises, using all different versions of SCOM.

The license is very cheap compared to other products, and with SCOM license you get a license for all system center products.

SCOM was the primary Monitoring solution chosen. it is always fulfilling our customers requirements.

SCOM is a Microsoft solution designed primary to Monitor Microsoft servers and applications, capable of Monitoring Non-Microsoft OS and applications as well.

• Performance data on Windows VMs

• Ability to have a lot of out of the box management packs with key monitors in place
• Ease of use

Ability to know when servers are offline through agent heartbeats.

Dashboarding and application performance management.

Three years.

No we did not.

Yes we did have some, but with Microsoft's assistance (RAS) we were able to gain more insight and improve.

No we did not.

8/10.

8/10.

Used Foglight but it was extremely difficult to learn and pick up as a monitoring solution.

It was all done in-house.

Included as part of MS ELA.

Yes - Quest Foglight and Nimsoft

If you are a large Microsoft shop then this product excels in monitoring Microsoft services.

Our primary use case is to monitor if the system is healthy and running well. 

The features we find most useful would be the automatic thresholds when disks are running full. If CPUs are causing high CPU load then we will be notified with triggers.

Price is always an issue with Microsoft and could be improved.

The solution is stable. It's working fine.

The solution is scalable. If you want to monitor more you have to buy more licenses, but you can add on. We don't plan to increase usage.

I haven't called technical support yet.

We had nothing essential in an enterprise managing console. This is relatively simple tooling, but we didn't have another solution on this scale.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment wasn't that long. Maybe a couple of days. We needed half a day for the installation and then three to four days for implementing and configuring all the monitoring agents. Deployment is not a big job, so you just need one person and then after that, you just need someone for an hour a day on the system.

Initial setup was done with a bit of additional support and then we added more and more services.

It's a Microsoft product so if you are using a lot of other vendors, other operating systems, then it's less compatible. For us, we're 99% Microsoft so it's not an issue. On this solution, the things we monitor are fine and perhaps other users will want more, but for our purpose and what we use it for, it's enough.

Once it's completed, you only get triggered by emails and you can respond to those emails so when the system does its thing it's not that complex. It's very simple.

I would rate this solution eight out of 10.

Deep integration with Windows provides in-depth monitoring and the management packs model ensures that products in the environment are supported or will be supported.

Proactive monitoring has helped us prepare and mitigate potential issues before they even happen. This comes in the monitoring of general server health and custom alerts for event log entries that are known indicators of potential issues.

GUI performance is the one aspect where I can see that improvement on it will make customers happy.

3rd Party Plugins for SCOM are also great, but some of them are quite expensive to implement due to the depth of function they provide. Maybe Microsoft should integrate the basic functionalities of some of them.

I've used it for two years.

The deployment of SCOM is pretty straightforward. You just need to make sure that the pre-requisites have been installed correctly and then SCOM itself should be a breeze to install.

Stability is subjective and based from experience. It is directly affected by the server hardware where SCOM is installed.

No. SCOM is scalable as you can add Management Servers as needed. You can also add more resources to the host server and it will not cause issues in SCOM.

For enterprise customers, Microsoft is one of the best providers of customer service. The system in place for the customer service ensures that customers will get the value they have paid for.

As with the Customer Service, the technical support of Microsoft is very good since they are the ones who develop the product itself. It follows a process where you will be first served by level 1 support but they will escalate to the product team as need to ensure the issue is resolved.

Free tools found online are good but require a lot of knowledge in scripting. The SCOM Management Packs takes in the lead in this space.

It was straightforward. You just follow the setup guide provided but just need to make sure the pre-requisites are installed properly.

I have experienced both as part of in-house team and also as part of the vendor team. The vendor was experienced in the deployment and management of SCOM and have been since the early versions of it.

We did not calculate the ROI as our SLA is internal only. However, the fact that we can proactively monitor issues that may cause downtime is a statement of the benefit of SCOM.

Please contact your Microsoft Account Manager regarding this. It is different for each customer and for each country. The System Center licensing has different criteria and you should get the most applicable for your environment.

We have evaluated some of the "free" monitoring solutions. Some are easy to use while others are a bit complicated. We implemented SCOM because not only it was included in our System Center License, its usage was also straightforward.

SCOM can monitor a whole lot of products, not just generic server components. Make sure that you contact the product vendor and ask if they have Management Packs for SCOM.