SCOM Reviews

• Monitoring Windows servers and services
• Monitoring Linux servers and services
• Monitoring disk space, performance and unexpected errors
• Customized views
• Ability to implement remote login and ping directly from the SCOM console

SCOM is a required tool in my job since I am responsible in overseeing multiple virtual and physical servers and services for a bank.

The warnings and errors I receive such as low disk space warnings allow me to easily determine the impact it has on the server and call out the required people to get the issue resolved before it's too late

Having the ability for it to be integrated with third party ticket systems or other monitoring software would make an even better tool for people like myself within administrative or monitoring positions.

We've used it for one year.

There were no issues encountered during the deployment.

Because SCOM currently runs on a Citrix session, SCOM sometimes becomes slow or crashes when there is too much going on.

There were no issues scaling it.

I've never had to contact Microsoft for a SCOM issue.

We are using Centreon and Nagios monitoring software. These two are web-based and maybe if SCOM can incorporate a web console, it would become a real powerful tool.

Since SCOM and its customized features were already set-up when I arrived, I cannot comment on this. I have not installed SCOM in the past so I also cannot comment on the installation process.

A third party vendor set-up SCOM before I started in this position so I cannot comment.

In order to use all the features in SCOM, one must learn the tool from the inside out and then customize it so that it fits the paricular business. This way you know the foundations and are able to build a robust tool to monitor and control a large amount of servers and services across the world

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.

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.

Extensible dashboards allow us to create customized service-level dashboards for business owners.

.NET monitoring capabilities are crucial for our organization to monitor the availability and performance of our IIS-based .NET applications.

Network monitoring also completes the monitoring story by providing visibility over the network layer. All backend routers and switches are monitored by SCOM and also we consume some third-party network management packs to extend the capability.

SCOM provided end-to-end monitoring for all aspects of the infrastructure, including web sites, network devices, databases and applications. Now, c-level management can easily see overall service-level dashboards and SLAs for mission-critical services.

I would like to see true multi-tenancy support. When it comes to service provider type of customers, it's quite difficult to have a complete monitoring view for different tenants. The System Center suite is not designed for true multi-tenancy overall. But SCOM is also lacking some multi-tenant environment requirements.

I have used it for nine years.

High-available deployment with SQL always on requires detailed planning and testing before production implementation. We needed different internal teams involved in the planning phase including the network team for bandwidth utilization, the database team for SQL and application owners. We also encountered some problems while implementing SQL always on on a multi-site SCOM deployment. We resolved problems by contacting Microsoft support.

Single-server deployment was quite straightforward. We deployed it for a POC and pre-prod environment. Online TechNet articles cover most of the steps. But when it comes to HA design for multiple datacenters, it gets complicated.

Also, we had to use PowerShell for some settings to reduce the deployment time. SCOM shell commands are not enough to achieve most of the tasks so we used SDK instead of PowerShell, which was an oddly difficult experience.

I have done both types of implementations in the past. See below.

The planning phase is crucial. Also note that SCOM admin can not plan the whole infrastructure. All application owners should be involved in planning phase. Also, post-configuration tasks should be taken care of by application owners, such as custom monitors, tunings for alerts, etc.

• 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 fact that you can create you own MP to monitor customs apps, servers, networking connections, etc. is very valuable. It can be integrate with ticket systems.

After a proper setup and MP fine tuning it offers a very fast view of your entire environment or just a special app, etc.

Dashboards, Dashboards, Dashboards. It will be nice to have the power of Live Maps with the built in dashboards.

More than 4 years

The suite is a monster. Without a clear strategy and fine tuning can produce a lot of noise (unnecessary noise) or miss critical aspects of your environment.

Some issues with DBs growing without reason. Nothing too unusual. I think the product is very stable and mature. Has a very easy system of redundancy.

No, nothing unusual. It's very stable, more Management servers can be add later, out of box redundant, etc.

Normal for Microsoft :), tickets, a lot of money, etc. Sometimes more easy and fast is to search on dedicated forums and blogs.

Is Microsoft :), you pay more better support. But the product is popular so many forums, blogs, etc., including resources in TechNet.

Cacti, Nagios, SolarWinds. The System Center 2012 R2 is really powerful, all products works great together. Is not so expensive any more, easy to licensees. Can cover from end to end (Networking, Hardware layer,OS , App and services, ports, etc.).

The initial setup is easy for a sysadmin, but the proper settings and MP tuning require a lot of attention. Out of box it works but not for enterprise level.

I'm a SCOM consultant so I can tell you that proper configuration and tuning, development of custom MP (management pack) for custom needs a lot of effort and is not cheap at all :).

This is a very complex discussions. If you have a proper engineers to handle this solution, if also you use SCCM, SCOM, Orchestrator, Service manager, all together can ad more value at same cost of one.

Microsoft simplified a lot the licensing so only two licence Standard and Datacenter. SQL and management servers are free.

Cacti, Nagios, SolarWinds. Are many on the market. Because is Microsoft large corporate received very good prices so over all is not to expensive like SolarWinds.

So if you want to implement this software initial installation is easy. But a high level of understanding of your own business needs is required. You need clear process to setup MP.