SCOM Reviews

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.

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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.

• 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

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.

We used SCOM for monitoring the health of the servers. The SCOM agent was very reliable in our environment and used to trigger alerts immediately, which helped us to take care of the servers without any critical impact to the client.

SCOM has helped us to reduce the time taken to address the issue and identify the false alerts triggered in an efficient manner. It's a reliable tool when it comes to monitoring and can be implemented in an environment which hosts critical information and has high revenue for the organization.

I feel that the stability of the tool has room for improvement and I would like to see that in the next version.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There have been issues with instability.

It has scaled for our needs.

Does a great job with Microsoft technologies. Decent with other technologies (Unix/Java).

Very expensive now that you are forced to buy entire System Center suite, although comparable to other monitoring solutions that include basic APM. Dashboards are pretty weak.

One of the most important features of SCOM is the Reporting Server role which runs on the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It’s responsible for rendering and scheduling reports. With Operations Manager, you have extract reporting capabilities and multiple report libraries that you can select from to customize reports to your own granular requirements.

It will help you to visualize the data in your environment. The reports provide high-level summaries and detailed information about your systems and can be e-mailed on a specified schedule or simply exported and printed out. The reporting server performs queries against the Operations Manager data warehouse database and returns the results in a number of easy-to-read formats.

Another point, you can import management packs available for Microsoft products, which you can customize thresholds of several counters of each product. Also, you can create your management pack and define your customizations.

This tool could be improved especially for tasks for our Capacity Planning Team and Monitoring Team. The Capacity Planning Team collect data through the reports from the Operations Manager for the memory, CPU and disks during the month. The use this to make dashboards to show their customers about their environment. With this, it’s possible to show environment of each customer.

For the Monitoring Team, it helps monitor a simple and complex environment in IT sending determinate alerts. For example, if your team receives a determined kind of alert, they will work on the solution before that problem occurs. Through the Operations Console, the Monitoring Team can see critical and warning alerts and if necessary, dispatch for a responsible team is the Database Team, Operating System Team or Exchange Team, etc. It’s clear that it's also possible to send alerts creating split groups for Database Team, Operation System Team, and send alerts for the respective products to the team responsible. It depends on each organization.

I think that it should be made possible to monitor private systems, which are developed in each company. In my opinion, this option already exists in SCOM 2012, however we have a lack of resources to develop this.

In this company, SCOM has been in place since 2006, starting with MOM in 2005 and after that, it was upgrade to SCOM 2007.

I've used it to monitor several Microsoft Servers, which I've customized thresholds to support in Exchange, File Servers, SQL Servers, Clusters and others products.

I had issues with SCOM 2007 and MOM 2005, regarding the view of alerts in the Console Operations. It delayed showing critical alerts to the monitoring Team, because they could not see alerts in the Operations Console. For this kind of issue, I had issues with database maintenance as well.

I have a contact at Microsoft Premier, and I find it necessary to us them to open a case with Microsoft, if they think that it's possible to fix the issue.

In another company, I’ve had experience with BMC Patrol, Tivolli and SiteScope as NETQoS products, but this tool I’ve worked with administration.

There were no issues with setting up SCOM.

Follow the best practices and there should be no issues.

Both SCOM and WhatsUp Gold afford us in-depth troubleshooting capabilities.

SCOM: The product has helped our organization with in-depth monitoring.

WhatsUp Gold: The product has helped our organization with VM monitoring.

Both SCOM and WhatsUp Gold could use some system enhancements, such as better dashboards.

SCOM: I have used SCOM for about eighteen months.

WhatsUp Gold: I have used WhatsUp Gold for nine years.

We did not encounter any stability issues with either product.

We did not encounter any scalability issues with either product.

For both products, I would give technical support a rating of 6/10.

We previously used open-source solutions before switching to SCOM and WhatsUp Gold.

SCOM: The initial setup was complex.

WhatsUp Gold: The initial setup was easy.

For both products, the pricing and licensing are fair.

Before choosing these products, we evaluated Symantec.