SCOM Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

I’m an IT consultant. My customers are using SCOM because they can more easily integrate it with their current Microsoft IT infrastructure, and because the monitoring power of SCOM is enough for servers, services and some apps. Some of my customers are monitoring their network devices with SCOM. More specialized monitoring for network devices require other tools (most of the time) like SolarWinds and/or Fluke, etc. My customers are using SCOM to avoid business disruptions.

Microsoft SCOM can be improved about the way it is presented. Microsoft needs to train more people about how to sell SCOM (and other System Center family products) because there are a lot of emerging technologies that are replacing Microsoft. The vendor could create better training campaigns to avoid their replacement by other emerging technologies.

Think about the cloud. Try to move everything (if it is possible) to the cloud. You will save a lot of money on monitoring themes because most of the cloud services include it, so you don’t have to worry about monitoring. (Azure is an example.)

Microsoft is currently more valuable because this brand is wide used. Microsoft is also cheaper than Riverbed’s APM offering, but it is a matter of time because there are another brands conducting successful marketing / testing / training campaigns to replace Microsoft.

Asset monitoring and auto alerts are the most valuable features of this product to me.

We are a service provider of these solutions to our clients. And we can see the change, how the IT team were able to have control and adapt quickly with SCOM.

The dashboard is still not so great and, most of the time, a third-party tool is required for presentation. There is a lot of room for improvement here.

Thorough analysis of the current environment and the goals that need to be achieved should be defined (from an end-results point of view) before rolling out SCOM. If the groundwork is not properly done, SCOM implementation can cost the organization.