SCSM Reviews

I use SCSM for a telecom company.

My company had planned a few months ago to apply SCSM over the cloud in order to provide updates, like regular updates, but it had to be put through a few tools from Microsoft on the cloud, which was not easy. My company found a solution to the problem, but we did not execute it, though we plan to execute it within the coming few months to check if it works or what obstacles users might face.

I have been using SCSM for twenty to twenty-five years. My company has a partnership with Microsoft.

It is one of the most stable solutions in the market.

The solution's technical support is fine, especially if a user has a contract with them. I rate the technical support an eight to nine out of ten.

Positive

From an ROI perspective, the solution helps my organization save time, effort, and everything else.

My company chose SCSM over other tools in the market since it is one of the most stable and reliable tools.

The tool is good and functions well enough.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

We are a system integrator and this is one of the solutions that we provide to our customers.

I have used 2012, 2015, and 2019 versions of this solution and have seen all of the different features. I am quite sure that I can do almost anything that is available in the suite, but I primarily generate customized reports.

SCSM is easy to learn because all of the material, including training videos, can be found online. When I went for training on this solution, I found it easy to learn.

SCSM integrates well with other Microsoft solutions.

Better integration with other services in Azure is needed because everything is moving from on-premises to the cloud, and as an integrator, we have to help our clients with the migration. I would also like to see integration with open-source solutions allowed. In general, we would like to have the integration process made simpler.

Technical support can be improved.

I am been using Microsoft System Center Service Manager for six years.

With respect to stability, it depends on whether the solution is deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Microsoft is dropping some of the other solutions, like SCOM. This has some people worried that Microsoft will drop all of the on-premises solutions and force them to go to the cloud. This would be a big problem for some people.

Scaling SCSM is very easy. When I looked at different solutions that work similarly, I realized that SCSM is comparably easy to deploy.

Our customers are varied in size and SCSM is suitable for companies of all sizes. We have implemented this solution for banks and big companies, as well as for small and growing companies. We will go on with the deployment if the customer has sufficient demand and they can pay the licensing fees.

The first time that I contacted technical support is when I was integrating with InTune, in a cloud-based deployment. I have found that the level of support is the same that I can do for myself, so many times, I visit the site to get information. Because support cannot always give me what I need, I often do not have time to call them. When I search through the site, I get the information I need.

The main difference between SCSM and similar solutions is integration. Microsoft can seamlessly integrate with all of the other solutions. There are some products that also integrate well, but it requires somebody with experience to implement it.

For anybody who has the training, this is an easy solution to set up.

When I first deployed this solution, it took me about five days. The reason it took this length of time is that I was integrating with WSUS, and it is a separate server so there are a lot of patches that need to be done.

In other cases, the initial setup is more straightforward.

We implement this solution for our clients.

Some customers have integrated this solution with InTune to manage the web part of it.

The initial concept of SCSM was very nice, but after the 2012 version, they have been changing it and integrating it with the cloud. Major changes have been happening about every two years. As a system integrator, we are liaising with them to discuss ideas about what customers want and in what direction they are moving.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to be sure about what it is they need and what problem they are trying to solve. Sometimes when we sit with a customer and analyze what they need, we find that they do not require a lot of the features that are available. However, even when the whole solution is deployed, the customer may be unsatisfied if the intended goal is not achieved. This is why I advise customers to know exactly what it is they would like to do.

System Center Service Manager is a good product, and it is very easy to use. If Microsoft packaged this solution in a better way then people would appreciate it more.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is our ITSM solution.

It is quite scalable.

There is no development with this product, and we had to go and buy additional ITSM solutions to sit on top of it. We had to buy products from companies like Cireson and Cased Dimensions in order to get the functionality that we need out of it. So, we're using Service Manager as an engine, rather than as a full-blown product. It is the engine, but we have other products sitting on top of it to make it work properly.

It has limited stability and support, and it is also complex to deploy.

I have been using this solution for nearly 10 years.

Its stability is limited. There are bugs in it that Microsoft isn't fixing.

It is quite scalable.

It is fairly limited. So, we buy additional support from another company.

It is complex to deploy.

It comes free with the enterprise agreement that we have, but the expense really is in having to buy another product to sit on top of it to make it work properly. You wind up having to buy additional support and additional products with their own support and maintenance costs on top of that.

I would not recommend this solution. If I was starting again, I wouldn't get this product. We didn't have to buy it, and it was free with our enterprise agreement, but if I was going again, I'd go to the market and buy another product.

If you've got Service Manager, I would recommend buying a solution from Cireson. They provide a browser interface and a whole pile of additional applications that sit on top of it. That's how you can get the features that are not in the product itself. The product is just an engine, and it is not very user-friendly.

I would rate it a four out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution to log calls and also for change and patch management.

The call logging is the solution's most valuable feature. It's very easy to use.

The solution isn't too resource-intensive.

The patch management aspect of the solution should be improved. It's quite complicated and not user-friendly. If your systems are not patched properly, you are unable to pull reports.

They should make it easy to use and to make it possible for users to log calls on the portal. It needs to be web-based. 

The solution is stable.

I've never tested the scalability of the solution. We only have about 10 to 20 users on it right now. We don't have plans to increase the usage right now.

We're happy with technical support. They've been fairly responsive. We log a call with Microsoft and they are able to log in and fix the problem for us.

We did previously use a different solution. It was something that we had developed internally.

The initial setup is quite complex. It requires someone with advanced knowledge to install it.

We outsourced the implementation to a consultant. They were very good and knew exactly what to do.

This solution uses the Microsoft licensing model. We pay every three years. The license includes support.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

The product is very good, aside from the patch management. I'd rate the solution five out of ten. If the patch management was better, I'd rate it much higher.

I am using this solution as a customer to do what it was built for: to help us be more efficient in tracking and delivering our services.  

The most valuable feature in this solution for me is the reporting.  

I have not made up my mind about what really needs to be improved. Overall, I am pleased with it mostly because it supplies the reports I need. As far as other features, it performs what I need it to do.  

Probably the price and configuration could both be a bit improved.  

I have been using SCSM (System Center Service Manager) for the last three years.  

We have not had any bugs or glitches with the stability of the solution that I have noticed. It is stable.  

We currently have 25 users for the product. It is a mixture of engineers and end-users.  

We have your own team for maintenance and do not really need to use support.  

We previously used SCCM (System Center Configuration Manager) and SCCPM (Software Configuration, Change, and Process Management).  

We actually still use all of these solutions. We just apply them in different use cases.  

The initial setup was pretty simple. The deployment part did not take long at all.  

It is an amazing solution but the pricing could be improved to be a little more competitive.  

I would recommend this as a solution to other people considering it. But just as with everything and anything, people need to educate themselves as to the services that the application offers. It has to fit the need to be worth the cost and effort to understand.  
 
On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate System Center Service Manager as an eight. It would not be higher because nothing is perfect and it does have some faults.  

We use this for ticketing. Initially, it is just like ticketing but we wanted to have some change management configuration as well. The possibility for change management and the ticketing system are the two main use cases for this product for us. 

The integration part of the product is the most valuable for my uses. Because at the base and out of the box, all the products that you use are already talking to each other. Microsoft has a very good solution. At the back, I have an active directory, I have an Operations Manager, I have the Configuration Manager, I have the Orchestrator, I have a data protection manager, and a solution for the virtualizing management as well — VMM (Virtual Machine Manager). With all of these products integrated together, when I have got a ticket it should be visible in many places. I can do automated orchestration based on the scenario. This is awesome. I can shut down as many things as I like. If I have got something wrong — if I got a critical high alert — I can even shut down my whole infrastructure within a very short period of time. 

So the integration of the whole Microsoft suites is awesome. At one end, I'm using the Virtual Machine Manager that is the core of the infrastructure. Then I have to config the manager to have the complete listing of all the items of IP in my whole environment. Then I configure the Operations Manager as well. So the ticketing system is all I need to use for any of the component products. If I get an alarm and I need to call the Operation Manager, it is just one right-click to open the menu and I can automatically open ticket orders right on that alarm. When you click it, it will open the CSM (Customer Service Management) interface. I can do it seamlessly. The whole thing works with SSO (Single Sign-on) from the backend and it is very nice and completely integrated. A very convenient package like an all-in-one tool but it is actually five or six products acting well together. 

The ticketing can be automated and I can also manually create the ticket on a particular severity level. For the other IT products — even something like BMC Remedy — SCSM will integrate with these other products and you can generate alarms from those as well. There are many things it can do. But in the BMC example, the monitoring is not done by the BMC Remedy product itself. It is a pure IT solution with SCSM and CMDB (Configuration Management Database) controlling the process. Microsoft manages it so all things are working together once they are integrated.

In SCSM (System Center Service Manager) there is a need to be cognizant of the management of the CMDB (Configuration Management Database). It needs to be improved. My initial base experience for alarms was BMC Remedy, and that works really well. From that example, I could see the concept of what the CMDB does but also what it was not doing. So in the SCSM, you can improve the CMDB by using customization on the interface. Because you are able to add configuration items a little easier, SCSM can be much better at doing the job that you need it to do. If I need a separate tool for customization or to add a class, this is the hard way and it makes the tool harder to use. For example, if I need to add a level of severity or if I need to add something else which is not related to IT in some other product, that ends up being harder to customize in BMC than SCSM — even if I know about CMDB. 

Products that are more difficult will, of course, make it a little tricky for people with less experience to work with. In SCSM, there are some features they provide for you to customize. It is a very easy graphic interface where you can add your stuff in a very easy way. It is different than doing it with the CSM (Content Management System). I know how to do it with CSM because I have already done it. But for the other people with less experience, it is much harder in BMC if you look at the level of difficulty by comparison. 

I would like to also see improvements in the CMDB. One of the recommendations I will make is that searches for ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) level V3 or V4 compliant software at SCSM have more complete disclosure. There is no real database, resource or content that exists to help support users find this information. It puzzles me as to why because it can only enhance the utility of the software.

If you search the internet, you will not even see if Microsoft SCSM is compliant with some particular software. It is compliant, and I know it is compliant, but I do not know if it is fully or partially or only marginally compliant. This type of information should be made readily available and should be there to access as the manufacturer knows the answers and compliances.

I used the product for at least five years, from before the time that it was a mature product.

For many years with Microsoft, if there was some problem, the common solution was that you just restart the machine. This is what users had been doing for ten or fifteen years. Previously, I had a very bad experience with the stability of Windows 2008, Windows 2008R2 and the configuration manager as well. It would need to be restarted often. But now my experience improved a lot. The release in 2012 was a really amazing improvement. Then in 2016 it improved more — and even more in 2019. The stability of the products might have been something of a problem and even a joke before, but now it is really much, much better. 

Of course, the product is scalable. I think that you can add 100,000 configuration items or even more than that. I do not remember exactly, but it is much more than before with earlier versions and probably more than most people will ever need.

Normally Microsoft support will become directly involved with you only if you are a big enterprise. They give you a big tour, they may even give you a resident engineer. But normally you get support from the vendors or from the partners. If the vendors or the partners can resolve your issues then that is okay. Otherwise, the partner will open up a ticket with Microsoft directly. 

I think, overall, it is a good service and solution. Sometimes it takes a little time to get a resolution, but it depends upon the severity level of the issue. If you have an SLA (Service Level Agreement) the partners work hand-in-hand with Microsoft. The support is very nice and it works well, but you need to pay more to get the service and this is the only thing about working with technical support that some people will not want to do.

I was using the product in 2012 and after that, I left it for a while because I had to use a different solution for a different purpose and a different job. I had just been switching between jobs and doing this or that. For a time, I was using BMC Remedy and I was managing to work with it pretty well. It was deployed by the client. At that time, I was working with Huawei.

BMC Remedy, too, is a good solution. Then I changed jobs again and, for a while, I used an open-source solution called iTop. It is an exact copy of BMC Remedy with only a few things missing. So between times where I was working with System Center, it was a quite long time — more than five years. Now I am working with it again as a service manager myself.

At my current job, I'm a consultant. So when the vendor told me they were going to use System Center in 2016, I had to learn how everything worked again. I knew the product before and it was good. After we did a small deployment and went to see the demos, we decided to go with SCSM. We told our clients that it would work perfectly. We started working on a big government project that I needed to add sites, or apps, and some other items which are not actually IT. I hadn't done these things before so it was not very easy at first, but it was possible. You just needed to add and define a new clause and you could do many things. After that, we realized it was pretty easy and that we could add anything that we wanted. That type of flexibility was really an attractive point.

From the infrastructure perspective, the setup is not a big deal. It is really simple. But from the operation perspective, you need to define the SLA (Service Level Agreement) and you need to define how you use the chain management copy process. You need to define your own clauses and many things that can take six months or one year. It depends on your situation. If you need to customize it, the customizing takes time. 

Many of the things are out of the box and they do not need a lot of customization. On the other hand, too much customization is not the way it should go. It may cause problems later. It should be as straightforward as possible for deployment and not add complexity just for complexity's sake. A little development for a few things, especially for the integration, should be what you want to shoot for.

I was an assistant administer before for 10 years. So all these products have gone through my hands. I know them all. I have clients and consult with them on their deployments. Some have already deployed SCSM or I may have clients who are looking to implement SCSM in their organization. I have to evaluate what each type of client needs and make appropriate suggestions. I deploy myself because I have the hands-on experience.

If you use the complete product and you can fully support the Microsoft System Center, the ROI is very high with this product. What we do normally — and as I see customers do — we are only using a small number of features available in all the individual products we license. Just like when I use SCSM, I only use it for ticketing or some other specific task. It is not utilizing what the product can do.

For Configuration Manager, only using it for the automatic deployment to push updates and nothing else is not utilizing the product, because it can do much more. For the Operations Manager, we normally only just use it for monitoring the alarms, and again it can do much more. If I go to the dashboard and I learn to use the product for capacity planning and the other features that can help me with my productivity, its ROI is higher. It is just a matter of learning about the product and taking advantage of it in ways that help you make the most of what you do and how it can help you do it.

The licensing costs are very tricky. As far as I know, it is very tricky for all people involved in using or reselling systems center — and sometimes it confused me. It is easy to recognize that in the earlier stages, the licensing scheme was different. Now you pay for the infrastructure level. You have to pay based on the processor and core. The requirements changed to eight cores for the infrastructure. Then if you need the tech support it is extra as part of the license. In my situation, I do not want to have the support contract from Microsoft because the partner will do support for me. So even to this point, the licensing is sometimes a little complex rather than straightforward. 

The conditions of the license depend upon the number of items in the infrastructure, but that is only one part of the agreement. That would be how many servers or how many instances are need to deploy based on the actual scenario and configuration. They increase the license cost according to individual situations based on how many devices need to be monitored. The products themselves come in a bundle, which is easy. You need to just purchase the desired package for the products. But licensing is actually not as simple as just picking the package of products. If I get the products in one of the bundled licensing schemes, I will get those products. But for the products, I need to buy additional licenses. So there are a lot of factors that drive the final license cost.

By comparison, VMware — and with many other products — licensing can be very straightforward. But this is not the case for Microsoft SCSM.

Before I was a consultant at SRB, and right now I'm working as a consultant and exploring additional products. Since the time before when the product was not that mature, I was not using SCSM for those few years. Now the product has been really changed. Especially the integration and configuration. And then also with the inclusion of Operation Manager and the Orchestrator. It is quite good now in comparison to the BMC Remedy and iTop.

My advice to anyone considering the SCSM solution would be to figure out if it is the product for you by evaluating what you already have as a base and what you want to accomplish. If it is already a Microsoft shop and it is using virtual machines and using Active Directory and if all the machines are Windows-based, this is one thing. It is an easy decision. It is clear that if I'm using the virtual infrastructure from Hyper-V, we virtualize stuff and all the products and infrastructure make us a Microsoft shop, definitely go for the System Center.

But, for example, if I'm working with VMware already, just go for that solution. VMware also has a lot of products. All this functionality is available using them. Or almost all. I don't think they have a ticketing system. It may have changed now. But for the configuration, they have a lot of products and opportunities. But with VMware, if you want to have it so you have Microsoft as a VM inside, it is much better to go with Microsoft instead of using something else on top of it.

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I rate this product as a seven. Maybe even between six and seven. This is because there are a few things they need to improve, especially in the interface. If you are only talking about rating the SCSM as a product, it is a different story. I'm talking about the whole System Center portfolio. SCSM cannot work alone. It needs System Center Configuration Manager at the back. If the configuration management is not there, it is very hard to manage the SCSM by itself. SCSM does not have its own CMDB. The CMDB is coming from the Configuration Manager. So it is not really a single product. If it were a complete product, and I could run it purely in one integrated solution, the rating would be higher.

We have the product installed on-premise but we are starting to integrate some of the cloud functionality. We are a systems integrator so we deploy the solution for our clients. We're deploying it for some banks that are big companies. We're doing for some small companies that are growing to help them with their growth. It depends on the demand of the customer and whether the customer can pay the license that is attached to it. So if the customer can pay, we go on with the deployment.

Microsoft System Center Service Manager is a good product. It seems very easy. It's better than most of the other solutions. But if you look at some of the packaging that goes with other solutions, they have only just a few features. They cannot do what Microsoft can do. But because of their packaging and whatever they do, they seem to cover Microsoft in some areas.

For this product, they are supposed to have an integration that will work with other resources in Microsoft Azure and other cloud providers because everything is going towards Azure now. I see how people are moving from on-premise to the cloud. So that's the direction we are looking at. And as an integrator, we're supposed to tell them the importance of it and how they will migrate and move on. We would like the integration process to be more simplified. They would have to allow some open-source that is a good product to speak to them even to lead to the open-source product. If the open-source product wants to talk to Microsoft or Service Manager they should have an API to do it.

I've been using Microsoft System Center Service Manager for six years now.

Microsoft has been changing, and It's still changing. It's like its working on some future solution in the System Center. Integrating more features in the cloud. So it's starting to provide some of the solutions. Microsoft uses the System Center to manage all the applications in the cloud and people are still afraid that they may drop everything and make everybody go to the cloud.

Microsoft System Center Service Manager scales very easily. Compared to other solutions that work similarly, I find that it's very easy to deploy. The customization seems to be easy as well. But if that person did not know the primal asset office and IT solutions it is more difficult.

I contacted support when I did the integration in the cloud. That is the first time I contacted support. It seems that the support is at the same level I am. So many times I go to the website of Microsoft to get information. But sometimes the documentation cannot give me exactly what I need. This makes me frustrated because I don't have time to call. They need to improve their support. When you cannot support the company that has your solution people will start to jump to another company that has a similar solution where somebody can support them if they have a problem. Bad support drives away in the business.

The initial setup is very nice. But after 2012 they changed the pattern of the solution because they are integrating it with the cloud. It takes more time to make a change. Because it's as if to say the change occurs every two years. I'm talking about people. People that manage it. I teach them about every two years to do it. When I started with it, I went for training, after the training, it was easy for me. So I cannot say that it's something somebody cannot easily learn from scratch from different services. Because all the material is online even video training is there. It is pretty easy to set up if you have the right training. It took me five days to set up. This included integrating WSCS with ACCM.

The difference between them is the integration. Because Microsoft can do a seamless integration to all the solutions. But when you are dealing with a third party you have to look for a problem, do the customization before you start allowing it to speak to the solution. So that is what is different between them but some of them are okay. Then some of them can be easily integrated some experience for somebody to arrive at a good answer.

Others that need this product that want to implement this product need to know what they need and be knowledgable about it. The problem we're having with the customer is they don't know what they need. After sitting with them we analyze and see what they need. They may not even require a lot of features in that solution which seems to be easy for us but when that customer is knowledgable even if we deploy the whole portions of the solution that person will not be surprised if something is not achieved. So I advise customers to know exactly what they need in each System Center Service Manager. 

I would rate it at a nine out of ten.

We use it when we want to push out OS upgrades to our users around the world.

In years past we used to go to the client to upgrade, etc. It was quite cumbersome. The solution has made managing the environment streamlined and much easier. I don't have to go to the client physically.

The remote access is one of the features I really enjoy. The pushing of email updates and things like that are very good. Also, the solution's patches have been very useful.

It crashes our client's computers. Sometimes they get blue screens. It would be useful if SCSM could check the upgrades or patches before we implemented them to see if they are going to crash a client's system. Or, if it does install, and the client's system crashes, it would be good if the solution could revert back somehow.

The solution is quite stable. We don't have errors or bugs or anything like that.

The solution is scalable. It's easy to expand. We don't have plans to increase usage at this time, however.

Technical support is good. They are very responsive.

The solution we had previously was more manual. We had to physically go to the computer to update everything.

The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't that user-friendly. My team had to play around with it a bit.

We implemented the solution ourselves.

I think it's the value for money we are seeing in terms of ROI. We've saved a lot of man-hours. We have branches in the US and a lot of times in the past it used to involve you going over there, you meet your team member and having to actually fly physically. Now, most of the software we do remotely.

We are using the private cloud deployment model.

The advice I would give to others attempting to implement the solution is that you need to have a thorough, good understanding of the application, or else it may seem a bit complicated. Whoever is going to use it has to understand it or get some training. 

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.