What needs improvement with SCOM?

SCOM is not as straightforward in terms of user interface or general experience, which could be improved. Additionally, I would like to see a software-as-a-service version in Azure to eliminate the need for on-premise infrastructure.

Might be the APM (Application Performance Monitoring) solutions, which it lacks compared to other tools. I don't know what other tools are in the market, so I don't know what SCOM lacks. I need to check, as it depends on the requirements. Once other teams have the requirement, and if that is not fulfilled, maybe they would have chosen another tool. But for me, whatever requirement my user provided has been fulfilled via SCOM. So there might be a few other requirements, which are from other teams, like software development teams, Java teams, and so on. They might have different requirements, but I haven't got those in my scope. That's the problem. If they had been in my scope, I would have started exploring it, and then I would have known if it's lacking or if it's already there because I haven't used a few features in SCOM, like distributed application monitoring and other stuff. In future releases, I would like to see APM solutions and dashboards like Grafana. It's not like Grafana. If it is possible to integrate with Grafana, that would be great because I have a lot of data in the data warehouse. If I get a chance to integrate with Grafana, I can show it there because SCOM collects a lot of data from the servers.

They could provide better dashboards, detailed logs, and reports crucial for monitoring services in real-time.

SCOM needs to improve its usability.

In terms of improvement, direct integration with third-party tools, like ticketing systems, is lacking but would be beneficial.

The solution should have more tools for monitoring the cloud engine versus on-premise. It sufficiently covers the on premise modules, but more work needs to be done in terms of monitoring various nodes of the cloud-based environment. Since SCOM is a vast solution that covers so many areas, it would be nice to get an actual certification. I know Microsoft has discontinued certification on the SCOM and SCCM products.

Application monitoring must be improved. The product must provide support for monitoring virtualization. It is a complex tool. It is not easy to configure it.

The solution’s initial setup is difficult. SCOM should include more in-depth trend analysis.

Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement. I got a response from the TCS that whenever they try to patch or throw some updates to any of the computers, it takes a lot of time to apply and to get the job done on the recipient. As the system is very slow, people only opt for it a little and instead go for solutions like Ivanti and other third-party solutions.

Regarding certain issues in the solution, it can be difficult to generate reports if we have a program that is not user-friendly for reporting. While this is not necessarily negative, we may need to use another solution. We can explore alternatives through certain products from Azure, but it may still be difficult to generate reports without specific development. In short, I feel the reporting feature of the solution needs to be better since it is very difficult to have a report of the best quality.

There is no room for update or enhancement in SCOM because Microsoft has retired it as an on-prem solution and moved it to the cloud. The current version will be the last on-prem given Microsoft's push to move all their solutions to the cloud. The GI is difficult to work with and the reporting servers are also difficult. Another dimension that makes SCOM difficult is the number of components. The reporting server, the database, and the two components of the database (operational and warehouse) are all difficult to work with. This is why SCOM is a difficult solution to implement, configure, and troubleshoot.

The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage. Currently, a lot of people do not use SCOM because it is limited to strictly being on-premises, and many organizations are moving to the cloud.

In a future release, they should add email notification alerts.

There could be more integration of SIM in the solution.

We haven't upgraded the SCOM version yet, however, there's a few of the versions where we would like to have improvements in terms of more visibility into some of the details of the device. We'd like to be able to configure and push more granular policies into the device. Using iOS is an issue for us. It's not as deep as the Microsoft offering. We'd like more detail in the iOS version. They also need more advanced iOS support. There is a lack of documentation. We didn't know the solution enough, and therefore, it took a while to set everything up correctly. There was a learning curve. We'd like more help in planning and training.

The SCOM dashboards have room for improvement. They've been improving them in iterations slowly and surely. Third-party tools have had to be created to make SCOM management pack creation more efficient and effective. However, this weighs down the application as it just adds a resource requirement, which is ballooning the size of the necessary storage and all that for essentially substandard components. I would suggest either using the dashboard and management packs to their full potential, so we don't have to go out to third-party vendors to install additional features, or allow them to be truncated during installation so that we're not wasting resources.

I would like to see them improve their network monitoring. We use Solar Winds, and it has a direct interface into SCOM. We can see all the Solar Winds dashboards from the SCOM interface, which is nice to have.

What we need in SCOM is the ability to share a lab console with our customers so that our end-users or customers in SCOM can navigate by themselves. It could be similar to how we use DRDG in PRTG where all of our customers can set up their monitoring on their own. Right now, in SCOM, only our team can set up their monitoring. The initial setup could be easier. The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface.

They can focus more on cloud monitoring instead of on-premise monitoring. We should be able to monitor cloud-related applications. They can include this feature in the next release. If it is in the cloud, we can have scalability by using Kubernetes. The container is containerized, packaged, and managed using Kubernetes. This feature is not there in SCOM. Going forward, if they can focus on that, it will be great.

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.

The management of the servers could be better. Also, the user interface could be improved.

It'll help if they can provide real-time or closer to real-time monitoring.

There are some negative points about this product. Sometimes, the capabilities of the software don't appear, and you can't directly see the results. You have to wait for a long period to refresh the policy to push it to the software or other patches.

SCOM is not a flexible product. The initial setup should be easier to complete.

SCOM has a lot of powerful features but it is not simple to use. We are using a third-party presentation layer to show all of the data because SCOM does not show it in a very nice and easy way. It is not an interface that you would expect to see in 2020. The interface is a little bit cumbersome and certain actions could be simplified. For example, many of the things that we do require clicking through many menus. Maintaining this product is very hard to do.

The dashboard is one place where the product can be improved. We finally needed to get a customized dashboard from the NOC (Network Operation Center) team. The dashboard that was included with the product just did not do what we wanted it to do. I am not sure, exactly, what should be included with future releases. There are already a lot of features there in the product. The main thing I can suggest is that Microsoft also provides management packs for monitoring third-party products with the product. If that were included with SCOM, that would make the product even greater. For example, to monitor an Oracle database, you need to look around to get a management pack separately. It could just be included instead. You can monitor any non-Microsoft product with Microsoft SCOM if you have the management pack for that product. You need to purchase that management pack. You can get them sometimes from Microsoft and other times from the third-party vendor.

The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department. We are currently looking for a plugin for the dashboard to assist in monitoring the dashboard in the SCOM server. At this time, SCOM is only being used in our IT department. Digital console is not available to our users, management team, or senior persons, and they are not allowed their own login to see what is happening in the network system. The only access that we have is to dump the reports to provide them to our management team. It doesn't monitor the Fortinet devices well.

Some checking issues could be improved. Checking some activators. It would help if we could export in some cases, because it may be that some people want to move the screen from the book to share reports. If it was possible to embed it in a report, that would be good. In other words, I would like more customized reports. I would definitely like to see the ability to go through the total life-cycle in the next release of SCOM, to cover everything. But in some cases, especially retrospectively, this is not happening, or not happening well. I'd like to see the retrospective outcome in the knowledge base. It would be good if it could accommodate some learning out of the box, together with information from the recording session. There are levels to it, but some of the records we keep often go to quickly deliver the project. But in most cases, they skip the retrospective part and lessons learned. It would be good to declare something in the knowledge base where people can easily put it and access their input of lessons learned. We've yet to see that in previous projects. But I'd like to get to the level where whenever a new person starts a project, they could visit the knowledge base and the retrospective section, and get some knowledge out of the box, which was not covered in the process. On a scale of one to ten I would definitely rate SCOM an 8. That's because people should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately.

In terms of features that could be improved, I would say the agent integration into the operating system. We are having difficulties integrating Linux into some of the networking devices. We have not seen the collected data so it makes it challenging. I would also say that agentless monitoring needs to be included. Something like this is pretty difficult if you don't have a particular agent. It's not so easy if you have to use something like a proxy to implement a work around. They should include a solution for discovering devices and something like an agentless monitoring solution for a particular device - just to understand what your environment looks like. I'm not saying that they should provide all the information for the device, but at least availability and partial monitoring based on SNMP. Because I know that other solutions have it. Maybe Service Center Operations Manager has already provided those things in the latest version, but I'm not familiar with it.

Even though I think there are ways that this product is superior to most other solutions on the market, there are quite a few things that it does not do alone. This is where the product can be improved. One of the facets is in network monitoring. In fact, it can use quite a lot of improvement in that area. That's where products — like CA Technologies Performance Manager — are much better. You can do a lot with it that you can not with the reporting in SCOM. However overall that CA product is not as well rounded and complete. The Scrum files that you set up can be made better. For example, you may want accounts that have access to the SCOM console to have more granular access. For example, you may have a situation where you prefer that only certain engineers will be able to add agents to the server — and only the server. But you can't set up the permissions that are this granular. Likewise, it may be that you want to assign someone the right to do threshold changes or to the environment of certain places of certain management groups. It is not part of the standard solution. With other monitoring tools, you have the ability to set the permissions granularly, which SCOM actually doesn't do. So I hope that they would add that feature and support granularity. There are other ways in which to do it, but if you can do it in the monitoring tool itself and in the administration, then it'll make things much easier and make it a far more complete, unified solution. One more thing would be better application monitoring. Products like AppDynamics do that very well and exceed the capabilities of SCOM. What I think I would like to see is for SCOM to be more of a complete end-to-end solution so there is no need to look to other solutions or work outside of the singular product.

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

I don't really think anything needs to be improved. We will soon be trying to use it with Microsoft to log analytics and that will be cloud-based. I would like to have the ability to schedule my reports via email or through SMS. Then there is also an issue with capacity and limited space. That is something that needs to be improved.

All of the areas of reporting are very bad and need to be improved. It is not simple to get a report. Even the monitoring people, who are supposed to be familiar with the system, are having difficulty generating specific reports. Also, the information in the reports is not user-friendly. The console is very slow, and not user-friendly. Even the browser for the web console is not very friendly, and I would not consider it useful compared to other ones that I have worked with. I would like to see the inclusion of more monitoring templates, where I would just have to enter variables and nothing more. If there were a template then it would save time, rather than have to create it again. The monitoring of Linux servers needs to be improved because it is hard compared to other products.

The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved. I would like to see more focus on application monitoring in the next release of this solution.

The console feature is very poor, and it would be very good for us if this were improved. The application monitoring feature is also poor. I would also like to see better training materials. What we currently have is very light. The ability to connect to cloud-based solutions would be very good.

On-prem network monitoring is something that could be improved drastically. In fact, it should have better end-to-end monitoring from the physical layer up to the software.

I would like to see better support for monitoring Unix-based systems. The Unix management functionality is not yet truly mature. The reporting capability needs improvement. This solution would be improved if the management functionality were expanded to include other products, such as WebSphere MQ.

This product is not easy to use. I would like to see more standard libraries for the market solutions, out of the box, that you don't need to do a lot of work on.