Microsoft System Center and Elastic Observability compete in the IT management and monitoring category. Microsoft System Center seems to have the upper hand in Microsoft's ecosystem integration, while Elastic Observability offers greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness for diverse infrastructures.
Features: Microsoft System Center is renowned for its robust integration with Microsoft products, offering comprehensive automation features and ease of configuration. It excels in deployment, patch management, and license tracking, proving valuable in Windows environments. Elastic Observability provides powerful search capabilities and is highly versatile due to its open-source nature. It supports real-time data analysis, allowing swift incident response, and offers diverse infrastructure monitoring.
Room for Improvement: Microsoft System Center could simplify multi-tenant environments and enhance integration with non-Microsoft products. Users request improved performance, better integration ease, and a modern interface. Elastic Observability faces challenges with limited APM capabilities, visualization, and automation. Users seek improved infrastructure monitoring, richer dashboards, and easier log retrieval.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft System Center primarily operates in on-premises and hybrid settings, with complex setups and satisfactory yet occasionally delayed support. Elastic Observability offers flexibility across on-premises, public cloud, and hybrid environments, benefiting from its open-source framework. Both products deal with timely support challenges, but Elastic's diverse deployment options provide more adaptability. Microsoft users rely on traditional support channels, while Elastic users benefit from community-driven assistance.
Pricing and ROI: Microsoft System Center is higher in cost with annual licensing and support contract dependency but delivers over 50% ROI through in-house management. Elastic Observability is cost-effective, particularly with open-source components and competitive pricing against premium solutions. It suits larger organizations needing scalable monitoring but can be costly for small startups, with pricing tied to data and infrastructure usage requiring careful cost management.
Elastic support really struggles in complex situations to resolve issues.
As a partner, I cannot create a ticket directly; I have to involve the end user's email to create one, so using the Software Assurance ID to create a ticket directly is not possible, making it very challenging for me.
Elastic Observability seems to have a good scale-out capability.
Elastic Observability is easy in deployment in general for small scale, but when you deploy it at a really large scale, the complexity comes with the customizations.
What is not scalable for us is not on Elastic's side.
Microsoft System Center is scalable, allowing integration even if I have different sites.
There are some bugs that come with each release, but they are keen always to build major versions and minor versions on time, including the CVE vulnerabilities to fix it.
It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it.
Elastic Observability is really stable.
For instance, if you have many error logs and want to create a rule with a custom query, such as triggering an alert for five errors in the last hour, all you need to do is open the AI bot, type this question, and it generates an Elastic query for you to use in your alert rules.
It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side.
Some areas such as AI Ops still require data scientists to understand machine learning and AI, and it doesn't have a quick win with no-brainer use cases.
The disadvantage of Microsoft System Center is related to the many integrated services; if one service is failing, then all features will be affected.
The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing.
Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those.
The most valuable feature is the integrated platform that allows customers to start from observability and expand into other areas like security, EDR solutions, etc.
the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities.
All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important.
In Microsoft System Center, all the features are integrated already, whereas in ManageEngine, you have to license each feature individually to access those features.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Elastic Observability | 4.3% |
| Microsoft System Center | 0.4% |
| Other | 95.3% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 8 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 7 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 4 |
| Large Enterprise | 10 |
Elastic Observability offers a comprehensive suite for log analytics, application performance monitoring, and machine learning. It integrates seamlessly with platforms like Teams and Slack, enhancing data visualization and scalability for real-time insights.
Elastic Observability is designed to support production environments with features like logging, data collection, and infrastructure tracking. Centralized logging and powerful search functionalities make incident response and performance tracking efficient. Elastic APM and Kibana facilitate detailed data visualization, promoting rapid troubleshooting and effective system performance analysis. Integrated services and extensive connectivity options enhance its role in business and technical decision-making by providing actionable data insights.
What are the most important features of Elastic Observability?Elastic Observability is employed across industries for critical operations, such as in finance for transaction monitoring, in healthcare for secure data management, and in technology for optimizing application performance. Its data-driven approach aids efficient event tracing, supporting diverse industry requirements.
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