SCOM and Kentik are both prominent in the IT infrastructure monitoring category. SCOM appears to have the upper hand in large Microsoft environments due to its seamless integration and enterprise-level features, while Kentik is favored for its real-time network visibility and traffic analysis capabilities.
Features: SCOM is strong in monitoring Microsoft products especially Windows Server OS and Hyper-V. It allows custom monitoring solutions to be created using Visual Studio and PowerShell. It provides a seamless integration with Windows, enabling robust out-of-the-box experience. Kentik is recognized for its network visibility and traffic analysis, featuring DDoS alarm and flow analysis. It offers real-time insight into network infrastructure, which optimizes network performance.
Room for Improvement: SCOM could improve by reducing its high licensing fees and simplifying setup. It generates many excess alerts, requiring significant tuning. It needs enhanced monitoring for non-Windows environments and better dashboard customization. Kentik's pricing is considered expensive and could provide more actionable insights from detected anomalies. Its interface should be more intuitive.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SCOM supports primarily on-premise and hybrid cloud environments with a complex setup that demands experienced IT staff. Microsoft's customer service quality varies with support contracts, with premier support being rated highly. Kentik supports on-premises and private cloud deployments with a straightforward setup for network monitoring tasks. Its support teams are responsive and effective.
Pricing and ROI: SCOM's pricing is often part of Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, offering savings when bundled with other products. While generally reasonable, additional management packs could increase costs. Kentik's pricing depends on the number of devices and flow data, potentially high for large deployments. However, its ability to enhance network monitoring provides cost savings, particularly in traffic management and DDoS protection.
In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.
They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.
I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.
They often treat issues in isolation, not considering how one problem might relate to another.
When I was working directly with Microsoft at TCS, my first company, the support experience was quite smooth, and we received solutions promptly.
Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.
You can scale as many devices and tests as you want, but you should have a good number of credits in your accounts.
The scalability of SCOM, meaning its ability to adapt to our needs, is excellent because we are working with SQL systems and multiple servers.
Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.
In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.
I have not seen many errors or frequent data loss because once we have installed the agent on the system and have the details, not much manual intervention is required.
SCOM is a bit unstable lately, primarily due to a lack of resources.
More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.
I would like to see a software-as-a-service version in Azure to eliminate the need for on-premise infrastructure.
SCOM is likely to be phased out in favor of more compatible tools like Icinga for application monitoring or when moving to cloud solutions like CloudWatch and Azure.
It would be beneficial to have a summary on one single dashboard, as there are many more possibilities available.
Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
The most important feature is cybersecurity.
One of the most valuable features of Kentik, especially for service providers, is its ability to visualize all the BGP peering and the status of the BGP peering platform.
Kentik is easy to use and set up.
It assists me in detecting server downtime and delivers basic performance monitoring right out of the box.
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool.
SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS.
Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.
With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.
SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) is a cross-platform data center monitoring and reporting tool that checks the status of various objects defined within the environment, such as server hardware, system services, etc. The solution allows data center administrators to deploy, configure, manage, and monitor the operations, services, devices and applications of multiple enterprise IT systems via a single pane of glass. It is suitable for businesses of all sizes.
SCOM Features
SCOM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
SCOM Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing SCOM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SCOM solution.
A Manager at a financial services firm says, “The feature I like most about SCOM is that it is easy-to-use. I find it very user-friendly. I also like the knowledge base which it has. You can find the resolution to questions or issues directly within the SCOM itself. It will alert you with a recommendation of what you need to do at the same time. This sort of self-diagnosis or prompting is one of the great values you get from SCOM compared to other solutions.”
PeerSpot user Zahari Z., Information Technology Auditor at a financial services firm, mentions, “Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications. There is a mechanism to set up a notification from the SCOM and whenever there is a drop in the availability the notification alerts not only for availability but for other issues as well. You can align thresholds according to the speed of your environment and you can have a threshold related notification, which is one of the useful features.”
Bill W., Sr. Systems Engineer at Arapahoe County Government, comments, “ I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time. When we patch, things are automatically put into maintenance mode so that the numbers for our systems being down, do not count against us.”
A Project Manager at a tech services company explains, “The feature I have found most valuable is the book feature. While we run the Sprint one we can add some setups for multiple sprints.”
A Systems Engineer at an educational organization states, “Because it's Windows-based, it actually reports quite well. It reports everything you can think of on the Windows server and allows you to monitor anything. It's excellent for those in the Windows world as it's very good at it.”
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