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Network Instruments Observer vs SCOM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Network Instruments Observer
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
113th
Average Rating
0.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
13th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Network Instruments Observer is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.6%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.6%
Network Instruments Observer0.2%
Other98.2%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer197955 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
The product has allowed us to have a recording of all business critical network data.
Ring capture buffer. Complex filtering The product has allowed us to have a recording of all business critical network data. The Observer application is very complex to use and setup, this should be improved. Windows is unstable, a possible Linux version in future will fix this. 4 years The…
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The product has allowed us to have a recording of all business critical network data."
"This solution allows us to standardize all of the reports for monitoring the network, so it helps a lot for auditing purposes."
"ROI turned out to be pretty good since we had good centralized monitoring for our whole data center and all the outages were quickly escalated from the Command center to the relevant Team."
"SCOM has helped us to monitor all the VMs in our environment, especially the Windows servers."
"The advantages of SCOM are that it is definitely user friendly and a more appropriate solution for what we need."
"We have installed SCOM in our Windows Server 2020 system to monitor any issues that might happen in our infrastructure and keep them in good health, including our SQL Servers, web servers, and web interfaces."
"SCOM's most valuable features are the network path feature, reporting, and integration with business intelligence."
"Anything that can be accessed via SNMP commands, SCOM can retrieve via SNMP Gets."
"If SCOM is implemented correctly, it can take away the need for administrators to constantly monitor things or perform health checks."
 

Cons

"Customer service was below average and the local value added reseller did not know the product very well."
"I would like to see better support for monitoring Unix-based systems."
"Dashboarding and application performance management."
"Application monitoring must be improved."
"The console was not stable at the early versions of 2007 product, opening multiple consoles might cause a crash, and the web console might hang when opening multiple sessions as well."
"The suite is a monster. Without a clear strategy and fine tuning can produce a lot of noise (unnecessary noise) or miss critical aspects of your environment."
"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."
"The interface is a little bit cumbersome and certain actions could be simplified."
"The dashboard is still not so great and, most of the time, a third-party tool is required for presentation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side."
"Two customers bought the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and paid for Software Assurance. But few customers don't buy it for Software Assurance. They just buy it and deploy it, and they think that we will be using it for the next five years."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"The platform is cost-effective due to our existing Microsoft support."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Brno University of Technology
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.