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Packetbeat 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

Packetbeat
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
61st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
2.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
25th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Packetbeat is 0.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.4%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.4%
Packetbeat0.3%
Other98.3%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed-Abdelalim - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Vice President at QualityKiosk Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Network analytics have delivered lightweight, integrated visibility for search, observability, and security
Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows. I recall that Packetbeat can cover a limited number of protocols including ICMP, but not as deeply as other solutions. It covers NetFlows and these types of flows, but not at the level of a deep packet capture that you can find in the market where it taps every single packet in the network. Packetbeat is more about bringing statistics about the packets, but it doesn't capture these packets. The development intention of Packetbeat appears to be to provide a window for application monitoring and performance analytics, and for that purpose, it is doing sufficiently well. However, if the vendor has another goal to build a similar network monitoring solution that exists in the market, which is outside of Elastic's business nature, Packetbeat is a sensor that needs to be improved to the level of deep packet capture where it loses no packets in the network. That improvement would take Elastic to another level.
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

"Elastic's scalability, in terms of cluster robustness, is definitely the most valuable feature."
"The beauty of Packetbeat is that it is easy, free, and lightweight, while other solutions are expensive and will accumulate a huge amount of data."
"It can send messages to our ticketing system."
"They have great integration with the active directory."
"Mature product, strong brand, many customers, Gartner awards Excellent Microsoft server/application monitoring capabilities Fast and consistent UX for system admins Extensive dashboarding capabilities REST API available Excellent technical support, rich user community Designed for on-premise installations"
"We leverage every component of SCOM; we have dashboards up, customized management packs, and monitors for both Windows and Linux, and we use SNMP traps to pull in information from network devices across the enterprise, so we use it for everything."
"If SCOM is implemented correctly, it can take away the need for administrators to constantly monitor things or perform health checks."
"It takes a lot of the headache out of managing your data centers and software in other places."
"SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS."
"We were supporting a bank infrastructure using SCOM, and their application availability improved a lot as we had the real time monitoring of the applications due to which application issues were fixed before the end user comes up and complains."
 

Cons

"Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows."
"The scalability of the agent itself could be improved."
"It's not straightforward, SCOM is relatively noisy out of the box, so time is required to tailor the alerting, adjusting threshold triggers and over-riding alerts that are not required to ensure alerts captured are relevant and require action."
"Microsoft SCOM is an old fashion beast of a monitoring solution that offers basic monitoring out of the box and for a dime because it comes with licenses they forced on us anyway."
"The interface is a little bit cumbersome and certain actions could be simplified."
"Too small of a scope in reports, need to improve a lot."
"We didn't know the solution enough, and therefore, it took a while to set everything up correctly. There was a learning curve."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"I feel that the stability of the tool has room for improvement and I would like to see that in the next version."
"In future releases, I would like to see APM solutions and dashboards like Grafana."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"SCOM's pricing is average."
"It is more expensive than the competition."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"The platform is cost-effective due to our existing Microsoft support."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Packetbeat?
Elastic is pretty cheap for large enterprises but unaffordable for small ones.
What needs improvement with Packetbeat?
Packetbeat analyzes specific protocols and is not suitable for full capture of all network traffic and network flows. I recall that Packetbeat can cover a limited number of protocols including ICMP...
What is your primary use case for Packetbeat?
I have dealt with all of them: Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, Beats, Elastic Agent, and Fleet, because I need to use all of them to achieve a solution for customers. These solutions are typically...
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...
What is your primary use case for SCOM?
My usual use case for SCOM is as an administrator role where I create reports and provide system configuration for Linux and installation of the SCOM agent. I handle deploying and upgrading the age...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Packetbeat vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.