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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
66th
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
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 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 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
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."
"I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time."
"The inbuilt management pack that Microsoft provides is really helpful. I know it's a mature product, and they keep upgrading the management pack."
"It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.​"
"Alerts notify the server or service owner of problems, allowing quick decisions or actions to keep the service running based on configured thresholds."
"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."
"I enjoy its integration with the Microsoft Active Directory functions, which means users, computers, or other group policies can connect with Windows Active Directory."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of Windows and Linux servers."
 

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."
"SCOM is not as straightforward in terms of user interface or general experience, which could be improved."
"The console feature is very poor, and it would be very good for us if this were improved."
"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."
"On-prem network monitoring is something that could be improved drastically."
"It could use some system enhancements, such as better dashboards."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement."
"I would like more customized reports. 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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"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
12%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

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?
I think that the scalability of the agent itself could be improved. It is also a bit limited in terms of capabilities. When a customer needs to customize the collection, I think it's tougher there.
What is your primary use case for Packetbeat?
I've been using Packetbeat ( /products/packetbeat-reviews ) for call centers, for logs, for observability, network monitoring, and some search engine optimization.
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

Information Not Available
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, Datadog and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: January 2026.
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