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Pandora FMS vs SCOM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

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

Pandora FMS
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
71st
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (25th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (58th), Log Management (61st), Cloud Monitoring Software (43rd)
SCOM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
14th
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 Pandora FMS is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.6%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM1.6%
Pandora FMS0.6%
Other97.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

MM
Independent Consultant at Maack Consulting
The open architecture is easy to extend and enhance
Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box. You can work around these limitations with the help of other tools like Grafana. The shortcomings are mostly on the graphical side. The built-in report generators are a bit limited in some areas. They could improve their management console's ability to monitor large environments could be improved. For example, SNMP management is only partially integrated into the management console.
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 support is excellent for this product; their response time is very fast, and they are very knowledgeable."
"The monitoring system within this solution is very good. It is easy to use and navigate, and makes issue alarms easily viewable."
"Thanks to Pandora FMS, we've been able to adapt to every new monitoring challenge over the past seven years."
"Pandora FMS is an all-in-one solution that is cost-efficient."
"Network monitoring is fun again with Pandora FMS."
"The solution is so lightweight that with only 4GB of ram, it allows keeping track of up to two hundred agents from a single console."
"Thanks to this software and to the work of the support team, we have everything under control."
"This tool has been of great help because we can manage faster solutions with the problems in our network and it helped us reduce our response time."
"The most valuable feature is the monitoring of Windows and Linux servers."
"It takes a lot of the headache out of managing your data centers and software in other places."
"We like the deployment of the machines and the features that they have, and it's easy to use."
"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."
"SCOM's most valuable features are the network path feature, reporting, and integration with business intelligence."
"This solution helps our application teams by allowing them to drill further into issues and perform a root cause analysis."
"The most valuable feature is the extensibility, as there are really no limits as to what you can do with it."
"They have great integration with the active directory."
 

Cons

"Improvements are needed for server and network discovery, including service-based discovery."
"We would like to see improvement in the mainframe integration that this solution is capable of."
"Pandora could deliver better analytics out of the box."
"It would be helpful to include the generation of reports for times that the network was out of service."
"In its versions for Linux, in the beginning, it can be somewhat complicated to configure and implement."
"I find that this software is resource heavy, and demands a lot of processing capacity."
"When it comes to the definition of local Software Agents for the first time in the open-source version, it can become very tedious."
"A nice feature in the next release would be an automation module to run workflow actions."
"Areas for improvement in my opinion are the resource footprint of the SCOM infrastructure side, the web console (drop Silverlight please!) and a few of the management packs."
"The configuration, especially for alerts, are somewhat lengthy."
"Reporting could be improved, you get many reports out-of-box but they can be difficult to interpret and drill down into."
"In terms of features that could be improved, I would say the agent integration into the operating system. We are having difficulties integrating Linux into some of the networking devices."
"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."
"We didn't know the solution enough, and therefore, it took a while to set everything up correctly."
"The System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) is great at alerting you when something breaks. It's not so great at reporting."
"Non Windows monitoring is fairly weak. Network device monitoring is not reliable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Only one payment and it includes support, updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of plugins except for SAP and z/OS."
"You get the license and it includes updates, new versions, and access to the complete library of modules."
"Growing the solution or migrating to the Enterprise version is easy, and various plans are available."
"They are very competitive on the pricing side. That's one reason why my manager keeps using it."
"My rule of thumb would be that if you need more than thirty agents, and you lack an automation tool such as Chef or Puppet, you will save a lot of time and money going to the Enterprise edition."
"You have to pay for the number of agents and models that you are monitoring. I would rate the cost at three with one being the most expensive and five being the cheapest."
"In terms of money, the Enterprise version is the cheapest that I have found after a market study."
"The Open Source Community Edition is great to just explore the software, or use it on medium-sized infrastructures."
"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"SCOM's pricing is average."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
13%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

Rakuten, Prosegur, Repsol, Teléfonica, Allianz, Ottawa Hospital, Hughes
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about Pandora FMS vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.