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SCOM vs System Center 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

SCOM
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (4th), Network Monitoring Software (13th)
System Center
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Software Asset Management (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

SCOM and System Center aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. SCOM is designed for Event Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 9.1%, up 7.6% compared to last year.
System Center, on the other hand, focuses on Software Asset Management, holds 23.4% mindshare, down 36.8% since last year.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM9.1%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management11.8%
OpsRamp9.4%
Other69.7%
Event Monitoring
Software Asset Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
System Center23.4%
ISC Software iCAN13.3%
ManageEngine AssetExplorer11.5%
Other51.8%
Software Asset Management
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user3483 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Unify Square
Aug 13, 2015
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Ted Mbugua - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Have faced challenges managing cloud endpoints and support response has been slow
System Center alone just being able to handle cloud endpoints has always been a challenge, even from Microsoft's end. Just looking at how best can you do it without Intune on System Center when it comes to cloud, it becomes a challenge. You'll find that for System Center, it purely looks at on-premise solutions; if maybe you have an Azure or an AWS virtual machine, it might become a challenge when looking at how you're able to manage that. On the reporting capability of System Center, there are some reports that you really need, but sometimes they are a bit shallow or sometimes they are not even there, so maybe on the reporting capability, more improvement is needed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SCOM integrates several systems and offers correlation features, like setting up everything around Active Directory or DNS."
"The solution has improved our overrides and the ability to start services if they're stopped."
"The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location."
"We have found the scalability capabilities to be okay."
"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."
"My customers are using SCOM to avoid business disruptions."
"SCOM will allow you to go from firefighting mode to a more proactive stance when finding issues."
"The fact that I'm able to see all my devices and the status of them has been extremely useful."
"The most valuable feature of the System Center is the easy management of everything."
"The System Center is a comprehensive solution that can help support the organization."
"The most valuable feature of System Center is remote deployment."
"System Center helps us manage everything in the company."
"Compared to the early versions, System Center 2012 is a major breakthrough."
"System Center is easy to configure."
"Time is money, so saving on time means you're also saving on costs, especially when looking at how quickly you're able to patch endpoints and servers when it comes to updates, the whole System Center family, if you're able to integrate the whole SCCM functionalities, you're able to harness more."
"Everything, from patches to deployments, can be done remotely."
 

Cons

"GUI performance is the one aspect where I can see that improvement on it will make customers happy."
"Regarding certain issues in the solution, it can be difficult to generate reports if we have a program that is not user-friendly for reporting. While this is not necessarily negative, we may need to use another solution."
"The System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) is great at alerting you when something breaks. It's not so great at reporting."
"Very expensive now that you are forced to buy entire System Center suite, although comparable to other monitoring solutions that include basic APM."
"There are some negative points about this product. Sometimes, the capabilities of the software don't appear, and you can't directly see the results."
"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."
"Documentation is poor, but the community makes up for it with good blogs and lots of how-to examples."
"SCOM's feature that notifies us when a server is down is not present in recent updates, which has weakened the product."
"Sometimes the updates don't work as they should."
"The support experience rates at a five; you really struggle to get support, and by the time you're getting support, they have to take you through their collecting logs before they can actually give you the technical assistance."
"System Center should make its interface and console easy to understand and operate."
"Future versions should integrate more with non Microsoft Operating systems, whether its virtual machines or hypervisors."
"The way the backups can be done could be easier."
"The integration could improve in the future. Additionally, a single reporting feature for databases would be useful."
"The security of the System Center can be enhanced."
"SCCM is expensive for me personally."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side."
"SCOM's pricing is average."
"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"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."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement."
"The platform is cost-effective due to our existing Microsoft support."
"I rate the price System Center a six out of ten."
"The licensing fee is yearly."
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Answers from the Community

it_user3483 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Unify Square
Aug 13, 2015
Aug 13, 2015
I believe the answer is "it depends". How much visibility do you need into your servers, network, applications? All of these questions need to be answered before you can justify the System Center Suite of products. A typical small business could live with a server going down or a misconfigured DNS server but if you need to put a magnifying glass up to any Microsoft product then the suite is ...
2 out of 5 answers
it_user149673 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Sep 30, 2014
1. What kinds of VM you are running? if they are Hyper-V, good match. If they are any others, I guess there are better tools in the market. 2. Yes some products included in the suite is not applicable, but they are included and you have it no matter what... like DPM, even you have the licenses, you might still go for other tools like backup exec or so.... 3. For ROI... it is the same for all management software I believe, how critical is your application? How much downtime you can afford?
it_user78465 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Sep 30, 2014
I have no experience in that regard.
 

Top Industries

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

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What needs improvement with System Center?
System Center alone just being able to handle cloud endpoints has always been a challenge, even from Microsoft's end. Just looking at how best can you do it without Intune on System Center when it ...
What is your primary use case for System Center?
When it comes to device management, I am working heavily with Intune and System Center in terms of the co-management functionality. We have implemented it and it works wonders, especially when look...
What advice do you have for others considering System Center?
We are using other Microsoft solutions including the Defenders. We started off with on-prem, but with the co-management functionality with Intune, now we are able to do the hybrid, where we can mon...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dialog Telekom
PKP Energetyka S.A., Florida Atlantic University, Bank Alfalah Ltd., Dimension Data, Liquor Control Board of Ontario, Wªrth Handelsges.m.b.H
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