SCOM vs Zenoss Service Dynamics comparison

SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) is a cross-platform data center monitoring and reporting tool that checks the status of various objects defined within the environment, such as server hardware, system services, etc. The solution allows data center administrators to deploy, configure, manage, and monitor the operations, services, devices and applications of multiple enterprise IT systems via a single pane of glass. It is suitable for businesses of all sizes.

SCOM Features

SCOM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Application monitoring
• Database monitoring
• Threshold alerts
• IT Asset Discovery
• Predictive capabilities
• Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
• Application performance management console
• Server availability and performance monitoring
• Collaboration tools
• Virtualization monitoring
• Patch management
• Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
• Application dependency mapping and thresholding

SCOM Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing SCOM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Management and monitoring of Windows as well as Unix/Linux platforms
• Remotely connect to Windows machines and perform administrative tasks from the console itself
• Custom dashboard creation to help monitor the datacenter with ease
• Agent based monitoring
• Integrates well with other Microsoft products
• Easy to use and reliable

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SCOM solution.

A Manager at a financial services firm says, “The feature I like most about SCOM is that it is easy-to-use. I find it very user-friendly. I also like the knowledge base which it has. You can find the resolution to questions or issues directly within the SCOM itself. It will alert you with a recommendation of what you need to do at the same time. This sort of self-diagnosis or prompting is one of the great values you get from SCOM compared to other solutions.”

PeerSpot user Zahari Z., Information Technology Auditor at a financial services firm, mentions, “Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications. There is a mechanism to set up a notification from the SCOM and whenever there is a drop in the availability the notification alerts not only for availability but for other issues as well. You can align thresholds according to the speed of your environment and you can have a threshold related notification, which is one of the useful features.”

Bill W., Sr. Systems Engineer at Arapahoe County Government, comments, “ I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time. When we patch, things are automatically put into maintenance mode so that the numbers for our systems being down, do not count against us.”

A Project Manager at a tech services company explains, “The feature I have found most valuable is the book feature. While we run the Sprint one we can add some setups for multiple sprints.”

A Systems Engineer at an educational organization states, “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.”

Zenoss Service Dynamics (ZSD) is a software-defined IT operations platform that provides

deep performance insights through real-time analytics to help your organization optimize any IT environment by building granular and intelligent infrastructure relationship models. ZSD has a highly flexible user interface, provides immediate root-cause analysis, helps prevent IT disruptions, offers intelligent automation, and also includes optimized infrastructure performance. The solution can be delivered as on-premises software or as a Zenoss-hosted service (ZaaS).

Zenoss Service Dynamics Features

ZSD has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Real-time service model: This feature is designed to help your organization understand the relationships and interdependencies between the IT services you are responsible for delivering and your constantly changing infrastructure.

• Operational analytics: The solution offers in-depth operational analytics reporting based on a normalized and centralized data store. With its operational analytics, you can view historical performance and event management trends month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year. You can do this by using your own custom report or by using one of the solution’s out-of-box reports.

• Root-cause analysis: ZSD allows you to conduct root-cause analysis of performance and availability issues for services, which reduces event storms to a prioritized list of most likely events.

• Predictive reporting: Using this feature, you can filter out insignificant outliers, then generate projections that help you proactively manage future capacity requirements that are based on historical usage data.

Zenoss Service Dynamics Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing ZSD. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Gain total visibility of overall IT service health with intelligent dashboards and reports.

• Eliminate risk associated with digital transformation.

• Use real-time modeling to gain awareness of end-to-end infrastructure-related risks.

• View performance and anomalies across all on-premises and cloud infrastructures.

• Apply consistent monitoring policies across all cloud and on-premises systems.

• Enable agile IT while eliminating employee fatigue by reducing alerts.

• Future-proof your monitoring platform to run at any scale.

• Get AIOps insights to predict service health and performance issues.

• Collaborate across teams to coordinate investigation and problem-solving.

• Deliver management as a service for DevOps teams.

• Leverage AI and machine learning for predictive analytics.

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot user Aldo-P., Security Architect at ITSur, says, “The solution has a variety of great features. The dashboard is excellent. With it, I can see everything from one place. It gives me a full picture of my networks and I can quickly see if there are any trouble areas to note. The user experience is excellent. Within the solution is a piece of software called Twill, which is very good. It's like dynamic monitoring. Twill provides a great user experience. I can put the URL from a website and I can send the user and password on that. Overall, it's a great solution, and I consider it to be one of the best. The initial setup is very easy. The product offers good documentation that helps with initial training.”