Microsoft System Center Reviews

Our use case is to easily see the resources of our infrastructure and we use System Center for that. It allows us to simply review a situation and get a report about the operations systems for all users and know whether they need an upgrade or anything else. It allows us to manage and administer the infrastructure.

We're a government organization and I am the infrastructure and technical support manager. We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, and we're also a customer.

In our case, the solution would be improved if they migrated to a cloud version. There could also be some improvement in the environment, it should be more user friendly.

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

I've contacted technical support a few times because I work with engineers, but we don't contact them for the simple issues. The problem is that when we do contact them they don't have a ready solution. Several times they've needed to update or patch things to make the solution work. We had an issue where users were unable to send or receive emails to their phones or mobile devices. It took a long time to solve that problem. They are willing to help, but there is too much delay. Problems need to be solved the same day, or the next day and it doesn't happen that way. 

I believe that these days initial setup is relatively straightforward although it does require specialized IT engineers. If the environment was more flexible, more user friendly, it would be simple. 

I'm not sure I would use this product if I were building a new infrastructure now. I would be more likely to use VMware, Vsign, and Visualize. The tools of VMware cover everything. They are more advanced and have more tools and you can use it for everything in the infrastructure. 

If you're using only Microsoft products then this is a good solution because you're working in a unified environment. The whole infrastructure functions better and you can monitor without problems. It makes life easier for the technicians and engineers in the company.

I would rate this product a seven out of 10.

Our primary use case is responsibility for the implementation and support of this product. I am always involved in the architecture and the design operations. We have several thousand users. I am the Chief Operating Officer and we are partners with Microsoft. 

I like the operation perspective that enables our team to carry out actions quickly. For example, the OS deployment, upgrades and remote control.

We recently carried out a complex implementation and I was part of the official design team for that project. The most difficult area we faced was the requirement of having one central system center that deployed in one domain, capable of managing and controlling the end user devices. We were using authentication based on certificates and it was difficult to do the work based on certificates from different domains. I would like to see a simplification of the implementation and integration in the case of multi-tenant environments.

I've been using this solution for over 10 years. 

We've been using Microsoft products for many years and they are mature and very stable. 

When we need Microsoft support, it's the customer that needs to log the case, then we handle the case with the support team from Microsoft. 

Initial setup is very straightforward. Microsoft has excellent documentation, step-by-step documentation that clarifies the implementation procedure. The difficulty in our case was that it was not a traditional implementation for System Center. It was an implementation based on the new architecture, which is not mature enough yet to support multi-tenant environments.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for performance monitoring in the retail environment and our large Wintel estate. The solution provides real-time monitoring of the estate 24x7x365. 

It has provided the ability to identify issues before they occur and also an active monitoring system to understand what our environment looks like at any given time.

The availability monitoring, performance matrix, and the historical reporting capabilities are the solution's most valuable features.

The solution's dashboard needs improvement.

Management and corrective action capabilities are needed as part of the solution.

The solution would benefit from having a mobile app.

Improvement of the application layer monitoring as part of the default solution due to methods of applications integrations.

The stability and overall performance of the solution are mainly dependent on the correct hardware specification, design, and implementation as is the case with most other ESM type solutions.

The solution is easily scalable, however, its not just the amount of hardware that needs to be taken into consideration. The throughput of the environment is also impacted depending on the number of nodes being monitored and the frequency thereof.

The solution's technical support is okay, but in my opinion, it needs to be more engaging.

I have almost 18 years of monitoring and Systems Management experience, so I have used a variety of products. For the Wintel estate currently SCOM is the best fit for the interim in terms of cost, feature, and function. 

The initial setup was complex. We run a large footprint in excess of 9,000 nodes, so it was complex to understand exactly what the network impact, throughput on the environment and the database sizing.

We had a 3rd party Microsoft Business partner assist with the implementation and operations.

Evaluate tools for the best fit for your environment. In terms of setup cost and pricing of SCOM, evaluate and spec your infrastructure environment sufficiently to ensure the environment will handle the load from the number of endpoints being monitored.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

In terms of advice I would give to other users, I'd say before implementing the solution, you have to plan for your environment appropriately, and seek advice from product experts at Microsoft or their business partners.

I would rate the solution 8.5 out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is the monitoring of basic functionalities of servers, applications, and data applications. 

Also for our internal environment, we are using only the Operations Manager and not the configurations manager.

The deployment model we are using was on-premises.

This solution has helped us to have better visibility of what we have in our environment, the stages of access. It allows me to see everything I need to better communicate with the business easily, concerning the situations of our services.

The features that I have found most valuable are the ease of configuration and the easy discovery of the environment.

As we are not using the latest version, it is difficult for me to say what needs to be improved, because it may have already been improved in the latest versions.

Also, we are only using 30% of the capabilities of this solution. We are limited on our side rather than the tool side. There are many features available that we have not yet explored.

This is a solution that supports many add ons, so we can run Unix, for example. I can explore it like a database but it's inconvenient.

We have, on occasion, experienced some crashes that have caused the application to break down. It could be an issue on our side, but we have not had the time to explore it.

They should have some customized solutions or internal development, then maybe it could be easier to use different solutions or some self-developed solution.

The only other thing is a better web interface. The current one is not good enough, in our version it's an installed application.

This solution is stable.

We are an external company service desk with seven to a desk and approximately sixty technicians. For internal use, we have six people. They are made up of six technicians or the IT administrators of databases, book sellers, some service managers and the setup of publications.

We are not a large company but it's fine and it works properly.

I can imagine that we can scale this solution for a larger environment but that is not the case for us at this time.

It works on a virtual machine and I can configure the set-up of the two machines running to increase the number of services which we are monitoring. 

At the beginning of implementation during the first year, we contacted support.

We were using an open-source solution, but I can't remember the name.

The initial set up was simple. It's based on Microsoft technology, so we didn't have any issues.

It took two months for the installation and configuration of monitoring.

We had two people for the deployment, one from our site and one external partner, but they were not full-time.

The implementation was done through an external partner. It was easy because we are marketing our business solution for approximately fifty sellers.

We researched monitoring solutions a year ago and found that this solution was easier to implement with our internal solution based on open-source technologies like Elastic.

Because the tools are from Microsoft and we have in-house development and technology, what we were using was not easy to integrate with the Microsoft monitoring tool.

It is easier for us to integrate with Elastic than it is with Microsoft.

We don't need to monitor the application level instead of the infrastructure, which is a standard feature fo Microsoft System Center, but it is not enough for us. Usually, the infrastructure is stabilized, but we have many issues in our applications which is not standard and usually, it's an out of the box application and we must monitor these features.

Before we were using Azure, and we were contacting Microsoft support monthly, depending on when we were implementing a new solution or if when we were having issues with the firewall.

It all depends on the purpose of using this solution and what you are monitoring, that is the main point of the decision tree. If you have a standard solution or books safe, the secure book, a secure or standard package, then Microsoft would be the right solution for that.

The most important is the configuration, the first implementation, and to find the right location, how to implement and find their interaction or relations between monitored environment and assets. It is not always easy to find the relationships between the items and how they can impact the whole solution.

We are customers and I am a happy user of this solution and I have not had any significant issues with this solution. It works well for me and our companies.

I would recommend this solution.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it for the following purposes:

• Infrastructure management and inventory collection (hardware and software).
• Infrastructure monitoring integrating Windows Server, as well as other platforms.
• Ticketing for our help desk.

• The IT environment aligned to SLAs. 
• System Center helps to create the basis for ITIL alignment. 
  
• Many processes could be implemented out-of-the-box, and this helped to adopt processes in areas which we lacked. 

• Platform integration
• Native tools for a Windows environment
• Low learning curve
• Administrators can use almost all its features out-of-the-box.

The following need to be improved:

• GUI
• Responsiveness
• Mobile environments
• Platform performance.

It still demands high computing resources.

We maximized our license investment.

Management Packs for Microsoft-specific products, which help us implement the best practices for each product.

The detail in the alarms is great.

Less server consumption would help, as would better, more flexible reports.

The stability is okay.

No problem with scalability.

I have never needed technical support for this product.

We used WhatsUp Gold, but System Center came with our Microsoft license.

It's is complex because there are a lot of divisions, and the management of the rules applied to the server are complex.

We didn't evaluate others before going with this, but we are actually analyzing Operations Management Suite, a powerful integration with SCOM 2012 R2.

Don't install all the Management Packs at the same time; this is key.