SCOM Reviews

SCOM is used as a monitoring solution for managing Windows-based IT infrastructures within our organization.

SCOM has helped us to monitor all the VMs in our environment, especially the Windows servers. This is our scoop, we monitor all the VMs that have OS Windows servers. The best part of SCOM is that we have a major comeback with it and can apply something that could act as a counteraction. Once an action appears, there is a counteraction in order to avoid any interruption to the service. This is the best way the solution has improved our organization.

The solution provides a full insight report for all the VMs in our environment. SCOM also tells us whether the VMs are healthy or not, as well as provides brief information about the management console in each site and the agents under these management consoles.

There is no room for update or enhancement in SCOM because Microsoft has retired it as an on-prem solution and moved it to the cloud. The current version will be the last on-prem given Microsoft's push to move all their solutions to the cloud.

The GI is difficult to work with and the reporting servers are also difficult. Another dimension that makes SCOM difficult is the number of components. The reporting server, the database, and the two components of the database (operational and warehouse) are all difficult to work with. This is why SCOM is a difficult solution to implement, configure, and troubleshoot.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is not very stable. Sometimes we find alerts in the event viewer that we don't understand. we have to spend hours trying to figure out what the events mean. Sometimes we have to request support from Microsoft engineers, who may take a long time to respond, and the case may take longer than expected to resolve.

I give the stability a six out of ten.

The solution is scalable. We currently have six members, but we should add management consultants depending on our workload. We need to go through the Microsoft documents first. We need to calculate and prepare for our Virtual Machine (VM). We need to identify the storage, memory, and CPUs for our VM. This is important because we don't want to lose our solution or have bad performance. A bad performance will affect our environment. We also need to make sure the latency is less than 12 milliseconds. This is important because the management console needs to communicate with the database. If the latency is more than 12 milliseconds, it will affect the outcome of these records and the management console will be unhealthy.

Previously we used SIM by SolarWinds.

The solution is difficult to implement and troubleshoot. Sometimes we need the prerequisites for a task, but we encounter issues that we don't understand or that are not reasonable.

The first time we deployed the solution, there were three of us, but now that we have more experience, we can do it on our own without the requirement of additional people. 

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have not seen a return on investment. We have a lot of latency issues with the solution that is related to the network coverage between the sites. We have ten data centers using a management console but our database is centralized in the capital of Cairo. 

I give the solution a six out of ten.

First-time users of SCOM need to be well prepared. There should not be too many management consoles. The SCOM gateway can be used as a way to transfer data to the management console, and the management console will have low latency so it can act as the management console for these sites. It will handle the queuing for the data through the centralized database. This is the best practice given to me by the Microsoft team because of an issue that occurred in our environment that took some time to be resolved.

The solution is used for monitoring the hardware inventory. For instance, it helps with the whole operational monitoring view for the company's infrastructure.

The product was relatively stable even a few months back. But people now evaluate other solutions like VMware and third-party solutions like Ivanti.

Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement. I got a response from the TCS that whenever they try to patch or throw some updates to any of the computers, it takes a lot of time to apply and to get the job done on the recipient. As the system is very slow, people only opt for it a little and instead go for solutions like Ivanti and other third-party solutions.

I have been using SCOM for seven to eight years. Also, I sell the solution.

The stability of the solution needs improvement.

For the system center, we have worked with eight to nine customers; those are mainly from the FSI side, which is the banking side. These days, we have two more customers, one from oil and gas and another from TCS, which is the biggest courier company in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, people get the solution deployed but don't monitor, control, or upgrade their systems. When Microsoft releases a new version of it every three years or two years down the road, they don't upgrade the existing one or install the bug fixes. So, there are problems where the customer needs help finding answers quickly on the internet. That is when they ask for support from their systems, reporting that the sensor or the things are not working correctly or have missed configurations. During such instances, it takes time to address the customer's queries because we take step-by-step procedures to mitigate the error and sometimes apply the update patches and then plan for the upgrade from the older version to the newer version.

The initial setup is complex. It also depends on the current infrastructure and Active Directory for this level. Sometimes there are some misconfigurations, or you may have faced configuration issues that need to be fixed at the infrastructure level about the ADA and other elements.

There are different phases in the deployment process. After planning the deployment then, you install the SCOM

server management. You install the additional management server and the agent on the infrastructure system server. You need to collect a debt and monitor the system.

Then, of the incident, you configure all those agents and define your monitoring objective. Like, how you want to create the tools and classify and configure the alerts notifications. And once it's done, you'll start configuring the reporting or want to

see other reports concerning performance and availability. Once that is done, if we do the test and validate the deployment, it will be done as per the plan we did in the initial phase.

So once that's done, then there is the monitor and the routine maintenance required.

Three staff helped with the deployment.

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.

From a technical perspective, I recommend going for Azure, using Sentinel, using Azure monitoring services, which give in-depth results and monitoring opportunities.

Microsoft is known for its integrated solution. But what happens when those solutions have several issues, like SCOM or any other solution?

But some companies get solutions to those areas to address those issues. So people start moving towards them, like, i.e. VMware or Ivanti, as I mentioned. These companies emerged as Microsoft solutions could not provide detailed or ease of accessibility and utility to those software solutions.

I rate the solution a five out of ten.

We use SCOM for all server applications, as well as service monitoring, such as Windows services, and auto-recovery of those services if they fail. Some of the processes that we monitor at the .exe level can also be restarted with SCOM. Then we use it all to monitor availability, health, and performance.

Personally, I enjoy it all. It's fairly powerful.

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.

I would like to see them improve their network monitoring.

We use Solar Winds, and it has a direct interface into SCOM. We can see all the Solar Winds dashboards from the SCOM interface, which is nice to have.

I have been involved with SCOM for seven years.

We just completed a major upgrade from 2012 R2 to 2019.

I have had a lot of success with the 2019 product. When we were on 2012 R2, I had to reboot the servers, particularly the database servers, at least once every two weeks. I believe we've been up and running for about three months in 2019 and have only rebooted once a month for monthly patching.

The scalability is good. It's very easy to scale.

It can support up to a thousand nodes per management server, and we are nowhere near that number. I have three management servers in place for a 400-node network. Load balancing is simple, stable, quick, and efficient.

In terms of speed and agility, I believe it is significantly better than the 2012 version.

Our systems team and then the applications team, use this solution, totaling approximately 75 people within our government. We have 2,000 employees, and our IT department has about 100 people, and about 75 of them use it.

For 2019, I haven't used technical support yet. I've never had to call him. 

In 2012, Microsoft's support was good.

We were using HP Open View at the time, and their technology was quickly becoming obsolete. They weren't keeping up, particularly when the 2012 operating system was released. They just couldn't keep up, and their pricing was spiraling out of control.

It's quite complicated. I would call it complex.

On a scale of one to five, I would give it at least four or four and a half.

There are a lot of customizations, and it's quite noisy out of the box.

You have a lot of alerts, which is normal for most of them. 

I have tried some of the other monitoring systems as well, and they all seem to work in the same way. Basically, all you have to do is tune it. That is what requires time.

Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price.

All of the Systems Center products have a backup, which we don't use, but SCCM is included in the pricing. As a result, we can afford it because we have the Enterprise agreement.

We do use SolarWind, but I am not on that team; it is used by the network group.

I use the Operations Manager to manage my server infrastructure. 

The most important thing would be to go to Microsoft and get some training. They provide a lot of free classes in the form of webinars and other similar events. It has a multitude of different deliverables that most people never get into. 

It's a lot more powerful than people realize, and I believe people become dissatisfied with it because of the complicated setup, but once it's up and running, it's pretty amazing at what it can do.

I am pretty happy with the way it works right now, I would rate SCOM a nine out of ten.

We use the solution essentially for the management of the endpoint and the management of assets.

The fact that I'm able to see all my devices and the status of them has been extremely useful. It's mainly the device visibility and device status. 

The stability has been great. 

It is very scalable. 

We haven't upgraded the SCOM version yet, however, there's a few of the versions where we would like to have improvements in terms of more visibility into some of the details of the device. 

We'd like to be able to configure and push more granular policies into the device.

Using iOS is an issue for us. It's not as deep as the Microsoft offering. We'd like more detail in the iOS version. They also need more advanced iOS support.

There is a lack of documentation.  

We didn't know the solution enough, and therefore, it took a while to set everything up correctly. There was a learning curve. We'd like more help in planning and training. 

I've been using the solution for eight years. 

It really is stable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. 

The solution can scale well. It's actually more suited for larger enterprises. 

We didn't have any issues with scalability.

We have about 800 users on the product currently. That's about 1,400 devices. 

We use the product fairly regularly. 

Technical support takes work. They're knowledgeable, yet it takes a lot of time. You have to go through the reseller first - before you get to speak to Microsoft. 

Neutral

We're going to, eventually in the next few years with SCOM, move to the cloud management features of Microsoft.

The initial setup took a lot of time. I can't remember exactly what the timeframe was. However, it took longer than we expected. I'd rate it 2.5 out of five in terms of the ease of setup. While it's not difficult, it does take time. We had to do and redo a few things during implementation. They didn't have any documentation for us to work out of, which would have helped. 

We handled the setup ourselves in-house. 

I don't have an individual cost for SCOM. We buy all our licenses under the program. We get invoiced for the quantities of each of the products without having an individual cost for SCOM. If you buy certain licenses or servers, SCOM automatically comes with it. 

At the time, we didn't investigate others. We didn't investigate a lot of other technologies as we're a Microsoft shop. We use Microsoft products. We are resellers. We're distributors of Microsoft. We didn't go much further out from there. Recently, we also haven't investigated a lot. We are starting to research the management of endpoints with the Microsoft cloud platform. That looks a little bit easier right now.

We're using a lot of Microsoft products. We are also resellers and distributors of Microsoft.

Whether this solution works for you or not depends on how you do your model. If you outsource everything, then you don't have the problem even if you're an SMB. However, if you have an IT department inside your organization, you will likely need this. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

We leverage every component of SCOM. The solution uses monitoring mechanisms to send alerts and notifications for down systems or problematic trouble issues. We use it for all of that. We have dashboards up, customized management packs, and monitors for both Windows and Linux. We use SNMP traps to pull in information forward network devices that are in the enterprise. We use it for everything.

Being able to make and customize management packs and send out notifications is very valuable. That's the bread and butter of the solution. That's what we use it for.

The SCOM dashboards have room for improvement. They've been improving them in iterations slowly and surely. Third-party tools have had to be created to make SCOM management pack creation more efficient and effective. However, this weighs down the application as it just adds a resource requirement, which is ballooning the size of the necessary storage and all that for essentially substandard components. I would suggest either using the dashboard and management packs to their full potential, so we don't have to go out to third-party vendors to install additional features, or allow them to be truncated during installation so that we're not wasting resources.

I've worked with SCOM for about ten years now.

SCOM's stability is pretty solid. 

SCOM has been scaling pretty nicely for us, which is what it's intended to do. We do have plans to increase usage. It's constantly evolving, developing utility. All new systems go onto it. It's not shrinking anytime soon.

The tech support is good. Our company has Premier Plus in place. They're responsive.

This is the only one I've used.

The initial setup is complex. It requires Microsoft's support in many cases. It takes about a month or two to get SCOM up and running and fleshed out so that you have all the configurations. For example, when you're migrating from '12 to '19, you have to look at everything that's already in place and then try to migrate it. Whereas if you're starting fresh, then you have to start one at a time looking at each component and building it out. They're too different. 

We deployed in-house, but we did leverage Microsoft.

The solution is provided by Microsoft for free but there are operating costs. Those would be the many hours necessary to prune it. We have a contract for support. If that didn't exist, then the cost of the solution would include paying for support. Because it is a complex system, I will contact support for assistance. I also have the general resource requirements just to have the systems up. This includes several databases and front-end servers running. However, added together, all of these costs are minimal.

We did not evaluate any other options before landing on SCOM. The reason for this is that SCOM is a Microsoft solution and we have a significant Microsoft presence in our environment, it's actually provided gratis by Microsoft, so it was just a logical utility to leverage.

My advice to others looking into implementing this product is to make sure that you have a solid understanding of SQL commands, statements, databases, and Visual Studio. This will help you understand how to make the management packs more effective. I rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use this tool to patch laptops, conduct an inventory, and gather information about our systems. We use SCCM and another solution around SCCM to gain a complete view of our laptops and desktops.

We use the solution for deployment purposes, including deploying solutions, new products, applications, and patch solutions.

The solution primarily drives system information, and I believe it works fine.

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. We can explore alternatives through certain products from Azure, but it may still be difficult to generate reports without specific development.

In short, I feel the reporting feature of the solution needs to be better since it is very difficult to have a report of the best quality.

We use the SCOM solution in our company and provide it to clients, if possible. Our role is to build a solution architecture for our clients. While SCOM is not our primary product, we have been using it for ten years, and it remains the latest solution to expedite our system information.

I think the solution is stable, but we had to meet with our engineer to address some tuning issues. When the solution gets appropriately tuned, it is a good solution.

I have worked with four big international companies using this solution.

My team uses Microsoft support to assist our clients, but we have a specific link with Microsoft to provide support for certain clients.

I work with solutions like Microsoft SCCM and Microsoft Intune.

We use the solution in our work for a big company, but we are rarely involved in the setup of the solution. The company uses and upgrades the solution but is not typically involved in new installations.

I work for a big company and thus have access to a certain piece of system information that can be considered big and vast. Due to its size, we have separated the activities, primarily because there are many activities. Also, we have many engineers working on the solution.

I recommend others to try this solution. Also, I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We mainly use SCOM for logging purposes and mounting configurations. It alerts us when any services have a problem. It really depends on the products that are being used in the backend. There are different kinds of virtual machines and different kinds of environments like VMware and Hyper-V.

One customer deploys the solution on a hyper conversion input service, and two customers deploy the solution on-premises.

The solution could be used in any sized company. It's been used in the manufacturing, IT, and telecom sectors.

The monitoring features are the most valuable. We have seen a major benefit from that so far.

There could be more integration of SIM in the solution.

The solution is stable.

Previous versions were not very stable. There were some issues while we were configuring the hierarchy.

The scalability is of medium difficulty.

Overall, support is not great but it's not bad. Microsoft's standard support is good. Sometimes, there aren't specific engineers who can help us with SCOM when we have an issue. A knowledge-based environment would help us more.

I would rate technical support 3.5 out of 5.

We have also used ManageEngine OpManager to monitor the environment and Solar Wind. 

They don't support integration of multiple products. Considering the stability and scalability, Microsoft is a better option. It depends on the use cases.

I would rate the initial setup 4.5 out of 5.

It's a complex process. When we deploy any other solution, it comes with a built-in SQL database. With SCOM, it was more of a complicated process.

If it doesn't have a hierarchy, then it takes about one hour. It's a standard installation. If there are hierarchies, like multiple site deployments, then it would take about three to five hours.

I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side.

I would rate SCOM as 8 out of 10. 

It depends on how the customer is using the product. My advice is that if you're interested in SCOM, you need to consider the environment, the business case, and what kind of business you are running.

We're using SCOM to monitor the health checks for the Windows servers in our organization.

It would be hard to talk about features. In maybe four months, in January, there is downtime for service, where we're able to look for the issues and proactively check everything.

The stability has been very good so far. 

Technical support has been very responsive.

We have found the scalability capabilities to be okay.

What we need in SCOM is the ability to share a lab console with our customers so that our end-users or customers in SCOM can navigate by themselves. It could be similar to how we use DRDG in PRTG where all of our customers can set up their monitoring on their own. Right now, in SCOM, only our team can set up their monitoring. 

The initial setup could be easier. 

The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface.

I've been dealing with the solution for two years. 

The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The scalability potential is good. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

The technical support on offer has been great, generally. When we have questions for Microsoft, they respond to us quickly. It's good for our end. We are quite satisfied.

The initial setup could be more straightforward and the deployment could be simplified in SCOM.

In terms of pricing, I'm not sure how much the company pays. As far as I know, our company gets a Microsoft package and SCOM is already included in the package. It's not separated out.

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

SCOM is a great monitoring tool. It's just pretty complex to set up, however, if you invest your time in learning SCOM, you can understand how it works and it will make things much easier.