SCOM Reviews

This product features allows me to monitor other systems including Windows and Unix systems as well as monitor various Network devices. It monitors these systems and can have all of the alerts displayed in one single GUI. It also allows me to setup notifications for the alerts, which can be emailed or texted to individual users. Another good feature, is as long as you have the necessary management packs installed for specific applications/technologies, this product will discover the systems running these applications/technologies and automatically start monitoring them.

My organization is used to install this product at various companies. But after installing this product at various companies, I have seen these companies improve as far as day to day problems. This product helps companies detect problems before they cause any real problems like downtime. It also helps companies to determine where a problem might exist in their current environment and helps the companies correct these problems with the knowledge base that it uses for each of the problems it detects.

This product has room for improvement in the way that it is administered. It doesn’t give you details on Monitors/Rules as far as what is being monitored and how it’s being monitored. It also can improve on letting you know what is being monitored on each system that it monitors.

This is an excellent monitoring tool, especially for Windows servers, as the technology developers are usually the ones who build the management packs for SCOM. You must plan out your environment before implementing this product in large environments and build very beefy SQL servers one for the OperationsDB and the other for the OperationsDB Ware House. As this product is very SQL intense and any slowness is usually caused by the SQL servers trying to keep up with all the requests and updates from the product. Limit the number of admins that will administer this product, as too many cooks in the kitchen can cause more harm than not enough cooks. This product gets better in time with tuning, otherwise it is a very chatty product and users will start ignoring it, if it’s not tuned correctly.

SCOM features object-based monitoring based on classes and discoveries and it gives you a lot of power and flexibility when you design and implement monitoring. For the advanced users you have full freedom in creating your own custom monitoring solutions with Visual Studio, but there are also a lot of production ready monitoring packs from Microsoft as well as 3rd-party providers that are easy to implement.

I've done multiple implementations of SCOM and once you have it technically tuned, have your methodology and processes implemented it really makes a difference in how aware Operations becomes and how fast they can discover and act on incidents both pro- and reactively. Distributed Applications enables you to give developers and business valuable insight into their IT infrastructure.

Reporting could be improved, you get many reports out-of-box but they can be difficult to interpret and drill down into. You can build custom reports in report builder or Visual Studio but both alternatives are difficult to use, not well documented and requires extensive knowledge of the SCOM databases.

Besides managing other System Center products SCOM has been my main focus for 9 years.

SCOM is very easy to deploy and get running, most of the work is tuning management packs together with subject matter experts and in bigger organisations you have to put work into establishing methodology and processes.

Since the original version of SCOM 2007 a lot has happened in the code base, SCOM 2012 R2 is a very stable and reliable product.

I have not seen or heard of scalability issues with SCOM, the infrastructure is distributed and can be tailored to your needs at any time.

If you have a Microsoft Premier agreement (which is my only experience) you get a lot of valuable attention from Microsoft. They help you do service checkups of your installations, give you valuable advice and are generally available when you need it.

My experience with Microsoft support has been good, Microsoft has different tiers of support but they are all very professional and if something needs to be escalated it will get the necessary attention. I've had a few complicated issues in the past that I could not solve myself which got solved by the help from either entry and senior level support.

I've had some experience with SiteScope and other in-house monitoring tools, I've also seen but not worked with a couple of other monitoring tools so I do not have the means for comparison.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy to understand, the first thing you do is size your enviornment and do all the preparations after that installing SCOM itself is very easy.

My very first implementation of SCOM 2007 was togheter with Microsoft, other than that I've done the implementations myself.

ROI is difficult to calculate with a product like this but being able to monitor your infrastructure is essential at any rate.

Licensing is based on how many and what type of agents you have installed, in my experience it is difficult to calculate licensing and pricing without help from Microsoft.

Since the organisations I've implemented SCOM in have been mainly Microsoft and Windows based choosing SCOM and other products from the System Center suite has been a natural choice.

SCOM is a great monitoring tool if you have an enterprise level infrastructure that you need to monitor and manage, it's mainly designed for Windows but it does have cross-platform and network monitoring support something which Microsoft keeps expanding. It is technically easy to implement and maintain but it requires an initial time investment for tuning and customizations.

Distributed applications, application performance monitoring, dashboard view, network monitoring, auditing services are the most valuable features.

Proactively monitoring the infrastructure servers and applications and reporting issues. Dashboards are very valuable to enable day-to-day monitoring.

Customizing management packs, fine tuning of alerts, monitors and creating new tasks reflected on the required group of servers.

9 years

Yes, installing some prerequisites sometime produced issues, installing SQL on a remote server as well might produce some challenges in installing SCOM

Yes, the console was not stable at the early versions of 2007 product, opening multiple consoles might cause a crash. web console might hang when opening multiple sessions as well.

Usually no, you can easily scale SCOM by adding a new server to the exiting pool of servers, it was much of a challenge in the old versions of SCOM

The level of customer service provided is very good, you will be supported for installation issue, configuration and usage.

The level of technical support provided is very good, technical support team will always provide the needed support.

No, it was always SCOM the primary monitoring solution used since it always fit the requirements.

It was straightforward, with the guide documentation it is easy to deploy and configure SCOM servers and components.

We are a service provider company and we implemented SCOM over 100 times at different customer premises, using all different versions of SCOM.

The license is very cheap compared to other products, and with SCOM license you get a license for all system center products.

SCOM was the primary Monitoring solution chosen. it is always fulfilling our customers requirements.

SCOM is a Microsoft solution designed primary to Monitor Microsoft servers and applications, capable of Monitoring Non-Microsoft OS and applications as well.

• Performance data on Windows VMs

• Ability to have a lot of out of the box management packs with key monitors in place
• Ease of use

Ability to know when servers are offline through agent heartbeats.

Dashboarding and application performance management.

Three years.

No we did not.

Yes we did have some, but with Microsoft's assistance (RAS) we were able to gain more insight and improve.

No we did not.

8/10.

8/10.

Used Foglight but it was extremely difficult to learn and pick up as a monitoring solution.

It was all done in-house.

Included as part of MS ELA.

Yes - Quest Foglight and Nimsoft

If you are a large Microsoft shop then this product excels in monitoring Microsoft services.