SCOM Reviews

SCOM's greatest attribute is that you can customize every monitor to specifically match the intended system. For example, you can monitor two servers for high CPU usage and customize it so one alerts if it goes above 95% and the other only alerts over 98%.

If SCOM is implemented correctly, it can take away the need for administrators to constantly monitor things or perform health checks. SCOM can be set up to alert when an issue occurs and SCOM is often easy to link to a ticketing system so a ticket will be generated automatically when issues occur. SCOM can even be set up to send emails/SMS when a problem occurs in your environment.

The System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) is great at alerting you when something breaks. It's not so great at reporting. For all of the information that SCOM collects and stores it has no good way to put this information into a useful reporting format. For example, it would be fantastic to be able to have a historic view of the memory usage on a server to assist with pinpointing the root cause to the issue.

Also, SCOM comes with many built-in monitors. Anything that isn't already there can often be add by installing a management pack. These management packs include a heap of monitors for a specific item (EG exchange). The main issue is that by default most items alerts are enabled. This means when you install SCOM or add a management pack you will need to tweak all of the sensors or you will be over run with alerts. It's a turn off what you don't want situation rather than, the more sensible, turn on what you do want.

There were no issues deploying it.

There have been no stability issues.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Microsoft offers many partnerships to businesses. These partnership agreements can get you some great discounts on software/support. To become a Microsoft partner you often only need to have staff with Microsoft certifications. The more certificates you have the better your partnership. Microsoft are great to call for support as they have a wealth of knowledge. They may not always be the most helpful, but by logging a ticket to Microsoft you will often get your management temporarily off your back.

SCOM is one of the most commonly used monitoring software used for large scale enterprise level. Being a Microsoft product, the Management Packs available are very useful for extensive monitoring of various Microsoft products such as Windows Server OS, Hyper-V, SCCM, SharePoint, Exchange, etc.

It has always helped to streamline our monitoring in various areas and helped to provide good reports to various in-house teams as well as provide alerting for the whole of our data center.

SCOM can move on to provide more on Cloud, Big Data, container and docks monitoring. Also, APM monitoring is really lacking in SCOM and they really need to look into this to keep up their strength in the IT market.

I've used it for four years.

A few glitches since the SCOM installation requires a good requirement analysis first before deployment. Eg : Creating service accounts in Active Directory and permissions as well sizing up how many Management Servers you will need and other factors like resource pooling.

SCOM is always known to be very unstable when it comes to SCOM Agents which are installed locally on all the servers.

SCOM is well known for scalability so I've never faced any issue in this portion. You can add any Management Server to the existing SCOM infrastructure anytime with little down time though.

I would give MS customer service 8/10.

I just had two experience making call to the MS customer service for raising issue to the Support Team.

I would give MS SCOM Support: 8/10

The level of technical support really varies from person to person. In one of my issues I did receive a very technically strong support engineer, in other case it was totally opposite.

I had a deployment with Solarwinds SAM which is very cheap product compared to SCOM, and almost gets the work done as SCOM if you are looking for basic monitoring and not much of customization and production environment is from small to medium.

The initial setup is not very straightforward and requires good preparation work to be done before you can install and make SCOM up and running.

It was an in-house implementation. If we do go through vendor it sholud not take more than 5 days to make SCOM up and running well with the baseline from Microsoft.

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.

BMC BPPM, HP OVO , IBM Tivoli.

Our primary use case for this solution is to monitor hardware and network devices.

This solution allows us to standardize all of the reports for monitoring the network. It helps a lot for auditing purposes.

The most valuable feature is the extension of the libraries that they have for other solutions, such as monitoring ASP, Office 365 and others.

This product is not easy to use.

I would like to see more standard libraries for the market solutions, out of the box, that you don't need to do a lot of work on.

It's very good, very stable.

This solution is not too scalable.

The technical support is good. We had some problems post-implementation. There are not many people who really know this software, so there are not many experts on the market.

We did not use a solution prior to this. 

The initial setup for this solution is complex in terms of the configuration. The standard product is very simple to set up, but if you go for different solutions then it takes a lot of effort to set it up.

We use a full-service Microsoft partner in Brazil. 

We have not considered ROI for this solution. The most important part for us is monitoring the environment and also reports for auditing.

Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month.

We use a lot of solutions from Microsoft and we consider them to be reliable, so we did not evaluate other solutions.

This product is both stable and reliable, but it is not easy to use and there are not a lot of experts on the market to provide help. You have to do a lot of it by yourself.

I do recommend this product, but I would suggest that somebody who really knows the product is in place before implementation.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

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.

Monitoring specific to Microsoft Windows and apps: native monitoring. It works better than other products I’ve used – namely SolarWinds, which is cumbersome and error prone for web app monitoring. SCOM is not.

It has streamlined alerting and gave us the ability to monitor websites better.

Non Windows monitoring is fairly weak. Network device monitoring is not reliable.

Five years.

No.

No.

Support was mediocre when I had called once or twice. I drove the call ultimately.

I used SCOM 2007 prior to 2012.

It’s complex and somewhat painful to get all the accounts created (SQL configured). Overall, it’s not bad though.

No, we were already licensed for System Center. We just hadn’t started using it. Others have used WhatsUp though.

None really. Read a book or take a class on it. It’s complex and powerful.

It is easy to deploy and configure, has rich out of the box monitoring capabilities for windows environments, and can be easily extended with base XML and scripting knowledge.

As any helpful monitoring tool, SCOM improved vision of core problems of the IT environment for the technical support team, helped locate causes faster and consolidated monitoring functions in fewer hands. With some reporting and dashboarding additions, SCOM helped the IT department show its value for business users.

As I see in the SC 2016 roadmap, the product development team understands that main improvements for product should be: cross-platform and network monitoring features including stability and extensibility, wider support of dashboarding and cool widgets, the web console should be greatly improved, along with more handy development tools including custom widget development.

I have been working with SCOM and projects on it since 2007.

There were some deployment and configuration problems with the gateway server and overall this feature works a bit sloppy with other monitoring. Many problems occurred with configuration updates due to many MPs and failing DB maintenance tasks. Unix resource pool server heartbeat failures is another pain, as well.

General support is not helpful enough but Premier support engineers work good and fast. Mostly there is enough information to solve problems on TechNet and other web and community resources.

Previously, we - as well as our main SCOM customer - used HP OMW (and also free open source tools like WhatsUp, Nagios), SCOM was chosen for it's simplicity in deployment, out-of-box packs and easy administration. Other customers have SCOM for Windows monitoring purposes co-existing with other monitoring tools.

Initial setup is very clear and straightforward, especially when taking into account the MVPs' blog posts and advice.

We implemented SCOM by ourselves and the main advice is as simple as that: Follow the instructions, pay attention to details, be generous with SQL Server resources (disk) which looks like the main bottleneck of all product.

To get enough ROI and full advantage of licensing, one should use the datacenter type of enterprise licences and use as many of Microsoft System Center products as possible.

SCOM should be a good choice for fresh IT environments based on Windows servers or switching from open-source monitoring tools. By adding e.g. SCCM and SCOrch, you get a fast-to-deploy and easy-to-manage bundle of enterprise-class tools.

We use it to monitor Linux systems. It has performed well.

We are able to do problem determination on runaway processes. 

Graphing processes. It can send messages to our ticketing system. It has good graphs of what is going on within the operating system.

I would like to better be able to monitor Oracle processes.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

I have not used technical support.

We did not previously use a different solution, so I asked my manager to look into it.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We evaluated Zabbix.

If you are using Linux, do not discount SCOM just because it is a Windows or Microsoft product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

1. Features
2. Price.

• Monitoring with No Downtime
• Integration with System Center Products/OEM/SolarWinds
• Live Dashboards

Ticket Automation has taken a considerable load from the NOC.

Custom Tasks allows NOC to perform all basic troubleshooting from the SCOM console itself.

I’d like to see cross-platform support that would make SCOM a single enterprise monitoring application.

I’d also like to see support for direct monitoring of Oracle databases, DB2, etc.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

I have not encountered any major deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

Implementation was done in-house.

Design well in advance and the planning plays the most vital role. Implementation is simple.

We evaluated other products, and we chose this product because of its licensing and cost efficiency.