SCOM Reviews

Our primary use of SCOM is for monitoring deployments of Windows. It is also used for monitoring applications, and it reports information if there is a problem.

It is very good at monitoring Microsoft Server.

SCOM is not a flexible product.

The initial setup should be easier to complete.

We have been working with SCOM for three years.

This is a very stable product and we plan to continue using it in the future.

This solution is very scalable. It can change the configuration for management and performance. We have two people who use it. One is a manager and the other is an engineer.

When I need external support, I can open a case with Microsoft. I have opened between two and four support cases and I am satisfied with the support I received.

We don't use any other product for deployments. 

I would say that the initial setup is 50-50. It is not easy and it's not hard to set up. It should be easier to install. It took us between three days and a week to deploy.

The length of time for deployment depends on the size of your environment. If I am installing a new System Center Operations Manager for 100 servers, it will take maybe two weeks. The process requires implementing monitoring agents, and I need to change the configuration as well.

I deploy this product myself.

We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it.

This is a good product and I recommend it. When it comes to monitoring Microsoft servers, it is very useful.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using SCOM for service monitoring integrated with some third-party dashboard. It is our end-to-end service monitoring solution.  

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.  

The dashboard is one place where the product can be improved. We finally needed to get a customized dashboard from the NOC (Network Operation Center) team. The dashboard that was included with the product just did not do what we wanted it to do.  

I am not sure, exactly, what should be included with future releases. There are already a lot of features there in the product. The main thing I can suggest is that Microsoft also provides management packs for monitoring third-party products with the product. If that were included with SCOM, that would make the product even greater. For example, to monitor an Oracle database, you need to look around to get a management pack separately. It could just be included instead.  

You can monitor any non-Microsoft product with Microsoft SCOM if you have the management pack for that product. You need to purchase that management pack. You can get them sometimes from Microsoft and other times from the third-party vendor.  

I have been using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) from Microsoft for almost five years.  

From the time we did the configuration, the product has been stable. It may be different in other cases. It really depends on the design you implement. If you want to add functionality, you can add it. It depends on the business. If you want Apache or you want a singular-server implementation you configure it as you need to. If it is configured correctly it should remain stable.  

SCOM is scalable. We do not have an issue with the number of users or with the number of machines and the devices we are monitoring. It does not have any issues in that respect.  

We support the product with a system admin team which is the only group that deals with SCOM directly for maintenance issues. Right now, the team is only five people. Even there, these five people do not use the product on a daily basis. The configuration is something that you do one time if you do it correctly. There is monitoring, which is done by the NOC team and that is ongoing. 

In case some maintenance is required like a change in business requirements or addition of services, then the SCOM team will do it. This does not happen all the time. But monitoring is done by another team separate from the maintenance.  

We have not had to use the Microsoft support since maybe four or five years ago. It was during the time we were doing the implementation. We had a few calls with them — maybe two or three calls — for some configuration-related questions. That was all. It was handled efficiently and we got the answers we needed. But we have not had to use the support team since.  

I have had the opportunity to use other products in this category. Not at the current organization, but in other organizations before this. One was WhatsUp Gold. If I were to compare these two solutions, SCOM has more advantages and is really the better product.  

It is actually pretty simple to do the setup. I think it really can be implemented on the same day that you get it. You can do the complete installation and configuration in one day.  

But adding services, that takes time. It depends on the business and your scope, what you need to add, what you need to configure when it is added. I consider that as a separate part because it is not the fault of the product that you have additional requirements. The additions made for service monitoring depends on the customer, the requirements that they have, and what they need to add.  

The installation was done by our company with an in-house team. We did not need help from the vendor or an integrator except for some basic questions.  

We do maintenance as required also in-house and we handle the upgrades from one version to another version. All those maintenance details are managed by the system admin team.  

If you compare the pricing of SCOM to some solutions now available — like ManageEngine — I think it is a bit more expensive. But at that price, you get more in Microsoft System Center. SCOM is a bundled product, it is not only SCOM. You get a complete suite of Microsoft System Center products. There are five products in the bundle. There are no additional costs for SCOM itself and everything is included in the license. The only additional costs that you may have is in getting management packs.  

On the other hand, open-source solutions are available that are mature or maturing and they are very good. They may pose a better solution because they are free.  

My advice to people who are looking for a solution like SCOM would actually be to advise them to move from licensed software to open-source. You can go to Nagios or most other open-source products and they do the same thing as SCOM. There is no need to pay additional money to get the same services.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SCOM as a seven-out-of-ten. It is a good product, but so are the free open-source products it competes with.  

My primary use case for SCOM is to monitor service availability and performance, such as operating systems. We also integrate some Linux based operating systems to monitor our databases. We also monitor the Microsoft Exchange. We are having some difficulties in the case of the monitoring a couple of our networking devices, so I wouldn't say that monitoring networking devices is also part of the primary use cases. 

I also have Internet Information Server and Application Service from Microsoft Monitor.

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.

In terms of features that could be improved, I would say the agent integration into the operating system. We are having difficulties integrating Linux into some of the networking devices. We have not seen the collected data so it makes it challenging.

I would also say that agentless monitoring needs to be included. Something like this is pretty difficult if you don't have a particular agent.

It's not so easy if you have to use something like a proxy to implement a work around. They should include a solution for discovering devices and something like an agentless monitoring solution for a particular device - just to understand what your environment looks like.

I'm not saying that they should provide all the information for the device, but at least availability and partial monitoring based on SNMP. Because I know that other solutions have it. Maybe Service Center Operations Manager has already provided those things in the latest version, but I'm not familiar with it.

I have been using Microcoft SCOM for roughly five years.

Our whole department that maintains SCOM is five people, so the IT department is pretty small and it's relatively integrated. Plus, we have only two dedicated System Administrators. Basically, a few people are doing many things.

We are doing the usual maintenance, patching, and updating. Alignment and configuration are also needed because we are trying to support a higher version of the application, Exchange 2016, with the previous 2012 version of Service Center Operations Manager. It's quite difficult and some type of maintenance is performed internally as we try to align as much as possible. 

Generally speaking, SCOM is stable from an operations point of view. Once it's set up and established and all the configuration is in place, there is no significant amount of time needed for stability or to support the availability of the solution itself. It's relatively simple to support.

In terms of scalability, we increased the amount of supported devices from 50 to 150, but it's not a significant scale. I couldn't say yet how it would behave for a thousand or 2,000 devices.

We have a pretty simple setup for SCOM, we are not using any kind of clustering or virtualization.

Microsoft support can vary. It's great for people that are used to other types of support. Meaning, software vendors usually provide a little bit more focused and dedicated Microsoft support teams. For general support, it's okay from my perspective. But to really understand the deep and the intense nature of your issue, it's a little bit tricky to get to that level.

Overall, technical support needs some alignment. The technical support should be separated from general support. They should start with the general support for people that are end-users or a single user in a simple environment. Then, to reach to the real technical integration-related support later because it's a little bit tricky. Usually, we use our integration partner as someone that is really dealing with those kinds of discussions with the vendor. But if you go directly as a single enterprise, it will be a little bit challenging.

In my previous work I had experience with Network Node Manager, a new solution from HP. It's more focused on agentless monitoring. Also, there is a capability for a monitoring device without any kind of agent installed, which is a little bit more professional. It's not the general solution for monitoring, so I wouldn't say that are comparable. My perception is that Microsoft is just focused on the software stack layer they provide. While Network Node Manager is more of an umbrella, it's much more focused on enterprise level devices and environments. So they should not be compared.

As far as I can remember, the initial setup was pretty simple, but we started with pretty easy devices to monitor. We started with a couple of servers and almost all of them had the same version of the operating system. So it was simple to figure out how things were progressing.

I would say it took a couple of days or a week for the whole setup. It took about five days to install all the servers, and installation and all the integration, and the checks probably took a week.

Initially we implemented on our own. But for a couple of integrations, we used integrators for support, especially for particular application servers and installations, Exchange and partially for SQL Server.

My recommendation to anyone looking to use SCOM is that they should start with the latest version because it's pretty difficult to update later. From an operational perspective and regarding migrating many devices and whole environments, it's better to start with the latest version for Service Center Operations Manager.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate Microsoft SCOP a seven.

Our primary use case is to monitor the extensive system of services that we operate for clients.

SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) has helped improve our organization through reporting capabilities. The reporting is very good. We're an outsourcing company, so we provide services and manage service and as a service. We have a multi-service environment, so it is complicated to monitor and maintain. 

The alerting with SCOM is incredible. The product works well with multiple environment integration, and if there is an issue, the system forwards alerts to different service desk systems so that the issues are handled appropriately. There are actually numerous things the solution does for our company to automate processes, and, to top it off, it's a stable application.

I'm the operational manager for Business Connections Monitoring Toolsets. We do installations of this product. We do the configuration. We take care of changes in threshold if needed, and supply additional expertise for critical projects as needed. We monitor everything to be sure things continue to work optimally and do things like monitor hard drive space, etc.

The integration with Power BI from the SCOM database offers incredible possibilities for enhancing user experience. That integration is added value to our services because of what it can do and what we can make it do for clients.

People don't have to log on to the console to see what's going on. They get all the data through the integration between Power BI (Business Intelligence) and SCOM. It is extremely flexible and can be adjusted to meet specific operating criteria. 

If I compare the SCOM solution with the CA UIM (CA Technologies Unified Infrastructure Management) products, the CA products are horrendous in comparison. It's not stable in the way that they do their aggregation and their roll-ups. Really the methodology doesn't make sense. SCOM handles these things without a problem.

Many of the features in the SCOM product have been valuable to us as an organization. Basically most of the main features like the alerting, the reporting, the discovery, the automation, the auto-discovery of products installed on a server and the grouping that it does automatically have all simplified the way we work. The automation in SCOM is incredible, and because I have some exposure now to other, similar products, I can make a good comparison between them. 

The CA products — which is in direct competition with SCOM — is not as good at all. I also have exposure to SolarWinds and a local product here called Syntelligence. None of those products can touch SCOM as far as general versatility. It is just a far superior application for general monitoring.

You can expand on the SCOM automation. But its power is more than just in the segment of automating things. If services stop, you can run recovery tasks and you can use disaster recovery scripts. That is just an example. There are numerous things that you can do with this product.

There are so many features in SCOM it has possibilities that are essentially longer than your arms can reach. You can monitor third-party applications, you can monitor services, you can collect events and you can trigger reports and send alerts based on those events. It's integration capabilities are very good. For me, it is the ultimate unified solution. It is a very nice product and I love it because of the capabilities it provides. The unification of services makes it easier to deploy and maintain.

Even though I think there are ways that this product is superior to most other solutions on the market, there are quite a few things that it does not do alone. This is where the product can be improved. One of the facets is in network monitoring. In fact, it can use quite a lot of improvement in that area. That's where products — like CA Technologies Performance Manager — are much better. You can do a lot with it that you can not with the reporting in SCOM. However overall that CA product is not as well rounded and complete.

The Scrum files that you set up can be made better. For example, you may want accounts that have access to the SCOM console to have more granular access. For example, you may have a situation where you prefer that only certain engineers will be able to add agents to the server — and only the server. But you can't set up the permissions that are this granular. Likewise, it may be that you want to assign someone the right to do threshold changes or to the environment of certain places of certain management groups. It is not part of the standard solution.

With other monitoring tools, you have the ability to set the permissions granularly, which SCOM actually doesn't do. So I hope that they would add that feature and support granularity. There are other ways in which to do it, but if you can do it in the monitoring tool itself and in the administration, then it'll make things much easier and make it a far more complete, unified solution.

One more thing would be better application monitoring. Products like AppDynamics do that very well and exceed the capabilities of SCOM. What I think I would like to see is for SCOM to be more of a complete end-to-end solution so there is no need to look to other solutions or work outside of the singular product. 

SCOM is stable. We have never had a problem with system stability.

I think that SCOM is a very scalable solution. It depends on what hardware or virtual environment you're running on, but the scalability of SCOM is practically endless, I think. You can certainly go very far with it. 

I know of a client in a banking institution that's working on 12,000 servers and their SCOM system is humming along without fail. So scalability on the environment of SCOM itself is very good, or at least it has proven to be scalable in that instance. 

Technical support from Microsoft for SCOM is always excellent. 

By comparison, I've been fighting with CA Technologies and how they do things. It is not the same kind of experience. If you log requests for technical support to tell them what the problem is, they ask a few questions in the investigation. You supply them with the information and from there on you do not know the response time. Depending on the severity of the issue you report on the call, it will be handled more quickly. If it's urgent, then they react very quickly. If it is not urgent, it is not quick even if the answer is simple.

What I like about the SCOM technical support is that they tell you what causes the issue when they find the resolution. They give you a report, they tell you what caused it and what the solution is. That helps make the solution make sense and maybe can help avoid other issues in the future.

We actually have not switched to this solution from another as we are evaluating and using several at the same time. We have used SolarWinds and then there's a new product called eSight that we have to use. The latter product is from Huawei and it is their monitoring tool for their network equipment. We basically were forced to start to support it because of client need. So there are four products that we supporting in our server for various reasons. 

But if I have to choose any one product for server monitoring to take care of all aspects of monitoring out of the box, SCOM is number one. That is it can do application monitoring, like SQL Server Stack Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, third party stats, VMware or VLAN — you name it. It's really an excellent product.

So that is why my number one choice is SCOM. Put simply, it is the most complete.

The installation of the product was the easiest thing about using it. If you just follow the instructions and do exactly what it tells you, you don't have to be a trained network surgeon to do it. You can teach a seven-year-old to do the installation. If you can read, you can do the installation. It's really that easy. 

Managing the system depends on the size of the environment for the most part, but I think it depends on the environment and the client as well. When their needs are more demanding or specialized the work will be harder. We've got a client that's got nearly 2,000 servers and they have only one engineer working on the entire thing. There is no need for additional personnel.

We work on our own systems and installations.

We, as a company, are using four products for monitoring, one of which is SCOM. We use multiple products because we are an outsourcing company and not everyone needs or wants the same thing. The other products are from CA Technologies. That is Performance Management, NFA, and UIM Unified Integration Management. These products just enhance the options we have to service our clients.

As far as meeting our needs for a solution, I give it a nine out of ten. But it is interesting to rate the tool. My rating doesn't really have a context. It is mostly engineers that are using the product. In a sense, it doesn't matter what monitoring tool you use, the success of a monitoring tool is dependent on the engineers using it. The engineer has to make it work.

I'm really not aware of the total number of users that we service and with SCOM I don't really need to know. I don't know much about the actual numbers except that we've got 28 clients. Each of the 28 clients has a different number of employees and different engineers that are working on different environments to solve different issues. If I had to guess, I'd say there are really only 100 to 120 only. I wish it was more, and I think we can easily scale to meet additional demand. But the point is that we are responsible for monitoring and identifying issues in a variety of environments, and that is exactly what SCOM helps us do, with efficiency.

We basically use everything we can that is included in the package and have found a real use for every module that's available. That said, we don't do a lot of network monitoring. Server monitoring, absolutely. That we use extensively. Reporting, we use a lot, event collections we use quite extensively. But we bring to the clients what they need most.

We have confidence in the solution and we are going to put all or most of the clients on to Scrum 2019 if they are willing to accept the upgrade path. We are busy working on that in a project to upgrade it to 2019. It all depends on how well test upgrades go and the willingness of clients to enhance their services. We need to test it in the development area first, and then, depending on the type of environment that is running, we have to plan the upgrade in the proper sequence. Say the environment is a 2012 version, the upgrade path is to 2016, from 2016 to 1801, from 1801 to 1807 and then you must make sure that you're on the correct sequel version for 2019. But to do it at all depends on the license agreement that the particular clients have with Microsoft. Right now we are busy taking the environment up to 1807 and then we going to upgrade the sequel version, and then from there, we can go to 2019.

So we are busy the whole time trying to better service our clients. We do our UI updates quite often. We are quite busy with our upgrade paths and testing to make sure everything goes smoothly for the clients in the implementation. 

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 have installed SCOM in our Windows Server 2020 system. We use the solution to monitor any issues that might happen in our infrastructure and keep them in good health. We have SQL Servers, web servers, and web interfaces.

The most valuable feature of SCOM is real-time alerts.

In a future release, they should add email notification alerts.

I have been using SCOM for approximately three months.

SCOM is stable.

The scalability of SCOM is good. We can add other servers or services.

I have approximately eight IT personnel that use the solution in my company.

I have not used the support but others in my company have many times.

Before I used SCOM I used Microsoft Azure.

There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually.

We have two system engineers who do the maintenance of this solution, but the number of people needed depends on their knowledge or qualification.

I recommend this solution to others, but I would suggest having some training.

I rate SCOM a seen out of ten.

We use it mainly for partitioning systems. All the systems' utilization and compute, uptime, and downtime. I also monitor a few applications through it.

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.

The configurations could be better. There are multiple tests where you can do something, but they can be a trigger as well. The overriding methodologies are not that easy. The configurations are difficult. The configuration and thorough day-to-day operations to get them to the level you want takes some time. It's very difficult.

I think certain things, like management packs, should also be built into the solution. They should be built into your installation or deployment so you can decide whether to keep them in the list of products that you want. You can just unpick the ones you don't want and install this with the latest management technologies. Installing the solution and then looking for management technologies and custom solutions, like your HP and the hardware, you have to go through an HPE port file to download that management pack and add it. I think their whole packaging of the software can be made a little bit easier.

I have been using SCOM for about three years.

SCOM is a stable product. Once you get it off the ground, it's very stable.

Technical support is fine. Not that I need it that much, but normally they do help.

The initial setup is straightforward. But configurations and maneuvering around it and getting things to a level you want is very difficult. Installing and deploying it properly takes close to a week. It takes time to take out things that are just unnecessary. It also takes time to customize things according to the environment. You need to read a lot of documentation, even with the management packs. You need to go back to the documentation all the time.

It doesn't take many people to implement this solution. You have to know math and the Microsoft server platform for you to manage it properly.

We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA.

If new potential users want to monitor a Windows platform or Microsoft Server-related platforms, I would recommend it. But if they want to manage anything else, they have to create a lot of custom things for them to work properly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SCOM an eight.

We use SCOM mostly for server performance monitoring in historical metrics.

I like the historical reporting of observer metrics. It's a fairly user-friendly solution.

It'll help if they can provide real-time or closer to real-time monitoring.

I've been using SCOM for at least five years.

SCOM is a stable solution.

SCOM is scalable, and it's easy to add resources.

I believe we have had issues. I'm not the primary administrator of it, but in general, I think they've been able to get back to us relatively quickly.

The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite. I believe we pay for the license on a yearly basis.

I would tell people looking to implement this solution that it's great for any historical tracking. But if they're looking for real-time, within-the-minute monitoring of servers from a console, then I would say that it falls short there.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SCOM a seven.