SCOM Reviews

First of all, this product is designed to monitor Microsoft products and does that very well. It covers monitoring SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, and the Operation System (2003-2012 R2 version).

IT management experienced a big improvement after implementation of this product. We use very tight integration with service desk software. SLA of IT services increased significantly.

At this point, only monitoring a network device is not good enough. But in the new version (it is a release candidate now), this function will be improved.

Our company have been using SCOM since it appeared (more than nine years).

We have been using this product for a long time, so we had some problems in the past, but it was a long time ago. The product is now very stable, and it has a lot of articles, documentation, internet community, internet resources and so on.

Technical support is very good if you have an agreement with MS.

At the beginning of this monitoring system project, we tested a few options. We tried IBM’s monitoring system, but we did not find a good specialist in our country and it is difficult to use a very complex, new product without good support. So we chose SCOM.

Nowadays, the initial setup is quite simple and straightforward. It is very well-documented. The installation process checks a lot of parameters and provides tips about what we should do.

We implemented our solution a very long time ago, and have had a few upgrades. Now, I think it is quite easy to implement this product without a vendor team.

The licensing is simple. The price is very low in comparison with other products with same functionality.

• Network monitoring feature
• Web application availability monitoring
• Web application transaction monitoring
• .NET app monitoring

These monitors are the most used in my infrastructure, because I have many websites and network devices to monitor and these features provide me different views such as the Detailed Dashboard list.

This product allows me to measure the level of availability of services and detect errors in them.

The console is a point to improve, because it is very heavy and a web console should be in HTML5.

I have been using it for five years.

I haven't seen any errors in my clean deployment.

The PRTG solution is easy to deploy and manage.

• 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.

• Ease of deployment capability
• Role-based automatic monitoring threshold deployment via MP

We used SCOM as our centralized pane of glass. We had other tools that were also directed to SCOM. Our NOC analysts were able to quickly see alerts and resolve. SCOM was able to monitor our Windows environment very well.

SCOM will allow you to go from firefighting mode to a more proactive stance when finding issues.

SCOM agents have a heavy footprint. Would like a lighter, more-efficient footprint. It takes a developer’s mindset to fully utilize SCOM’s potential. I would like easier deployment of MP and custom monitors.

I have used this solution for five years.

We had no issue during deployment and SCOM was pretty stable. We did run into a database limitation that brought us down every day for a week until Microsoft isolated the issue. Once they sent us a hot fix, we were up and running with no issues.

I rate technical support 7/10.

Setup was straightforward, not hard at all.

We installed SCOM with an in-house team. If you have a good relationship with Microsoft, they will have chalk talk conversations with you and tell what their best practice would be. After we had these talks, we installed and deployed ourselves.

We also evaluated HP OpenView, Zenoss, SolarWinds, and CA UIM.

SCOM works well for Windows, but if you need a broader solution and have a heterogeneous environment, SCOM is lacking.

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.

I’m an IT consultant. My customers are using SCOM because they can more easily integrate it with their current Microsoft IT infrastructure, and because the monitoring power of SCOM is enough for servers, services and some apps. Some of my customers are monitoring their network devices with SCOM. More specialized monitoring for network devices require other tools (most of the time) like SolarWinds and/or Fluke, etc. My customers are using SCOM to avoid business disruptions.

Microsoft SCOM can be improved about the way it is presented. Microsoft needs to train more people about how to sell SCOM (and other System Center family products) because there are a lot of emerging technologies that are replacing Microsoft. The vendor could create better training campaigns to avoid their replacement by other emerging technologies.

Think about the cloud. Try to move everything (if it is possible) to the cloud. You will save a lot of money on monitoring themes because most of the cloud services include it, so you don’t have to worry about monitoring. (Azure is an example.)

Microsoft is currently more valuable because this brand is wide used. Microsoft is also cheaper than Riverbed’s APM offering, but it is a matter of time because there are another brands conducting successful marketing / testing / training campaigns to replace Microsoft.

The agent for both products is solid and reliable and does not require post-deployment maintenance/restarts, as required by other products I have used.

Also, the way objects are discovered by class allows for quick overrides without much rework.

Managing a fleet of 9000-plus servers across multiple time zones and administrative domains, the ability to alter a threshold across the entire fleet within seconds has improved how my organization functions.

It has reduced the amount of time we spend in an operational support role, allowing us to focus on designing and building custom monitoring.

It would be nice to see the old MP Designer come back as you could quickly design and build a MP without a deep understanding of the XML code behind it.

Having to use Visual Studio requires a much deeper understanding of MP coding and limits the audience base capable of building custom monitoring Management Packs.

We have been using 2012 R2 for two years, and 2007 R2 for five years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. None, whatsoever.

I previously used NetIQ AppManager. Another great product, taking a different approach to monitoring. But if you have Microsoft System Centre licenses at your disposal, why pay for another product on top of that.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

We implemented it in-house. Follow the rules and it will work.

We were already paying for System Centre licensing, so rolling out SCOM only cost us in time and materials, and not in licensing.

Having been in IT for over 20 years, with Microsoft, you know what you are getting. I have not logged a single support case for this product, whereas with other, similar products, I would log cases every month. It’s extremely well-tested and you know what you are getting: quality.

Its flexibility, the ability to create Management Packs to monitor different programs or devices. No matter what it is you want to monitor or how you want to monitor, it can be done. You may have to create the code using VBScript or PowerShell, and XML, but it can be done. There are always lots of examples online that you can work from that will save you lots of time.

The company to which I am currently contracted is in the process of creating SNMP Management packages for our network devices. Very steep learning curve but the results are fantastic. Anything that can be accessed via SNMP commands, SCOM can retrieve via SNMP Gets. This fulfills the network monitoring need extremely well and now we are getting alerts that allow us to pre-empt problems before they become service issues. This is making our network much more stable.

There are always areas that can be improved in any product, but overall SCOM has matured very well over the years and appears to be at the point where only minor improvements need to be made. Since MS sends out updates regularly, these improvements can be made on the fly with very little interruption in service.

I have used this solution for 10 years.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment. This is one area where there is plenty of documentation. It would be nice if more companies actually retained a PME for rollouts instead of just letting their brightest take a shot at it. I have had to clean up behind a lot of best efforts that could have been avoided by just bringing a contractor in for a couple of months. It seems that the biggest mistake is putting all of the management packs available in at the same time before talking to the owners that will be getting the alerts. Off-the-shelf MPs are very verbose and need to be tuned for the environment and the way in which alerts are going to be handled.

Technical support is pretty good: very responsive, good level of understanding, rare to have to go beyond second-level support.

I chose it after investigating Nagios, SiteScope, and SolarWinds. Initially, the thing that sold me was the Authoring console for creating MPs. It made it very easy to get started and produce right away. Now that MS has discontinued it, I use Visual Studio. It didn’t take long to figure Visual Studio out and now I can produce MPs as quickly as I did with the console and with more flexibility and understanding of what is going on. Most of the other programs aren’t ready off-the-shelf to the extent that SCOM is, and require a lot more work to get alerts coming in. MS has created the basic packages with all the possible monitoring and collections that they think the average company will want to use. Many of these are disabled by default and up to the implementer to go through them to see if his/her company can benefit from them. In many cases, companies will decide that anything that isn’t actionable needs to be turned off. That’s not always a good idea, as many of the alerts are preemptive to help you fix an issue before it becomes a major problem.

I am a contractor and work exclusively with SCOM, I have implemented at many different companies, including MS, so it’s pretty easy for me to come into an environment and know what needs to be done. Probably the most important part of the design that most companies forget about is the processes that need to be in place before you stand it up. What are we going to monitor? How are we going to handle requests for custom monitoring, and tuning or disabling of existing monitoring and collections? Who and where are we sending alerts? Are they aware of what is going to be coming at them? Did you sit down with each and every group that you are installing MPs for and go over the monitoring and collections to see what they want and don’t want? DBA’s, for example, don’t want to see endless alerts about SPNs, or even permissions. Get this worked out before installing the SQL package and the DBA group will be much easier to work with. How are you going to route alerts, are you going to send them to a ticketing application? If so you have to decide how to do that. Are you going to send all alerts and have the ticketing system decide what is an actionable alert, or are you going to create subscriptions in SCOM to handle it?

As compared to some of the others that I have been exposed to, SCOM has its good and bad points. Documentation is poor, but the community makes up for it with good blogs and lots of how-to examples.

Get knowledgeable help, not someone off the street that says they know SCOM, but someone that can show a track record of working with it. You will save lots of time and money.

It is so flexible and easy to learn if the right processes are put into place.