SCOM Reviews

Mature product, strong brand, many customers, Gartner awards

Excellent Microsoft server/application monitoring capabilities

Fast and consistent UX for system admins

Extensive dashboarding capabilities

REST API available

Excellent technical support, rich user community

Designed for on-premise installations

After reviewing alternatives based on our existing needs, we decided against SCOM for the time being.

Lacks common network monitoring features found in alternatives.

Poor support for non-Microsoft systems at this time.

User dashboards require posting to Microsoft SharePoint Server.

Very high administrative burden, requires constant maintenance.

Application transaction monitoring only available in .NET applications on IIS.

Limited analytics capabilities (you must build your own in SSRS)

Full monitoring capabilities requires integration with the rest of the Microsoft System Center suite

2 years

Yes, many. Official documentation fails to list all required TCP/UDP ports necessary for installing the base server as well as gateway servers that are members of remote domains.

We also encountered many issues with each service account used by SCOM that took several days to resolve (domain account rights can be troublesome if not set up correctly from the beginning).

No. Once SCOM was up and running we never had a failure.

No. Scalability is one of the hallmarks of SCOM. It is designed for scaling up/out.

Good.

Very good. Microsoft's technical support team for SCOM is very knowledgeable and is responsive. Most of your technical support documentation/ information can be found on TechNet as well.

Initial setup was extremely complex with security certificates, multiple installation options depending on the server roles in the system, multiple service accounts are needed, as well as delegation of rights for each account. It took several days of troubleshooting to resolve each issue as they were found during initial installation.

Our own team installed the system in-house.

None.

With regards to licensing, if your organization has Enterprise CALs then SCOM is typically included in the suite and may help you if you are trying to save operational costs.

SCOM truly demands it's own support team to manage and administer it (not to mention applying the monthly patches) and is designed for monitoring mid-to-large on-premise environments. If you have a somewhat small environment, or if you do not have the people resources to support a SCOM install then I would recommend to look for alternatives. However if you are an existing Microsoft Enterprise CAL customer SCOM is worth the evaluation.

It integrates with your Windows environment seamlessly and provides a lot of visibility on your Windows environment. If you use SCCM as well, it integrates beautifully with it.

The interface doesn't provide any graphical view of your topology, you only see a bunch of alerts, monitors, etc. Humans are visual creatures and if you can see at a glance what's going on in your infrastructure, that's added value to me.

You can create dashboards to create views of your infrastructure but I feel that this should come out of the box.

It generates a lot of false positives, probably due to misconfiguration or because it doesn't have an intuitive algorithm to pinpoint the root of the problem

You need to add a lot of management packs in order to manage different devices, instead of SCOM containing these already out of the box, I'm talking about vendors such as Citrix and VMware. Even Exchange and SQL Server monitors are not configured out of the box, it requires configuration. This should come straight away configured for you, especially as SQL Server and Exchange are Microsoft products!

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us.

It lacks capabilities to properly monitor other devices or infrastructure that is not Microsoft based, stuff like Linux, UNIX, Cisco routers, switches. I mean, since it is not the core of the product, the monitoring capabilities on these devices is very basic if I compare it with CA Spectrum which it used to be a network product that evolved into something else to cover other critical and important areas like Application and Systems performance and Servers/Systems in general.

In New Zealand, it's 4/5.

Configuration of alerts and monitors is very convoluted. You need to configure four or five different places to make a monitor work.

The price is OK, and I think the licensing works the same as any other Microsoft product.

I find this product very clunky and not very intuitive to use, it took me a while to find my way around and understand where I needed to go to configure or even get a report is a bit complicated.

• Agent based monitoring
• Agentless monitoring
• VSAE
• Rules
• Monitors
• SLA
• Server monitoring

All our environments are automated to automatically install the SCOM agents across different domains which helps us to check the health of the server, to get the server details like IIS, app pools, Performance counters like CPU, Memory, Disk usage, etc.

SCOM needs improvement in phasing out the Silverlight based web platform and instead provide web access for all browsers using HTML5 probably. The API and the knowledge base needs to be improved by Microsoft.

I've used it for two years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

SCOM server needs periodic maintenance to make sure the disk/database has enough space and a lot of alerts across a big environment might come fairly quickly. At times it needs server and service restarts.

We've had no issues with scalability.

5/10

5/10

I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.This was the first monitoring solution we used, but we have moved out the URL monitoring away from SCOM to StatusCake and VictorOps as StatusCake has an easy REST based endpoint for monitoring and VictorOps provides us on call support. We are continuing with SCOM as we need agent based monitoring for our SAAS solutions.

The initial setup is fairly simple if you read the installation documents beforehand and install all the prerequisites properly, otherwise it can be a fairly long task.

I implemented SCOM on my own. You can use SCOM C# SDK or VSAE or GUI to implement SCOM management packs.

It has a good ROI.

Pricing and licensing is fairly OK. If you have a MSDN license, then your dev environments can be set up for free as you can get a dev SCOM license from MSDN. You only have to pay for production SCOM server if you have a MSDN license.

Implement a prototype management pack on the dev environment and analyze all the pros and cons before buying the product. You can get a free six months trial on this also.

The dashboard is in a class of its own, with a whole other range of competing products in management of datacenters and cloud environment. Microsoft has managed to create a user experience that builds trust in the product. The monitoring features are top notch. 

It is in our starter pack for new employees joining the IT division. Working with SCOM enables new hires or management trainees gain insight into the inner workings of the the business with emphasis on uptime. 

The monitoring features are top notch. 

The configuration, especially for alerts, are somewhat lengthy. 

There were no issues with the deployment.

There were no issues with the stability.

There were no issues with the scalability.

The initial implementation stage can be a bit of a challenge but once things are up and running, it's worth it.

Real time monitoring/alerts. Pro-active response to warning alerts are invaluable and have saved disasters quite a few times.

We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool. We have prevented various problems and have been able to resolve issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, it assists our department in being pro-active in regards to resolving issues with servers/services rather the reactive. The level of monitoring from overview health to granular object monitoring is excellent.

I've been using it for four years.

I wasn't involved in the deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

We have needed to increase the VM resources as we’ve added more servers and increased monitoring packs, but that’s to be expected.

Microsoft support is generally excellent, we’ve never raised a call for SCOM though.

We have some in house monitoring that’s looked after by our NOC team, however, this is basic SNMP monitoring, so nothing in comparison.

It's not straightforward, SCOM is relatively “noisy” out of the box, so time is required to tailor the alerting, adjusting threshold triggers and over-riding alerts that are not required to ensure alerts captured are relevant and require action.

It was done in-house.

Very difficult to gauge. Using most or all of the Security Centre Suite ensures that the license cost is very reasonable considering what’s in the suite. To just use SCOM would be a very expensive license per server in my opinion, best to use multiple products in this suite.

Ensure you have plenty of resources to throw at the environment, space for data warehouse and SQL as it will be resource hungry for SCOM (server estate size relevant of course). Be prepared for some initial time investment and ensure regular updates and management packs are applied to make the product as useful as possible.

• Monitoring Windows servers and services
• Monitoring Linux servers and services
• Monitoring disk space, performance and unexpected errors
• Customized views
• Ability to implement remote login and ping directly from the SCOM console

SCOM is a required tool in my job since I am responsible in overseeing multiple virtual and physical servers and services for a bank.

The warnings and errors I receive such as low disk space warnings allow me to easily determine the impact it has on the server and call out the required people to get the issue resolved before it's too late

Having the ability for it to be integrated with third party ticket systems or other monitoring software would make an even better tool for people like myself within administrative or monitoring positions.

We've used it for one year.

There were no issues encountered during the deployment.

Because SCOM currently runs on a Citrix session, SCOM sometimes becomes slow or crashes when there is too much going on.

There were no issues scaling it.

I've never had to contact Microsoft for a SCOM issue.

We are using Centreon and Nagios monitoring software. These two are web-based and maybe if SCOM can incorporate a web console, it would become a real powerful tool.

Since SCOM and its customized features were already set-up when I arrived, I cannot comment on this. I have not installed SCOM in the past so I also cannot comment on the installation process.

A third party vendor set-up SCOM before I started in this position so I cannot comment.

In order to use all the features in SCOM, one must learn the tool from the inside out and then customize it so that it fits the paricular business. This way you know the foundations and are able to build a robust tool to monitor and control a large amount of servers and services across the world

One of the most important features of SCOM is the Reporting Server role which runs on the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It’s responsible for rendering and scheduling reports. With Operations Manager, you have extract reporting capabilities and multiple report libraries that you can select from to customize reports to your own granular requirements.

It will help you to visualize the data in your environment. The reports provide high-level summaries and detailed information about your systems and can be e-mailed on a specified schedule or simply exported and printed out. The reporting server performs queries against the Operations Manager data warehouse database and returns the results in a number of easy-to-read formats.

Another point, you can import management packs available for Microsoft products, which you can customize thresholds of several counters of each product. Also, you can create your management pack and define your customizations.

This tool could be improved especially for tasks for our Capacity Planning Team and Monitoring Team. The Capacity Planning Team collect data through the reports from the Operations Manager for the memory, CPU and disks during the month. The use this to make dashboards to show their customers about their environment. With this, it’s possible to show environment of each customer.

For the Monitoring Team, it helps monitor a simple and complex environment in IT sending determinate alerts. For example, if your team receives a determined kind of alert, they will work on the solution before that problem occurs. Through the Operations Console, the Monitoring Team can see critical and warning alerts and if necessary, dispatch for a responsible team is the Database Team, Operating System Team or Exchange Team, etc. It’s clear that it's also possible to send alerts creating split groups for Database Team, Operation System Team, and send alerts for the respective products to the team responsible. It depends on each organization.

I think that it should be made possible to monitor private systems, which are developed in each company. In my opinion, this option already exists in SCOM 2012, however we have a lack of resources to develop this.

In this company, SCOM has been in place since 2006, starting with MOM in 2005 and after that, it was upgrade to SCOM 2007.

I've used it to monitor several Microsoft Servers, which I've customized thresholds to support in Exchange, File Servers, SQL Servers, Clusters and others products.

I had issues with SCOM 2007 and MOM 2005, regarding the view of alerts in the Console Operations. It delayed showing critical alerts to the monitoring Team, because they could not see alerts in the Operations Console. For this kind of issue, I had issues with database maintenance as well.

I have a contact at Microsoft Premier, and I find it necessary to us them to open a case with Microsoft, if they think that it's possible to fix the issue.

In another company, I’ve had experience with BMC Patrol, Tivolli and SiteScope as NETQoS products, but this tool I’ve worked with administration.

There were no issues with setting up SCOM.

Follow the best practices and there should be no issues.

SCOM is a monitoring tool that looks after the vast majority of your private and even public cloud. In my experience having a good insight into specific product monitoring surrounding the Microsoft suite such as Exchange, Active Directory, Lync, SQL and the System Center suite is something that all my clients seek. For me the addition of Microsoft knowledge base articles that point to the cause, explanation and resolution to a product specific issue is invaluable and the ability to add your own knowledge base articles that specifically relate your environment is awesome!

Having a round the clock watchmen offers great peace of mind. Typically my organization uses it for monitoring our virtualisation environments specifically Hyper-V and VMware as well as all the services we run from it. We've had outages at two am and three am that was automatically resolved by SCOM saving us time and money. The saving came from not having to rely on highly priced out of hours staff to resolve any potential issues.

In the world that is monitoring, sometimes the decision makers want to see and hear all the issues that may occur during business hours (as well as out of hours) and (rightly or wrongly) SCOM gives you exactly that! Its revered to as an "Alert Storm". SCOM uses something called "Management Packs" and that is where the alerts come from, but, managing these can be a little convoluted to say the least, I'd like to see these made a little simpler but still keep the same functionality, basically these management packs need to become a little more user friendly. Almost always, these alert storms can put IT managers and operators off the product and give the impression that everything is broken or not working properly, so making them easier to work with will help SCOM administrators (especially if they are new to SCOM) manage and understand what the product is showing them.

I've been using it since 2007.

There were no issues with the deployment.

From a stability point of view, personally I've rarely seen SCOM fall over because of SCOM, I've seen SCOM fall over and die due to hardware issues, visualization issues or resource issues. But the good news is if you've setup SCOM correctly, the product will tell you why it fell over! This means that you can put the preventative measures in place to stop it happening again.

SCOM is "highly available" out of the box (those are Microsoft words not mine) but it really is true, so scaling your SCOM set-up is easy, just install more SCOM servers!

I've had such a mix of technical support scenarios with SCOM it’s a difficult one to answer. Microsoft support of the product is pretty good, with regular updates and good internal knowledge and relatively fast response times. However, other vendors have created software the plugs into SCOM and support for these add-ons can differ wildly! But overall its pretty good.

Personally no, I stared in IT in 2007 and it's all I've ever used. However some of my clients have made the jump from other products to SCOM. Depending on their requirements, SCOM can offer a wide range of monitoring solutions and more often than not, it’s been a successful transition.

It never use to be, but since the 2012 release the deployment side of SCOM was simplified greatly. This was obviously great news for I.T pro's like myself as the client conversation became a little more straight forward. However, installing SCOM was the easy part, making it work after the install is where the fun begins, this side of the setup however remains a little more challenging.