SCOM Reviews

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

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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.

Extensible dashboards allow us to create customized service-level dashboards for business owners.

.NET monitoring capabilities are crucial for our organization to monitor the availability and performance of our IIS-based .NET applications.

Network monitoring also completes the monitoring story by providing visibility over the network layer. All backend routers and switches are monitored by SCOM and also we consume some third-party network management packs to extend the capability.

SCOM provided end-to-end monitoring for all aspects of the infrastructure, including web sites, network devices, databases and applications. Now, c-level management can easily see overall service-level dashboards and SLAs for mission-critical services.

I would like to see true multi-tenancy support. When it comes to service provider type of customers, it's quite difficult to have a complete monitoring view for different tenants. The System Center suite is not designed for true multi-tenancy overall. But SCOM is also lacking some multi-tenant environment requirements.

I have used it for nine years.

High-available deployment with SQL always on requires detailed planning and testing before production implementation. We needed different internal teams involved in the planning phase including the network team for bandwidth utilization, the database team for SQL and application owners. We also encountered some problems while implementing SQL always on on a multi-site SCOM deployment. We resolved problems by contacting Microsoft support.

Single-server deployment was quite straightforward. We deployed it for a POC and pre-prod environment. Online TechNet articles cover most of the steps. But when it comes to HA design for multiple datacenters, it gets complicated.

Also, we had to use PowerShell for some settings to reduce the deployment time. SCOM shell commands are not enough to achieve most of the tasks so we used SDK instead of PowerShell, which was an oddly difficult experience.

I have done both types of implementations in the past. See below.

The planning phase is crucial. Also note that SCOM admin can not plan the whole infrastructure. All application owners should be involved in planning phase. Also, post-configuration tasks should be taken care of by application owners, such as custom monitors, tunings for alerts, etc.

• 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.

The fact that you can create you own MP to monitor customs apps, servers, networking connections, etc. is very valuable. It can be integrate with ticket systems.

After a proper setup and MP fine tuning it offers a very fast view of your entire environment or just a special app, etc.

Dashboards, Dashboards, Dashboards. It will be nice to have the power of Live Maps with the built in dashboards.

More than 4 years

The suite is a monster. Without a clear strategy and fine tuning can produce a lot of noise (unnecessary noise) or miss critical aspects of your environment.

Some issues with DBs growing without reason. Nothing too unusual. I think the product is very stable and mature. Has a very easy system of redundancy.

No, nothing unusual. It's very stable, more Management servers can be add later, out of box redundant, etc.

Customer Service:

Normal for Microsoft :), tickets, a lot of money, etc. Sometimes more easy and fast is to search on dedicated forums and blogs.

Technical Support:

Is Microsoft :), you pay more better support. But the product is popular so many forums, blogs, etc., including resources in TechNet.

Cacti, Nagios, SolarWinds. The System Center 2012 R2 is really powerful, all products works great together. Is not so expensive any more, easy to licensees. Can cover from end to end (Networking, Hardware layer,OS , App and services, ports, etc.).

The initial setup is easy for a sysadmin, but the proper settings and MP tuning require a lot of attention. Out of box it works but not for enterprise level.

I'm a SCOM consultant so I can tell you that proper configuration and tuning, development of custom MP (management pack) for custom needs a lot of effort and is not cheap at all :).

This is a very complex discussions. If you have a proper engineers to handle this solution, if also you use SCCM, SCOM, Orchestrator, Service manager, all together can ad more value at same cost of one.

Microsoft simplified a lot the licensing so only two licence Standard and Datacenter. SQL and management servers are free.

Cacti, Nagios, SolarWinds. Are many on the market. Because is Microsoft large corporate received very good prices so over all is not to expensive like SolarWinds.

So if you want to implement this software initial installation is easy. But a high level of understanding of your own business needs is required. You need clear process to setup MP.

Deep integration with Windows provides in-depth monitoring and the management packs model ensures that products in the environment are supported or will be supported.

Proactive monitoring has helped us prepare and mitigate potential issues before they even happen. This comes in the monitoring of general server health and custom alerts for event log entries that are known indicators of potential issues.

GUI performance is the one aspect where I can see that improvement on it will make customers happy.

3rd Party Plugins for SCOM are also great, but some of them are quite expensive to implement due to the depth of function they provide. Maybe Microsoft should integrate the basic functionalities of some of them.

I've used it for two years.

The deployment of SCOM is pretty straightforward. You just need to make sure that the pre-requisites have been installed correctly and then SCOM itself should be a breeze to install.

Stability is subjective and based from experience. It is directly affected by the server hardware where SCOM is installed.

No. SCOM is scalable as you can add Management Servers as needed. You can also add more resources to the host server and it will not cause issues in SCOM.

Customer Service:

For enterprise customers, Microsoft is one of the best providers of customer service. The system in place for the customer service ensures that customers will get the value they have paid for.

Technical Support:

As with the Customer Service, the technical support of Microsoft is very good since they are the ones who develop the product itself. It follows a process where you will be first served by level 1 support but they will escalate to the product team as need to ensure the issue is resolved.

Free tools found online are good but require a lot of knowledge in scripting. The SCOM Management Packs takes in the lead in this space.

It was straightforward. You just follow the setup guide provided but just need to make sure the pre-requisites are installed properly.

I have experienced both as part of in-house team and also as part of the vendor team. The vendor was experienced in the deployment and management of SCOM and have been since the early versions of it.

We did not calculate the ROI as our SLA is internal only. However, the fact that we can proactively monitor issues that may cause downtime is a statement of the benefit of SCOM.

Please contact your Microsoft Account Manager regarding this. It is different for each customer and for each country. The System Center licensing has different criteria and you should get the most applicable for your environment.

We have evaluated some of the "free" monitoring solutions. Some are easy to use while others are a bit complicated. We implemented SCOM because not only it was included in our System Center License, its usage was also straightforward.

SCOM can monitor a whole lot of products, not just generic server components. Make sure that you contact the product vendor and ask if they have Management Packs for SCOM.

We used SCOM for monitoring the health of the servers. The SCOM agent was very reliable in our environment and used to trigger alerts immediately, which helped us to take care of the servers without any critical impact to the client.

SCOM has helped us to reduce the time taken to address the issue and identify the false alerts triggered in an efficient manner. It's a reliable tool when it comes to monitoring and can be implemented in an environment which hosts critical information and has high revenue for the organization.

I feel that the stability of the tool has room for improvement and I would like to see that in the next version.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There have been issues with instability.

It has scaled for our needs.

Does a great job with Microsoft technologies. Decent with other technologies (Unix/Java).

Very expensive now that you are forced to buy entire System Center suite, although comparable to other monitoring solutions that include basic APM. Dashboards are pretty weak.