SCOM Reviews

Our primary use case is to monitor if the system is healthy and running well. 

The features we find most useful would be the automatic thresholds when disks are running full. If CPUs are causing high CPU load then we will be notified with triggers.

Price is always an issue with Microsoft and could be improved.

The solution is stable. It's working fine.

The solution is scalable. If you want to monitor more you have to buy more licenses, but you can add on. We don't plan to increase usage.

I haven't called technical support yet.

We had nothing essential in an enterprise managing console. This is relatively simple tooling, but we didn't have another solution on this scale.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment wasn't that long. Maybe a couple of days. We needed half a day for the installation and then three to four days for implementing and configuring all the monitoring agents. Deployment is not a big job, so you just need one person and then after that, you just need someone for an hour a day on the system.

Initial setup was done with a bit of additional support and then we added more and more services.

It's a Microsoft product so if you are using a lot of other vendors, other operating systems, then it's less compatible. For us, we're 99% Microsoft so it's not an issue. On this solution, the things we monitor are fine and perhaps other users will want more, but for our purpose and what we use it for, it's enough.

Once it's completed, you only get triggered by emails and you can respond to those emails so when the system does its thing it's not that complex. It's very simple.

I would rate this solution eight out of 10.

• Performance data on Windows VMs

• Ability to have a lot of out of the box management packs with key monitors in place
• Ease of use

Ability to know when servers are offline through agent heartbeats.

Dashboarding and application performance management.

Three years.

No we did not.

Yes we did have some, but with Microsoft's assistance (RAS) we were able to gain more insight and improve.

No we did not.

8/10.

8/10.

Used Foglight but it was extremely difficult to learn and pick up as a monitoring solution.

It was all done in-house.

Included as part of MS ELA.

Yes - Quest Foglight and Nimsoft

If you are a large Microsoft shop then this product excels in monitoring Microsoft services.

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.

Asset monitoring and auto alerts are the most valuable features of this product to me.

We are a service provider of these solutions to our clients. And we can see the change, how the IT team were able to have control and adapt quickly with SCOM.

The dashboard is still not so great and, most of the time, a third-party tool is required for presentation. There is a lot of room for improvement here.

Thorough analysis of the current environment and the goals that need to be achieved should be defined (from an end-results point of view) before rolling out SCOM. If the groundwork is not properly done, SCOM implementation can cost the organization.

• 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.

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.

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.