SCOM Reviews

SCOM's greatest attribute is that you can customize every monitor to specifically match the intended system. For example, you can monitor two servers for high CPU usage and customize it so one alerts if it goes above 95% and the other only alerts over 98%.

If SCOM is implemented correctly, it can take away the need for administrators to constantly monitor things or perform health checks. SCOM can be set up to alert when an issue occurs and SCOM is often easy to link to a ticketing system so a ticket will be generated automatically when issues occur. SCOM can even be set up to send emails/SMS when a problem occurs in your environment.

The System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) is great at alerting you when something breaks. It's not so great at reporting. For all of the information that SCOM collects and stores it has no good way to put this information into a useful reporting format. For example, it would be fantastic to be able to have a historic view of the memory usage on a server to assist with pinpointing the root cause to the issue.

Also, SCOM comes with many built-in monitors. Anything that isn't already there can often be add by installing a management pack. These management packs include a heap of monitors for a specific item (EG exchange). The main issue is that by default most items alerts are enabled. This means when you install SCOM or add a management pack you will need to tweak all of the sensors or you will be over run with alerts. It's a turn off what you don't want situation rather than, the more sensible, turn on what you do want.

There were no issues deploying it.

There have been no stability issues.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Microsoft offers many partnerships to businesses. These partnership agreements can get you some great discounts on software/support. To become a Microsoft partner you often only need to have staff with Microsoft certifications. The more certificates you have the better your partnership. Microsoft are great to call for support as they have a wealth of knowledge. They may not always be the most helpful, but by logging a ticket to Microsoft you will often get your management temporarily off your back.

SCOM is capable of so much that it can actually be somewhat overwhelming. But if you know how to use it effectively, one of the great things about it is that you can really tailor it to your specific environment and get as much (or as little) alerting as you need.

SCOM also provides for administrative roles and selective alerting, so if you have a team that only monitors a specific subset of servers or a specific application, you can create designated roles for them and give them limited console access for just those resources that they are responsible for.

In my previous position, there was basically no true infrastructure monitoring at all – they were relying on alerts configured per system or device, and consequently there was a lot of firefighting and working reactively to problems that occurred.

My first priority when I started was to implement enterprise monitoring and alerting, and SCOM was approved. Once it was in place and tweaked to that environment, we experienced a lot less firefighting and were able to prioritize issues as they came up. Less late nights, too.

In some ways, SCOM is a double-edged sword. It can do so much, even by default -- monitoring and alerting of everything from Windows servers and applications, to Linux machines, to network devices including routers and switches. However, because of this, you can get overwhelmed fairly quickly, and if left unchecked, you’ll get too many alerts for too many objects. When that happens, your team starts ignoring alerts because they simply can’t get to them all, and that is just as bad as not having any alerting at all.

For SCOM to be really great, I’d love to see Microsoft come up with a quick and simple way to enable common critical monitoring and alerts by default. Then, as you get more familiar with SCOM, you can gradually tweak and enable the more customized and intricate stuff.

I have been using Operations Manager for almost three years. I set up and deployed it (with assistance from a consultant) at my last job, and it was already in limited use at my current position, where I currently administer it.

SCOM can be somewhat tricky to implement.

There have been no issues with the stability.

With SCOM 2012 R2, a single management pool deployment can handle up to 150,000 objects - according to Microsoft.

Tech support and customer service depends on your relationship(s) with Microsoft, but Microsoft support, whether you like it or not, is pretty consistent across the board. If you've dealt with it previously, at least you know what to expect.

I have used and evaluated other enterprise solutions. I will say that, while Microsoft sometimes does things that seem oddly questionable, SCOM truly makes sense once you get familiar with how it works. SCOM uses management packs, which are basically pre-packaged building blocks of rules and monitors, to allow configuration and tweaking of monitoring for each service or application

SCOM can be somewhat tricky to implement, and if you’re implementing more than one System Center module, you definitely need to be careful about the order you deploy them in. However, there is good documentation online from Microsoft and other sources, so take your time and read the documentation completely to avoid having to start all over. I have worked in mainly small to mid-size environments, but scalability, from my understanding, is generally not an issue for SCOM.

In both cases I was involved in, we had a consultant work with the internal team to deploy and configure SCOM. As I mentioned before, implementation can be tricky, and it’s mainly because there are a lot of smaller details to pay attention to (specific user & group creations, proper installation order, etc.). So I would advise bringing in a consultant to do initial deployment if you don’t have the experience in-house.

I don’t know specifics about pricing and licensing, but if you’re familiar with Microsoft, you can get very good deals buying a certain level of licensing and getting System Center thrown in.

SCOM is capable of providing full-featured infrastructure monitoring, alerting and reporting, especially for Windows-centric production environments.

I have heard a lot of people say that to do SCOM right, you really should create a full-time position, or at least a full-time System Center admin who works only on System Center stuff. Because you’re only going to get out of it what you put into it. If you don’t put any time into it, it’s not going to work well for you.

The flexibility which Operations Manager (SCOM) gives to monitor anything in any way is the main valuable feature to me. A big second would be the amount of management packs for Microsoft and other products which can be plugged in and give you a fast start to your monitoring.

In every case so far we managed to move from a slow reactive type of non-monitoring toward a proactive monitoring for different layers within the organization and real insights into their IT environment from different angles. Including helpdesk, system admins, IT management, company management, departmental staff and managers. Creating good dashboards makes the monitoring come more alive as well and move it over and above a long list of mixed alerts.

Areas for improvement in my opinion are the resource footprint of the SCOM infrastructure side, the web console (drop Silverlight please!) and a few of the management packs.

I have been using MOM and SCOM since the year 2002.

During the years we did see deployment issues. Often related to people not reading the documentation and not installing the prerequisites correctly (for instance SQL). In some cases it was related to in-place upgrades between major versions, which we have been warning against for years in the community. And one of the previous versions had some bugs in the command-based setup version in not accepting one of the setup parameters correctly (which the setup wizard did do correctly).

The stability of the product is fine as long as the scaling is done right according to the types and amounts of monitored objects. There are calculation models for it, but experience in designing SCOM implementations helps a lot with that.

We did encounter scalability issues when monitoring a large amount of network devices which turned out to have more monitored objects than expected (for instance a switch stack which is seen as one switch but turns out to have a few more ports and interfaces than a simple switch). In such cases a scale out or a second management group might provide what is needed.

SCOM is part of the System Center Suite and part of the datacenter management solutions provided by Microsoft. The amount of customer service depends on the amount of licenses and software assurance for instance you aquire.

Technical suport is given by Microsoft for their products through the usual channels. Next to that there are the Technet Forums where also a lot of community members answer questions. There are a lot of blogs run by community members and community leaders and MVP's which provide a lot of information.

Yes we used several products and also customers we are new to have existing solutions. Often a whole lot of them. The reason for switching is always to try to get as much as possible monitoring and dashboarding and reporting and alerting and therefore insights into as few products as possible. This is one of the reasons we standardize to SCOM.

The initial setup is very simple if you follow the documentation, best practices setup guides and use the sizing calculation models. Install the prerequisites right the first time and the rest flows from there.

We are a consultancy for the System Center products and I specialize in SCOM. I usually work with one or more people at a customer to get the basics done and installed and next work with the rest of the organization to make it friendly and accessible for all.

I think this depends on the organization and their wishes. In general a lot of organizations of a certain size already have the System Center licenses. The ROI comes from reacting more proactively to upcoming disruptions, current disruptions (and being able to inform users calling helpdesk) and being in control.

SCOM comes as part of the System Center stack. So if you buy one product you will have them all. Some organizations already have the licenses needed. Some have special pricing (education organizations for instance).

Yes other products are in evaluation. There are several big monitoring products which have been around for years and years. And there are niche players for monitoring specific parts of the infrastructure. With those last you may get deeper insights into one aspect, but lose the ability to add it all together.

I do like this product a lot and have followed its advances since the MOM2000 version and continue to do so toward the 2016 version and beyond. One thing to notice lately is there are more possibilities when combined with Microsofts OMS solution in a hybrid scenario to get even more value out of both products.

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.

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.

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.

SCOM is one of the most commonly used monitoring software used for large scale enterprise level. Being a Microsoft product, the Management Packs available are very useful for extensive monitoring of various Microsoft products such as Windows Server OS, Hyper-V, SCCM, SharePoint, Exchange, etc.

It has always helped to streamline our monitoring in various areas and helped to provide good reports to various in-house teams as well as provide alerting for the whole of our data center.

SCOM can move on to provide more on Cloud, Big Data, container and docks monitoring. Also, APM monitoring is really lacking in SCOM and they really need to look into this to keep up their strength in the IT market.

I've used it for four years.

A few glitches since the SCOM installation requires a good requirement analysis first before deployment. Eg : Creating service accounts in Active Directory and permissions as well sizing up how many Management Servers you will need and other factors like resource pooling.

SCOM is always known to be very unstable when it comes to SCOM Agents which are installed locally on all the servers.

SCOM is well known for scalability so I've never faced any issue in this portion. You can add any Management Server to the existing SCOM infrastructure anytime with little down time though.

I would give MS customer service 8/10.

I just had two experience making call to the MS customer service for raising issue to the Support Team.

I would give MS SCOM Support: 8/10

The level of technical support really varies from person to person. In one of my issues I did receive a very technically strong support engineer, in other case it was totally opposite.

I had a deployment with Solarwinds SAM which is very cheap product compared to SCOM, and almost gets the work done as SCOM if you are looking for basic monitoring and not much of customization and production environment is from small to medium.

The initial setup is not very straightforward and requires good preparation work to be done before you can install and make SCOM up and running.

It was an in-house implementation. If we do go through vendor it sholud not take more than 5 days to make SCOM up and running well with the baseline from Microsoft.

ROI turned out to be pretty good since we had good centralized monitoring for our whole data center and all the outages were quickly escalated from the Command center to the relevant Team.

BMC BPPM, HP OVO , IBM Tivoli.

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.

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

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.

SCOM is a very powerful tool if deployed and eventually maintained correctly. It is an improvement over MOM 2005. It no longer monitors just a node like MOM 2005 used to do (eg: a server) but it can be made to monitor a whole service.

SCOM 2012 monitors each node and advises you that a particular node is unreachable/down in a very short time. This time a.k.a as the polling time is dependent upon number of nodes, network traffic and the speed of the scom servers and network equipment. Having a short time helps to meet the SLA target.

Unfortunately, when you need to monitor member servers which are not joined to the same domain as the SCOM servers, you need to go through the certificate route (so that you can have the required trust through the certificate). This is very time consuming and very prone to error.

3years.

SCOM requires that all servers are from 2008server upwards. Does not work with Server 2003 or lower. Moreover, the respective service packs need to be installed.

As regards Linux servers, a specific file must be configured so that SCOM is allowed to communicate to.

No particular issues were encountered. If it is allocated the required resources, service pack installed etc, it should have a reasonable performance.

SCOM 2012 was implemented and monitored 300+ servers and various network connections. Issues that were encountered is with respect to servers which were not on the same windows domain as the SCOM servers.

Customer service was fine. However, a trained support team is required so that the SCOM is handled correctly and in a timely manner.

Technical support from Microsoft was always given in a timely manner when required. Technical support advice was analyzed and taken on board when required.

MOM 2005 was used but this supports up to 2003 Server. Having upgraded all servers to Server 2008 upwards necessitated this switch. Finally it proved to be a good choice.

MOM experience helped a lot since the basics are the same. You have to open the required TCP ports and allocate the required resources so that setup succeeds.

It was implemented in-house. A group of engineers designed, planned and implemented SCOM 2012. Their level of expertise was very high and they were MCSE engineers.

The ROI is in the form that the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is met and downtime minimized as possible. This reduced the penalties incurred to us from customers.

Cannot comment on this. I was on the technical aspect of SCOM. However this was given "for free" as part with the SCCM package.

There are various other options, like OP5 and Zabbix but being in a Microsoft environment, SCOM was the way to go.

No comments so far. SCOM has a lot of potential and can give a helping hand in maintaining a healthy network.