Microsoft System Center Reviews

Our use case is to easily see the resources of our infrastructure and we use System Center for that. It allows us to simply review a situation and get a report about the operations systems for all users and know whether they need an upgrade or anything else. It allows us to manage and administer the infrastructure.

We're a government organization and I am the infrastructure and technical support manager. We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, and we're also a customer.

In our case, the solution would be improved if they migrated to a cloud version. There could also be some improvement in the environment, it should be more user friendly.

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

I've contacted technical support a few times because I work with engineers, but we don't contact them for the simple issues. The problem is that when we do contact them they don't have a ready solution. Several times they've needed to update or patch things to make the solution work. We had an issue where users were unable to send or receive emails to their phones or mobile devices. It took a long time to solve that problem. They are willing to help, but there is too much delay. Problems need to be solved the same day, or the next day and it doesn't happen that way. 

I believe that these days initial setup is relatively straightforward although it does require specialized IT engineers. If the environment was more flexible, more user friendly, it would be simple. 

I'm not sure I would use this product if I were building a new infrastructure now. I would be more likely to use VMware, Vsign, and Visualize. The tools of VMware cover everything. They are more advanced and have more tools and you can use it for everything in the infrastructure. 

If you're using only Microsoft products then this is a good solution because you're working in a unified environment. The whole infrastructure functions better and you can monitor without problems. It makes life easier for the technicians and engineers in the company.

I would rate this product a seven out of 10.

On-premises

Microsoft System Center is a suite of products with different products within it. We have experience using all of them. We primarily use the solution for client management.

The solution is easily available. That's its most valuable aspect.

The multi-tenancy support needs to be improved. We need to have the ability to manage several different environments from one central point of administration.

We've been using this solution for ten years.

The solution is stable. We haven't had issues. It doesn't crash or freeze and there aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

I wouldn't describe the solution as scalable. That's not necessarily why you would use it.

We manage about 15,000 clients with this product currently.

We do not plan to increase usage in the future.

We have a support agreement with Microsoft. So far, we've been satisfied with the level of support we've received. They are responsive and knowledgeable and they do help when we require their assistance.

We did use a different solution, however, it was so long ago, I don't recall the name. It's been ten years. The switch of technology made us originally switch solutions.

The initial setup was not complex at all. It was pretty straightforward, from what I recall.

I'm not sure how long deployment took our team as I was not directly involved in the process. I'm not sure what our implementation strategy was or how it was executed.

We have about 10-15 staff members that handle deployment and maintenance.

We handled the deployment internally. We did not use a consultant, reseller, or integrator to assist us.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

We have a business relationship with Microsoft. However, we are only a customer.

I'd recommend this solution to other companies. It's been quite good to us overall.

I'd rate the solution four out of ten.

On-premises

Our primary use case is responsibility for the implementation and support of this product. I am always involved in the architecture and the design operations. We have several thousand users. I am the Chief Operating Officer and we are partners with Microsoft. 

I like the operation perspective that enables our team to carry out actions quickly. For example, the OS deployment, upgrades and remote control.

We recently carried out a complex implementation and I was part of the official design team for that project. The most difficult area we faced was the requirement of having one central system center that deployed in one domain, capable of managing and controlling the end user devices. We were using authentication based on certificates and it was difficult to do the work based on certificates from different domains. I would like to see a simplification of the implementation and integration in the case of multi-tenant environments.

I've been using this solution for over 10 years. 

We've been using Microsoft products for many years and they are mature and very stable. 

When we need Microsoft support, it's the customer that needs to log the case, then we handle the case with the support team from Microsoft. 

Initial setup is very straightforward. Microsoft has excellent documentation, step-by-step documentation that clarifies the implementation procedure. The difficulty in our case was that it was not a traditional implementation for System Center. It was an implementation based on the new architecture, which is not mature enough yet to support multi-tenant environments.

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

2012 product is the whole suite with one SKU Automation is the heart of SC2012 Third party, management packs integration Control other hypervisors (VMware and Citrix) API integration

Installation is cumbersome and not much documentation available for best practices for installation. While some components require less prerequisites others are very extensive. Third-party hypervisors difficult to configure

System Center 2012 SP1 is one hell of infrastructure management suite. With careful planning and installation of key components, you can take control of your entire environment.

We use it for the following purposes:

• Infrastructure management and inventory collection (hardware and software).
• Infrastructure monitoring integrating Windows Server, as well as other platforms.
• Ticketing for our help desk.

• The IT environment aligned to SLAs. 
• System Center helps to create the basis for ITIL alignment. 
  
• Many processes could be implemented out-of-the-box, and this helped to adopt processes in areas which we lacked. 

• Platform integration
• Native tools for a Windows environment
• Low learning curve
• Administrators can use almost all its features out-of-the-box.

The following need to be improved:

• GUI
• Responsiveness
• Mobile environments
• Platform performance.

It still demands high computing resources.

One to three years.

We maximized our license investment.

Integrates great with other Microsoft Products.

Have had challenges to integrate with Non-Microsoft Products.

Management Packs for Microsoft-specific products, which help us implement the best practices for each product.

The detail in the alarms is great.

Less server consumption would help, as would better, more flexible reports.

One to three years.

The stability is okay.

No problem with scalability.

I have never needed technical support for this product.

We used WhatsUp Gold, but System Center came with our Microsoft license.

It's is complex because there are a lot of divisions, and the management of the rules applied to the server are complex.

We didn't evaluate others before going with this, but we are actually analyzing Operations Management Suite, a powerful integration with SCOM 2012 R2.

Don't install all the Management Packs at the same time; this is key.