SCOM Reviews

We are using SCOM for service monitoring integrated with some third-party dashboard. It is our end-to-end service monitoring solution.  

The feature I like most about SCOM is that it is easy-to-use. I find it very user-friendly. I also like the knowledge base which it has. You can find the resolution to questions or issues directly within the SCOM itself. It will alert you with a recommendation of what you need to do at the same time. This sort of self-diagnosis or prompting is one of the great values you get from SCOM compared to other solutions.  

The dashboard is one place where the product can be improved. We finally needed to get a customized dashboard from the NOC (Network Operation Center) team. The dashboard that was included with the product just did not do what we wanted it to do.  

I am not sure, exactly, what should be included with future releases. There are already a lot of features there in the product. The main thing I can suggest is that Microsoft also provides management packs for monitoring third-party products with the product. If that were included with SCOM, that would make the product even greater. For example, to monitor an Oracle database, you need to look around to get a management pack separately. It could just be included instead.  

You can monitor any non-Microsoft product with Microsoft SCOM if you have the management pack for that product. You need to purchase that management pack. You can get them sometimes from Microsoft and other times from the third-party vendor.  

I have been using System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) from Microsoft for almost five years.  

From the time we did the configuration, the product has been stable. It may be different in other cases. It really depends on the design you implement. If you want to add functionality, you can add it. It depends on the business. If you want Apache or you want a singular-server implementation you configure it as you need to. If it is configured correctly it should remain stable.  

SCOM is scalable. We do not have an issue with the number of users or with the number of machines and the devices we are monitoring. It does not have any issues in that respect.  

We support the product with a system admin team which is the only group that deals with SCOM directly for maintenance issues. Right now, the team is only five people. Even there, these five people do not use the product on a daily basis. The configuration is something that you do one time if you do it correctly. There is monitoring, which is done by the NOC team and that is ongoing. 

In case some maintenance is required like a change in business requirements or addition of services, then the SCOM team will do it. This does not happen all the time. But monitoring is done by another team separate from the maintenance.  

We have not had to use the Microsoft support since maybe four or five years ago. It was during the time we were doing the implementation. We had a few calls with them — maybe two or three calls — for some configuration-related questions. That was all. It was handled efficiently and we got the answers we needed. But we have not had to use the support team since.  

I have had the opportunity to use other products in this category. Not at the current organization, but in other organizations before this. One was WhatsUp Gold. If I were to compare these two solutions, SCOM has more advantages and is really the better product.  

It is actually pretty simple to do the setup. I think it really can be implemented on the same day that you get it. You can do the complete installation and configuration in one day.  

But adding services, that takes time. It depends on the business and your scope, what you need to add, what you need to configure when it is added. I consider that as a separate part because it is not the fault of the product that you have additional requirements. The additions made for service monitoring depends on the customer, the requirements that they have, and what they need to add.  

The installation was done by our company with an in-house team. We did not need help from the vendor or an integrator except for some basic questions.  

We do maintenance as required also in-house and we handle the upgrades from one version to another version. All those maintenance details are managed by the system admin team.  

If you compare the pricing of SCOM to some solutions now available — like ManageEngine — I think it is a bit more expensive. But at that price, you get more in Microsoft System Center. SCOM is a bundled product, it is not only SCOM. You get a complete suite of Microsoft System Center products. There are five products in the bundle. There are no additional costs for SCOM itself and everything is included in the license. The only additional costs that you may have is in getting management packs.  

On the other hand, open-source solutions are available that are mature or maturing and they are very good. They may pose a better solution because they are free.  

My advice to people who are looking for a solution like SCOM would actually be to advise them to move from licensed software to open-source. You can go to Nagios or most other open-source products and they do the same thing as SCOM. There is no need to pay additional money to get the same services.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SCOM as a seven-out-of-ten. It is a good product, but so are the free open-source products it competes with.  

It is used for monitoring on-premises servers, and we deploy it on-premises.

The solution helped monitor web servers, database servers and alerting, which is very useful.

The ease of deployment, especially on Windows platforms, is valuable.

The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage. Currently, a lot of people do not use SCOM because it is limited to strictly being on-premises, and many organizations are moving to the cloud.

We have been using the solution for approximately 11 years.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable. It has an excellent capacity to monitor 100 to 1,000 servers, based on how the SCOM servers are provisioned. You can easily scale up your monitoring capacity.

I rate my experience with customer service and support a ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward, and only one person was required for deployment and maintenance.

We did not evaluate other options.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by adapting to a cloud environment. I advise users considering the solution to use it if they have on-premise servers and more of a Windows-based environment.

We use SCOM for all server applications, as well as service monitoring, such as Windows services, and auto-recovery of those services if they fail. Some of the processes that we monitor at the .exe level can also be restarted with SCOM. Then we use it all to monitor availability, health, and performance.

Personally, I enjoy it all. It's fairly powerful.

I like some of their newer features, such as maintenance schedules, because SCOM records SLA and SLO time.

When we patch, things are automatically put into maintenance mode so that the numbers for our systems being down, do not count against us.

I would like to see them improve their network monitoring.

We use Solar Winds, and it has a direct interface into SCOM. We can see all the Solar Winds dashboards from the SCOM interface, which is nice to have.

I have been involved with SCOM for seven years.

We just completed a major upgrade from 2012 R2 to 2019.

I have had a lot of success with the 2019 product. When we were on 2012 R2, I had to reboot the servers, particularly the database servers, at least once every two weeks. I believe we've been up and running for about three months in 2019 and have only rebooted once a month for monthly patching.

The scalability is good. It's very easy to scale.

It can support up to a thousand nodes per management server, and we are nowhere near that number. I have three management servers in place for a 400-node network. Load balancing is simple, stable, quick, and efficient.

In terms of speed and agility, I believe it is significantly better than the 2012 version.

Our systems team and then the applications team, use this solution, totaling approximately 75 people within our government. We have 2,000 employees, and our IT department has about 100 people, and about 75 of them use it.

For 2019, I haven't used technical support yet. I've never had to call him. 

In 2012, Microsoft's support was good.

We were using HP Open View at the time, and their technology was quickly becoming obsolete. They weren't keeping up, particularly when the 2012 operating system was released. They just couldn't keep up, and their pricing was spiraling out of control.

It's quite complicated. I would call it complex.

On a scale of one to five, I would give it at least four or four and a half.

There are a lot of customizations, and it's quite noisy out of the box.

You have a lot of alerts, which is normal for most of them. 

I have tried some of the other monitoring systems as well, and they all seem to work in the same way. Basically, all you have to do is tune it. That is what requires time.

Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price.

All of the Systems Center products have a backup, which we don't use, but SCCM is included in the pricing. As a result, we can afford it because we have the Enterprise agreement.

We do use SolarWind, but I am not on that team; it is used by the network group.

I use the Operations Manager to manage my server infrastructure. 

The most important thing would be to go to Microsoft and get some training. They provide a lot of free classes in the form of webinars and other similar events. It has a multitude of different deliverables that most people never get into. 

It's a lot more powerful than people realize, and I believe people become dissatisfied with it because of the complicated setup, but once it's up and running, it's pretty amazing at what it can do.

I am pretty happy with the way it works right now, I would rate SCOM a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is monitoring the health of our Windows servers. We deploy the solution on-premises.

The solution has improved our overrides and the ability to start services if they're stopped.

We have been using the solution for approximately one year and currently using the latest version, SCOM 2022.

The solution is stable. I rate it a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a ten out of ten.

We have had a good experience with customer service and support. I rate them a ten out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We have not seen a return on investment.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. The price could be improved.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I recommend it for users considering implementing it and advise them to do some research.

We use SCOM for proactive monitoring that we code ourselves. We code it with a management pack, which is the actual logic of all monitoring experiences. We develop our own monitoring capabilities instead of using Microsoft's. We could use them as a base but always add extra deliverables with our own code.

The most valuable feature of SCOM is the capability of using classes within your management pack development.

The solution’s initial setup is difficult. SCOM should include more in-depth trend analysis.

I have been using SCOM for 15 years.

I rate SCOM an eight out of ten for stability.

More than 100 users are using SCOM in our organization. I rate SCOM ten out of ten for scalability.

It took one day to deploy SCOM.

We have seen a return on investment with SCOM, and the solution is worth its money.

SCOM's pricing is average.

I am using the latest version of SCOM. Users should do a POC for the solution.

Overall, I rate SCOM a nine out of ten.

I primarily use SCOM to monitor services, logins, devices, and workstations and get notifications when there's a problem.

SCOM's most valuable features are the network path feature, reporting, and integration with business intelligence.

SCOM's feature that notifies us when a server is down is not present in recent updates, which has weakened the product. In the next release, SCOM should add more and simpler integration with other software.

I've been using SCOM for eight years.

SCOM is stable.

SCOM is scalable, but it can be difficult if you don't fully understand the product.

Microsoft's technical support employs a lot of remote workers as support engineers. While some of them are very good, sometimes they can't handle the problems and will procrastinate until the time is up before referring you to someone else. This means that our time is wasted by people who are not technically sound and can't help with our problems.

Neutral

The initial setup is complex if you're using the cloud elements because not every part of SCOM works in the cloud, and some need to be integrated in different formats, which not everyone will know how to do. If everything is complete when you start the deployment, it will take an hour or two, but the cloud-based part will increase it to about six hours.

I implemented SCOM by myself.

SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL. Support is initially free but will incur an additional fee once you exceed a certain level.

I would recommend SCOM to those using a Microsoft operating system, but those who don't would be better looking for another solution, like ServiceDesk. I would rate SCOM eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is to monitor the extensive system of services that we operate for clients.

SCOM (System Center Operations Manager) has helped improve our organization through reporting capabilities. The reporting is very good. We're an outsourcing company, so we provide services and manage service and as a service. We have a multi-service environment, so it is complicated to monitor and maintain. 

The alerting with SCOM is incredible. The product works well with multiple environment integration, and if there is an issue, the system forwards alerts to different service desk systems so that the issues are handled appropriately. There are actually numerous things the solution does for our company to automate processes, and, to top it off, it's a stable application.

I'm the operational manager for Business Connections Monitoring Toolsets. We do installations of this product. We do the configuration. We take care of changes in threshold if needed, and supply additional expertise for critical projects as needed. We monitor everything to be sure things continue to work optimally and do things like monitor hard drive space, etc.

The integration with Power BI from the SCOM database offers incredible possibilities for enhancing user experience. That integration is added value to our services because of what it can do and what we can make it do for clients.

People don't have to log on to the console to see what's going on. They get all the data through the integration between Power BI (Business Intelligence) and SCOM. It is extremely flexible and can be adjusted to meet specific operating criteria. 

If I compare the SCOM solution with the CA UIM (CA Technologies Unified Infrastructure Management) products, the CA products are horrendous in comparison. It's not stable in the way that they do their aggregation and their roll-ups. Really the methodology doesn't make sense. SCOM handles these things without a problem.

Many of the features in the SCOM product have been valuable to us as an organization. Basically most of the main features like the alerting, the reporting, the discovery, the automation, the auto-discovery of products installed on a server and the grouping that it does automatically have all simplified the way we work. The automation in SCOM is incredible, and because I have some exposure now to other, similar products, I can make a good comparison between them. 

The CA products — which is in direct competition with SCOM — is not as good at all. I also have exposure to SolarWinds and a local product here called Syntelligence. None of those products can touch SCOM as far as general versatility. It is just a far superior application for general monitoring.

You can expand on the SCOM automation. But its power is more than just in the segment of automating things. If services stop, you can run recovery tasks and you can use disaster recovery scripts. That is just an example. There are numerous things that you can do with this product.

There are so many features in SCOM it has possibilities that are essentially longer than your arms can reach. You can monitor third-party applications, you can monitor services, you can collect events and you can trigger reports and send alerts based on those events. It's integration capabilities are very good. For me, it is the ultimate unified solution. It is a very nice product and I love it because of the capabilities it provides. The unification of services makes it easier to deploy and maintain.

Even though I think there are ways that this product is superior to most other solutions on the market, there are quite a few things that it does not do alone. This is where the product can be improved. One of the facets is in network monitoring. In fact, it can use quite a lot of improvement in that area. That's where products — like CA Technologies Performance Manager — are much better. You can do a lot with it that you can not with the reporting in SCOM. However overall that CA product is not as well rounded and complete.

The Scrum files that you set up can be made better. For example, you may want accounts that have access to the SCOM console to have more granular access. For example, you may have a situation where you prefer that only certain engineers will be able to add agents to the server — and only the server. But you can't set up the permissions that are this granular. Likewise, it may be that you want to assign someone the right to do threshold changes or to the environment of certain places of certain management groups. It is not part of the standard solution.

With other monitoring tools, you have the ability to set the permissions granularly, which SCOM actually doesn't do. So I hope that they would add that feature and support granularity. There are other ways in which to do it, but if you can do it in the monitoring tool itself and in the administration, then it'll make things much easier and make it a far more complete, unified solution.

One more thing would be better application monitoring. Products like AppDynamics do that very well and exceed the capabilities of SCOM. What I think I would like to see is for SCOM to be more of a complete end-to-end solution so there is no need to look to other solutions or work outside of the singular product. 

SCOM is stable. We have never had a problem with system stability.

I think that SCOM is a very scalable solution. It depends on what hardware or virtual environment you're running on, but the scalability of SCOM is practically endless, I think. You can certainly go very far with it. 

I know of a client in a banking institution that's working on 12,000 servers and their SCOM system is humming along without fail. So scalability on the environment of SCOM itself is very good, or at least it has proven to be scalable in that instance. 

Technical support from Microsoft for SCOM is always excellent. 

By comparison, I've been fighting with CA Technologies and how they do things. It is not the same kind of experience. If you log requests for technical support to tell them what the problem is, they ask a few questions in the investigation. You supply them with the information and from there on you do not know the response time. Depending on the severity of the issue you report on the call, it will be handled more quickly. If it's urgent, then they react very quickly. If it is not urgent, it is not quick even if the answer is simple.

What I like about the SCOM technical support is that they tell you what causes the issue when they find the resolution. They give you a report, they tell you what caused it and what the solution is. That helps make the solution make sense and maybe can help avoid other issues in the future.

We actually have not switched to this solution from another as we are evaluating and using several at the same time. We have used SolarWinds and then there's a new product called eSight that we have to use. The latter product is from Huawei and it is their monitoring tool for their network equipment. We basically were forced to start to support it because of client need. So there are four products that we supporting in our server for various reasons. 

But if I have to choose any one product for server monitoring to take care of all aspects of monitoring out of the box, SCOM is number one. That is it can do application monitoring, like SQL Server Stack Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, third party stats, VMware or VLAN — you name it. It's really an excellent product.

So that is why my number one choice is SCOM. Put simply, it is the most complete.

The installation of the product was the easiest thing about using it. If you just follow the instructions and do exactly what it tells you, you don't have to be a trained network surgeon to do it. You can teach a seven-year-old to do the installation. If you can read, you can do the installation. It's really that easy. 

Managing the system depends on the size of the environment for the most part, but I think it depends on the environment and the client as well. When their needs are more demanding or specialized the work will be harder. We've got a client that's got nearly 2,000 servers and they have only one engineer working on the entire thing. There is no need for additional personnel.

We work on our own systems and installations.

We, as a company, are using four products for monitoring, one of which is SCOM. We use multiple products because we are an outsourcing company and not everyone needs or wants the same thing. The other products are from CA Technologies. That is Performance Management, NFA, and UIM Unified Integration Management. These products just enhance the options we have to service our clients.

As far as meeting our needs for a solution, I give it a nine out of ten. But it is interesting to rate the tool. My rating doesn't really have a context. It is mostly engineers that are using the product. In a sense, it doesn't matter what monitoring tool you use, the success of a monitoring tool is dependent on the engineers using it. The engineer has to make it work.

I'm really not aware of the total number of users that we service and with SCOM I don't really need to know. I don't know much about the actual numbers except that we've got 28 clients. Each of the 28 clients has a different number of employees and different engineers that are working on different environments to solve different issues. If I had to guess, I'd say there are really only 100 to 120 only. I wish it was more, and I think we can easily scale to meet additional demand. But the point is that we are responsible for monitoring and identifying issues in a variety of environments, and that is exactly what SCOM helps us do, with efficiency.

We basically use everything we can that is included in the package and have found a real use for every module that's available. That said, we don't do a lot of network monitoring. Server monitoring, absolutely. That we use extensively. Reporting, we use a lot, event collections we use quite extensively. But we bring to the clients what they need most.

We have confidence in the solution and we are going to put all or most of the clients on to Scrum 2019 if they are willing to accept the upgrade path. We are busy working on that in a project to upgrade it to 2019. It all depends on how well test upgrades go and the willingness of clients to enhance their services. We need to test it in the development area first, and then, depending on the type of environment that is running, we have to plan the upgrade in the proper sequence. Say the environment is a 2012 version, the upgrade path is to 2016, from 2016 to 1801, from 1801 to 1807 and then you must make sure that you're on the correct sequel version for 2019. But to do it at all depends on the license agreement that the particular clients have with Microsoft. Right now we are busy taking the environment up to 1807 and then we going to upgrade the sequel version, and then from there, we can go to 2019.

So we are busy the whole time trying to better service our clients. We do our UI updates quite often. We are quite busy with our upgrade paths and testing to make sure everything goes smoothly for the clients in the implementation. 

We are using the System Manager in a state university. They have around 1000 workstations and clients, that were using a System Center Configuration Management to upgrade only those clients and Windows servers, as well as the WHS server.

The solution is very user-friendly, and it offers upgrade options and updates features with a simple click.

I personally found the initial setup to be straightforward.

There are excellent simple options on offer.

They have great integration with the active directory. You can see active directory users in the System Center.

In recent years, no doubt it's improved. 

That said, at the time I used it, System Center just provided upgrade and update features for Windows clients, and Windows systems, and did not support Linux, Android, or iOS, and other operating systems. They need to provide better integration with other operating systems if they don't already.

The initial setup should be a bit more straightforward.

I have experience working with the solution for about one year or so. I only have one experience with SCOM.

At any given time, 10 members of the IT department, all engineers, would be working on the Assistant Manager Console.

I never dealt with technical support in the past. I can't speak to how knowledgeable or responsive they are in general. 

The initial setup was a very simple process. That said, in general, the installation process is not very straightforward, as you need to install it and then secure the server, and configure the database, and you need to provide different specific options in the configuration process. It can be a bit tricky. It should be improved to provide a straightforward installation.

I handled the installation myself. I did not use a consultant or integrator. I was able to handle it in-house.

I can't speak to the actual cost of the solution. It was more or less handled by the sales department. The licensing aspect was not my responsibility.

We are using System Center 2016.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It was mostly a very positive experience working with it.

I would recommend the solution to other users and organizations.