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IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs SCOM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (13th)
SCOM
Ranking in Event Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 3.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 9.9%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SCOM9.9%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server3.4%
Other86.7%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2317098 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers effective monitoring of resources but lacks the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.
We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes We've set up alerts to notify us when performance deviates from the baseline we've configured for each resource. So, whenever that happens, we get an alert and can investigate immediately. So,…
AK
Assistant Manager at SMS group GmbH
Have integrated effective monitoring and seamless alerting with improved visualization capabilities
The most valuable feature of SCOM is its monitoring capability, and we have integrated SCOM with Grafana, which is a dashboarding tool. We have implemented and integrated this to create dashboarding of the SCOM monitoring system for the database, SQL, and the Linux servers we have configured in SCOM. We have created separate dashboarding for it, and the monitoring and creating rules and monitors in the management servers and management packs that SCOM provides are very useful for us. The alerting mechanism of SCOM has benefited our operations because we have modified the thresholds as per our internal requirements. We have configured threshold modifications for the CPU, memory, and especially for disk space. For routine disk space usage on the system, we have provided a separate threshold configuration.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The best part of SQL DM is the ability to customize alerts and counters. This allows our team to find an issue then alert on the issue at a granular level."
"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."
"SQL monitoring time has been dramatically reduced and our IT Infrastructure team has improved SQL maintenance and monitoring knowledge over time just by using SQL DM."
"Baselining our SQL Servers has made a huge impact."
"There are several monitoring tools, but IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager is actually better than other competitors."
"Overall, it has allowed us to do more with database management and run more databases on a given server, because we're able to isolate issues quicker and take the proactive steps necessary to correct them."
"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."
"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."
"The solution has improved our overrides and the ability to start services if they're stopped."
"The monitoring features are the most valuable. We have seen a major benefit from that so far."
"Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications."
"It can send messages to our ticketing system."
"The advantages of SCOM are that it is definitely user friendly and a more appropriate solution for what we need."
"Mature product, strong brand, many customers, Gartner awards Excellent Microsoft server/application monitoring capabilities Fast and consistent UX for system admins Extensive dashboarding capabilities REST API available Excellent technical support, rich user community Designed for on-premise installations"
"Setting up SCOM is straightforward and takes about an hour as long as you have all your firewalls and DNS settings in place."
"This solution helps our application teams by allowing them to drill further into issues and perform a root cause analysis."
 

Cons

"Some more granularity in alerting."
"I'm going to do an upgrade which may resolve my issues, but one area for improvement is its ability to handle the amount of data that we collect with it. We're likely one of the largest installations, with over 300 servers being collected with this product, and sometimes there are gaps. That would really be my only concern, in terms of how the data is collected and stored, for consistency."
"I would absolutely love to create customized dashboards but, unfortunately, they don't provide me the information that I need to create the report. The report I need is the detail or the transaction detail that's happening on those Snapshots. I'd like to be able to go back through time and search for things. I don't have that functionality, which is very disappointing. That's pretty bad and frustrating because I could query it and find out so much information about what's hitting my environment and when, but instead, they want control over it and to not give me that information. So it's encrypted. I can't pull it out and that is really bothersome."
"Scalability is what I mentioned earlier, regarding room for improvement. It doesn't seem to scale out to an environment as large as ours, with just a single monitoring server."
"One thing I'd like to see is the ability to view the execution plan and have the system automatically recommend potential query optimizations, especially at the query level."
"With basic SQL training in my history, I've found at times I needed to Google SQL counters, for example, to understand what was occurring or how to configure SQL DM to be useful."
"We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better. Also, in terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing."
"The initial setup gives too many user rights to the server, so you have to put a user that is part administrator's group - that's the preferred way - on each server, which is kind of a risk. You want to do least privilege and you're not doing that."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"All of the areas of reporting are very bad and need to be improved."
"The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department."
"I would like to see better support for monitoring Unix-based systems."
"The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface."
"Application monitoring must be improved."
"SCOM is likely to be phased out in favor of more compatible tools like Icinga for application monitoring or when moving to cloud solutions like CloudWatch and Azure."
"In a future release, they should add email notification alerts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."
"We were upgraded to Premium Support without their actually asking us, when we were quoted. Then I asked for Standard Support and that they had to re-quote us that. But they don't do that by default. They upcharge you by default, which I didn't think was very nice, without even asking."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"It is more expensive than the competition."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"Our licensing fees are approximately $30 per user, per month."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
"We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA."
"I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
9%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
 

Also Known As

IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Padnos, University of Notre Dame, D4, Infeon Technologies, Chevron, LC Waikiki, Sisters of Saint Francis Health Services, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CVE, Colorado State University, St. Charles, Chaucer PLC, 1-800-Flowers, Ancoris, Money Management, National Opinion Research Center, California Department of Health, Plexus; Aviva, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CBS, Comcast, Google, Merck, Regions Financial, Schneider Electric, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon Communications, Zurich Financial Services
Dialog Telekom
Find out what your peers are saying about IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. SCOM and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.