SCOM Reviews

SCOM is used as a monitoring solution for managing Windows-based IT infrastructures within our organization.

SCOM has helped us to monitor all the VMs in our environment, especially the Windows servers. This is our scoop, we monitor all the VMs that have OS Windows servers. The best part of SCOM is that we have a major comeback with it and can apply something that could act as a counteraction. Once an action appears, there is a counteraction in order to avoid any interruption to the service. This is the best way the solution has improved our organization.

The solution provides a full insight report for all the VMs in our environment. SCOM also tells us whether the VMs are healthy or not, as well as provides brief information about the management console in each site and the agents under these management consoles.

There is no room for update or enhancement in SCOM because Microsoft has retired it as an on-prem solution and moved it to the cloud. The current version will be the last on-prem given Microsoft's push to move all their solutions to the cloud.

The GI is difficult to work with and the reporting servers are also difficult. Another dimension that makes SCOM difficult is the number of components. The reporting server, the database, and the two components of the database (operational and warehouse) are all difficult to work with. This is why SCOM is a difficult solution to implement, configure, and troubleshoot.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The solution is not very stable. Sometimes we find alerts in the event viewer that we don't understand. we have to spend hours trying to figure out what the events mean. Sometimes we have to request support from Microsoft engineers, who may take a long time to respond, and the case may take longer than expected to resolve.

I give the stability a six out of ten.

The solution is scalable. We currently have six members, but we should add management consultants depending on our workload. We need to go through the Microsoft documents first. We need to calculate and prepare for our Virtual Machine (VM). We need to identify the storage, memory, and CPUs for our VM. This is important because we don't want to lose our solution or have bad performance. A bad performance will affect our environment. We also need to make sure the latency is less than 12 milliseconds. This is important because the management console needs to communicate with the database. If the latency is more than 12 milliseconds, it will affect the outcome of these records and the management console will be unhealthy.

Previously we used SIM by SolarWinds.

The solution is difficult to implement and troubleshoot. Sometimes we need the prerequisites for a task, but we encounter issues that we don't understand or that are not reasonable.

The first time we deployed the solution, there were three of us, but now that we have more experience, we can do it on our own without the requirement of additional people. 

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have not seen a return on investment. We have a lot of latency issues with the solution that is related to the network coverage between the sites. We have ten data centers using a management console but our database is centralized in the capital of Cairo. 

I give the solution a six out of ten.

First-time users of SCOM need to be well prepared. There should not be too many management consoles. The SCOM gateway can be used as a way to transfer data to the management console, and the management console will have low latency so it can act as the management console for these sites. It will handle the queuing for the data through the centralized database. This is the best practice given to me by the Microsoft team because of an issue that occurred in our environment that took some time to be resolved.

We mainly use SCOM for logging purposes and mounting configurations. It alerts us when any services have a problem. It really depends on the products that are being used in the backend. There are different kinds of virtual machines and different kinds of environments like VMware and Hyper-V.

One customer deploys the solution on a hyper conversion input service, and two customers deploy the solution on-premises.

The solution could be used in any sized company. It's been used in the manufacturing, IT, and telecom sectors.

The monitoring features are the most valuable. We have seen a major benefit from that so far.

There could be more integration of SIM in the solution.

The solution is stable.

Previous versions were not very stable. There were some issues while we were configuring the hierarchy.

The scalability is of medium difficulty.

Overall, support is not great but it's not bad. Microsoft's standard support is good. Sometimes, there aren't specific engineers who can help us with SCOM when we have an issue. A knowledge-based environment would help us more.

I would rate technical support 3.5 out of 5.

We have also used ManageEngine OpManager to monitor the environment and Solar Wind. 

They don't support integration of multiple products. Considering the stability and scalability, Microsoft is a better option. It depends on the use cases.

I would rate the initial setup 4.5 out of 5.

It's a complex process. When we deploy any other solution, it comes with a built-in SQL database. With SCOM, it was more of a complicated process.

If it doesn't have a hierarchy, then it takes about one hour. It's a standard installation. If there are hierarchies, like multiple site deployments, then it would take about three to five hours.

I don't know the exact cost because it's managed by our sales team, but Microsoft is on the higher side.

I would rate SCOM as 8 out of 10. 

It depends on how the customer is using the product. My advice is that if you're interested in SCOM, you need to consider the environment, the business case, and what kind of business you are running.

We use this tool to patch laptops, conduct an inventory, and gather information about our systems. We use SCCM and another solution around SCCM to gain a complete view of our laptops and desktops.

We use the solution for deployment purposes, including deploying solutions, new products, applications, and patch solutions.

The solution primarily drives system information, and I believe it works fine.

Regarding certain issues in the solution, it can be difficult to generate reports if we have a program that is not user-friendly for reporting. While this is not necessarily negative, we may need to use another solution. We can explore alternatives through certain products from Azure, but it may still be difficult to generate reports without specific development.

In short, I feel the reporting feature of the solution needs to be better since it is very difficult to have a report of the best quality.

We use the SCOM solution in our company and provide it to clients, if possible. Our role is to build a solution architecture for our clients. While SCOM is not our primary product, we have been using it for ten years, and it remains the latest solution to expedite our system information.

I think the solution is stable, but we had to meet with our engineer to address some tuning issues. When the solution gets appropriately tuned, it is a good solution.

I have worked with four big international companies using this solution.

My team uses Microsoft support to assist our clients, but we have a specific link with Microsoft to provide support for certain clients.

I work with solutions like Microsoft SCCM and Microsoft Intune.

We use the solution in our work for a big company, but we are rarely involved in the setup of the solution. The company uses and upgrades the solution but is not typically involved in new installations.

I work for a big company and thus have access to a certain piece of system information that can be considered big and vast. Due to its size, we have separated the activities, primarily because there are many activities. Also, we have many engineers working on the solution.

I recommend others to try this solution. Also, I rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

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 the solution essentially for the management of the endpoint and the management of assets.

The fact that I'm able to see all my devices and the status of them has been extremely useful. It's mainly the device visibility and device status. 

The stability has been great. 

It is very scalable. 

We haven't upgraded the SCOM version yet, however, there's a few of the versions where we would like to have improvements in terms of more visibility into some of the details of the device. 

We'd like to be able to configure and push more granular policies into the device.

Using iOS is an issue for us. It's not as deep as the Microsoft offering. We'd like more detail in the iOS version. They also need more advanced iOS support.

There is a lack of documentation.  

We didn't know the solution enough, and therefore, it took a while to set everything up correctly. There was a learning curve. We'd like more help in planning and training. 

I've been using the solution for eight years. 

It really is stable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. 

The solution can scale well. It's actually more suited for larger enterprises. 

We didn't have any issues with scalability.

We have about 800 users on the product currently. That's about 1,400 devices. 

We use the product fairly regularly. 

Technical support takes work. They're knowledgeable, yet it takes a lot of time. You have to go through the reseller first - before you get to speak to Microsoft. 

Neutral

We're going to, eventually in the next few years with SCOM, move to the cloud management features of Microsoft.

The initial setup took a lot of time. I can't remember exactly what the timeframe was. However, it took longer than we expected. I'd rate it 2.5 out of five in terms of the ease of setup. While it's not difficult, it does take time. We had to do and redo a few things during implementation. They didn't have any documentation for us to work out of, which would have helped. 

We handled the setup ourselves in-house. 

I don't have an individual cost for SCOM. We buy all our licenses under the program. We get invoiced for the quantities of each of the products without having an individual cost for SCOM. If you buy certain licenses or servers, SCOM automatically comes with it. 

At the time, we didn't investigate others. We didn't investigate a lot of other technologies as we're a Microsoft shop. We use Microsoft products. We are resellers. We're distributors of Microsoft. We didn't go much further out from there. Recently, we also haven't investigated a lot. We are starting to research the management of endpoints with the Microsoft cloud platform. That looks a little bit easier right now.

We're using a lot of Microsoft products. We are also resellers and distributors of Microsoft.

Whether this solution works for you or not depends on how you do your model. If you outsource everything, then you don't have the problem even if you're an SMB. However, if you have an IT department inside your organization, you will likely need this. 

I'd rate the solution seven 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.