SCOM Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We're using SCOM to monitor the health checks for the Windows servers in our organization.

It would be hard to talk about features. In maybe four months, in January, there is downtime for service, where we're able to look for the issues and proactively check everything.

The stability has been very good so far. 

Technical support has been very responsive.

We have found the scalability capabilities to be okay.

What we need in SCOM is the ability to share a lab console with our customers so that our end-users or customers in SCOM can navigate by themselves. It could be similar to how we use DRDG in PRTG where all of our customers can set up their monitoring on their own. Right now, in SCOM, only our team can set up their monitoring. 

The initial setup could be easier. 

The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface.

I've been dealing with the solution for two years. 

The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The scalability potential is good. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

The technical support on offer has been great, generally. When we have questions for Microsoft, they respond to us quickly. It's good for our end. We are quite satisfied.

The initial setup could be more straightforward and the deployment could be simplified in SCOM.

In terms of pricing, I'm not sure how much the company pays. As far as I know, our company gets a Microsoft package and SCOM is already included in the package. It's not separated out.

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

SCOM is a great monitoring tool. It's just pretty complex to set up, however, if you invest your time in learning SCOM, you can understand how it works and it will make things much easier.

System Center Operations Manager is basically for windows monitoring. We use SCOM to monitor metrics, such as CPU and memory disk, and a lot of applications, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, Office 365, Active Directory, RDBMS, Skype, and Citrix.

It discovers the components automatically, which is a fantastic thing. The discovery works in an automatic way, and it has a dynamic way of discovering the components, assets, and applications. It doesn't require any manual intervention.

They can focus more on cloud monitoring instead of on-premise monitoring. We should be able to monitor cloud-related applications. They can include this feature in the next release.

If it is in the cloud, we can have scalability by using Kubernetes. The container is containerized, packaged, and managed using Kubernetes. This feature is not there in SCOM. Going forward, if they can focus on that, it will be great.

Its scalability works well. In our environment, we are monitoring 150,000 Windows Servers by using System Center Operations Manager. Its usage keeps increasing.

I am satisfied with their support.

Its initial setup is straightforward. It doesn't take long.

We evaluated other options. We found SCOM to be suitable for Microsoft Windows applications, so we decided to go for it.

I would rate System Center Operations Manager an eight out of ten.

We work with our global team to produce software delivery packages and patches. We push the changes to the servers as well as to the computers of the end users.

I enjoy its integration with the Microsoft Active Directory functions, which means users, computers, or other group policies can connect with Windows Active Directory.

There are some negative points about this product. Sometimes, the capabilities of the software don't appear, and you can't directly see the results. You have to wait for a long period to refresh the policy to push it to the software or other patches.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is very stable.

We can easily scale-up when we have a new global site. It is just so easy to extend this solution to other sites, which is an advantage. 

On the IT side, we have 30 people working on this platform, and on the user side, we have 600 people. We use it every month to push down new patches.

We used LANDESK and Manager Engine. Both of these solutions are similar to SCOM and suitable for the simple purpose of management. 

SCOM is just one user interface. It is a Microsoft service user interface. However, it is not user friendly like Manage Engine, which has a self-service desktop where users can log in and change their password themselves. The software also sends out an automatic notification. Manage Engine has a user-friendly interface.

It is very complex to install because you have to plan the whole deployment. You have to design the central server, the deposit server, and the domain. It is a little bit complex as compared to other common server installations. The deployment took two months.

We have a consultant.

This is a good software. I would definitely recommend this software.

I would rate SCOM an eight out of ten.

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.  

My primary use case for SCOM is to monitor service availability and performance, such as operating systems. We also integrate some Linux based operating systems to monitor our databases. We also monitor the Microsoft Exchange. We are having some difficulties in the case of the monitoring a couple of our networking devices, so I wouldn't say that monitoring networking devices is also part of the primary use cases. 

I also have Internet Information Server and Application Service from Microsoft Monitor.

Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications. There is a mechanism to set up a notification from the SCOM and whenever there is a drop in the availability the notification alerts not only for availability but for other issues as well.

You can align thresholds according to the speed of your environment and you can have a threshold related notification, which is one of the useful features.

In terms of features that could be improved, I would say the agent integration into the operating system. We are having difficulties integrating Linux into some of the networking devices. We have not seen the collected data so it makes it challenging.

I would also say that agentless monitoring needs to be included. Something like this is pretty difficult if you don't have a particular agent.

It's not so easy if you have to use something like a proxy to implement a work around. They should include a solution for discovering devices and something like an agentless monitoring solution for a particular device - just to understand what your environment looks like.

I'm not saying that they should provide all the information for the device, but at least availability and partial monitoring based on SNMP. Because I know that other solutions have it. Maybe Service Center Operations Manager has already provided those things in the latest version, but I'm not familiar with it.

I have been using Microcoft SCOM for roughly five years.

Our whole department that maintains SCOM is five people, so the IT department is pretty small and it's relatively integrated. Plus, we have only two dedicated System Administrators. Basically, a few people are doing many things.

We are doing the usual maintenance, patching, and updating. Alignment and configuration are also needed because we are trying to support a higher version of the application, Exchange 2016, with the previous 2012 version of Service Center Operations Manager. It's quite difficult and some type of maintenance is performed internally as we try to align as much as possible. 

Generally speaking, SCOM is stable from an operations point of view. Once it's set up and established and all the configuration is in place, there is no significant amount of time needed for stability or to support the availability of the solution itself. It's relatively simple to support.

In terms of scalability, we increased the amount of supported devices from 50 to 150, but it's not a significant scale. I couldn't say yet how it would behave for a thousand or 2,000 devices.

We have a pretty simple setup for SCOM, we are not using any kind of clustering or virtualization.

Microsoft support can vary. It's great for people that are used to other types of support. Meaning, software vendors usually provide a little bit more focused and dedicated Microsoft support teams. For general support, it's okay from my perspective. But to really understand the deep and the intense nature of your issue, it's a little bit tricky to get to that level.

Overall, technical support needs some alignment. The technical support should be separated from general support. They should start with the general support for people that are end-users or a single user in a simple environment. Then, to reach to the real technical integration-related support later because it's a little bit tricky. Usually, we use our integration partner as someone that is really dealing with those kinds of discussions with the vendor. But if you go directly as a single enterprise, it will be a little bit challenging.

In my previous work I had experience with Network Node Manager, a new solution from HP. It's more focused on agentless monitoring. Also, there is a capability for a monitoring device without any kind of agent installed, which is a little bit more professional. It's not the general solution for monitoring, so I wouldn't say that are comparable. My perception is that Microsoft is just focused on the software stack layer they provide. While Network Node Manager is more of an umbrella, it's much more focused on enterprise level devices and environments. So they should not be compared.

As far as I can remember, the initial setup was pretty simple, but we started with pretty easy devices to monitor. We started with a couple of servers and almost all of them had the same version of the operating system. So it was simple to figure out how things were progressing.

I would say it took a couple of days or a week for the whole setup. It took about five days to install all the servers, and installation and all the integration, and the checks probably took a week.

Initially we implemented on our own. But for a couple of integrations, we used integrators for support, especially for particular application servers and installations, Exchange and partially for SQL Server.

My recommendation to anyone looking to use SCOM is that they should start with the latest version because it's pretty difficult to update later. From an operational perspective and regarding migrating many devices and whole environments, it's better to start with the latest version for Service Center Operations Manager.

On a scale of one to ten I would rate Microsoft SCOP a seven.