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.  

The solution is used for monitoring the hardware inventory. For instance, it helps with the whole operational monitoring view for the company's infrastructure.

The product was relatively stable even a few months back. But people now evaluate other solutions like VMware and third-party solutions like Ivanti.

Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement. I got a response from the TCS that whenever they try to patch or throw some updates to any of the computers, it takes a lot of time to apply and to get the job done on the recipient. As the system is very slow, people only opt for it a little and instead go for solutions like Ivanti and other third-party solutions.

I have been using SCOM for seven to eight years. Also, I sell the solution.

The stability of the solution needs improvement.

For the system center, we have worked with eight to nine customers; those are mainly from the FSI side, which is the banking side. These days, we have two more customers, one from oil and gas and another from TCS, which is the biggest courier company in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, people get the solution deployed but don't monitor, control, or upgrade their systems. When Microsoft releases a new version of it every three years or two years down the road, they don't upgrade the existing one or install the bug fixes. So, there are problems where the customer needs help finding answers quickly on the internet. That is when they ask for support from their systems, reporting that the sensor or the things are not working correctly or have missed configurations. During such instances, it takes time to address the customer's queries because we take step-by-step procedures to mitigate the error and sometimes apply the update patches and then plan for the upgrade from the older version to the newer version.

The initial setup is complex. It also depends on the current infrastructure and Active Directory for this level. Sometimes there are some misconfigurations, or you may have faced configuration issues that need to be fixed at the infrastructure level about the ADA and other elements.

There are different phases in the deployment process. After planning the deployment then, you install the SCOM

server management. You install the additional management server and the agent on the infrastructure system server. You need to collect a debt and monitor the system.

Then, of the incident, you configure all those agents and define your monitoring objective. Like, how you want to create the tools and classify and configure the alerts notifications. And once it's done, you'll start configuring the reporting or want to

see other reports concerning performance and availability. Once that is done, if we do the test and validate the deployment, it will be done as per the plan we did in the initial phase.

So once that's done, then there is the monitor and the routine maintenance required.

Three staff helped with the deployment.

Two customers bought the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and paid for Software Assurance. But few customers don't buy it for Software Assurance. They just buy it and deploy it, and they think that we will be using it for the next five years.

From a technical perspective, I recommend going for Azure, using Sentinel, using Azure monitoring services, which give in-depth results and monitoring opportunities.

Microsoft is known for its integrated solution. But what happens when those solutions have several issues, like SCOM or any other solution?

But some companies get solutions to those areas to address those issues. So people start moving towards them, like, i.e. VMware or Ivanti, as I mentioned. These companies emerged as Microsoft solutions could not provide detailed or ease of accessibility and utility to those software solutions.

I rate the solution a five out of ten.

We have installed SCOM in our Windows Server 2020 system. We use the solution to monitor any issues that might happen in our infrastructure and keep them in good health. We have SQL Servers, web servers, and web interfaces.

The most valuable feature of SCOM is real-time alerts.

In a future release, they should add email notification alerts.

I have been using SCOM for approximately three months.

SCOM is stable.

The scalability of SCOM is good. We can add other servers or services.

I have approximately eight IT personnel that use the solution in my company.

I have not used the support but others in my company have many times.

Before I used SCOM I used Microsoft Azure.

There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually.

We have two system engineers who do the maintenance of this solution, but the number of people needed depends on their knowledge or qualification.

I recommend this solution to others, but I would suggest having some training.

I rate SCOM a seen out of ten.

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 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.

We use it mainly for partitioning systems. All the systems' utilization and compute, uptime, and downtime. I also monitor a few applications through it.

Because it's Windows-based, it actually reports quite well. It reports everything you can think of on the Windows server and allows you to monitor anything. It's excellent for those in the Windows world as it's very good at it.

The configurations could be better. There are multiple tests where you can do something, but they can be a trigger as well. The overriding methodologies are not that easy. The configurations are difficult. The configuration and thorough day-to-day operations to get them to the level you want takes some time. It's very difficult.

I think certain things, like management packs, should also be built into the solution. They should be built into your installation or deployment so you can decide whether to keep them in the list of products that you want. You can just unpick the ones you don't want and install this with the latest management technologies. Installing the solution and then looking for management technologies and custom solutions, like your HP and the hardware, you have to go through an HPE port file to download that management pack and add it. I think their whole packaging of the software can be made a little bit easier.

I have been using SCOM for about three years.

SCOM is a stable product. Once you get it off the ground, it's very stable.

Technical support is fine. Not that I need it that much, but normally they do help.

The initial setup is straightforward. But configurations and maneuvering around it and getting things to a level you want is very difficult. Installing and deploying it properly takes close to a week. It takes time to take out things that are just unnecessary. It also takes time to customize things according to the environment. You need to read a lot of documentation, even with the management packs. You need to go back to the documentation all the time.

It doesn't take many people to implement this solution. You have to know math and the Microsoft server platform for you to manage it properly.

We have an EA with Microsoft, and it comes as part of the EA.

If new potential users want to monitor a Windows platform or Microsoft Server-related platforms, I would recommend it. But if they want to manage anything else, they have to create a lot of custom things for them to work properly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SCOM an eight.

We use SCOM to deploy images.

We like the deployment of the machines and the features that they have.

It's easy to use.

The management of the servers could be better.

Also, the user interface could be improved.

We have used SCOM for a couple of years.

We are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution.

It's a scalable product. We have 1,000 users in our organization.

We have plans to continue using this solution.

Technical support is fine. We have no issues with them.

We did not use any other solution. It's a group standard for us.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy for us.

We have a team of four to deploy and maintain it.

We completed the installation ourselves.

It took one week to deploy and customize it.

We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us.

I would recommend this solution to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use SCOM mostly for server performance monitoring in historical metrics.

I like the historical reporting of observer metrics. It's a fairly user-friendly solution.

It'll help if they can provide real-time or closer to real-time monitoring.

I've been using SCOM for at least five years.

SCOM is a stable solution.

SCOM is scalable, and it's easy to add resources.

I believe we have had issues. I'm not the primary administrator of it, but in general, I think they've been able to get back to us relatively quickly.

The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite. I believe we pay for the license on a yearly basis.

I would tell people looking to implement this solution that it's great for any historical tracking. But if they're looking for real-time, within-the-minute monitoring of servers from a console, then I would say that it falls short there.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SCOM a seven.

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.

Our primary use of SCOM is for monitoring deployments of Windows. It is also used for monitoring applications, and it reports information if there is a problem.

It is very good at monitoring Microsoft Server.

SCOM is not a flexible product.

The initial setup should be easier to complete.

We have been working with SCOM for three years.

This is a very stable product and we plan to continue using it in the future.

This solution is very scalable. It can change the configuration for management and performance. We have two people who use it. One is a manager and the other is an engineer.

When I need external support, I can open a case with Microsoft. I have opened between two and four support cases and I am satisfied with the support I received.

We don't use any other product for deployments. 

I would say that the initial setup is 50-50. It is not easy and it's not hard to set up. It should be easier to install. It took us between three days and a week to deploy.

The length of time for deployment depends on the size of your environment. If I am installing a new System Center Operations Manager for 100 servers, it will take maybe two weeks. The process requires implementing monitoring agents, and I need to change the configuration as well.

I deploy this product myself.

We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it.

This is a good product and I recommend it. When it comes to monitoring Microsoft servers, it is very useful.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.