SCOM Reviews

Our primary use case is to monitor infrastructure and the Windows ecosystem. We also create distributed applications within SCOM to monitor our custom applications. It is deeply integrated into our systems.

The most valuable feature is the extensibility, as there are really no limits as to what you can do with it.

The fact that you can use PowerShell is a big plus.

SCOM has a lot of powerful features but it is not simple to use. We are using a third-party presentation layer to show all of the data because SCOM does not show it in a very nice and easy way. It is not an interface that you would expect to see in 2020. 

The interface is a little bit cumbersome and certain actions could be simplified. For example, many of the things that we do require clicking through many menus.

Maintaining this product is very hard to do.

We have been using SCOM for about four years.

This product is quite robust.

I don't have much experience in scaling out and adding more servers, although I think that it's fairly straightforward. It may not be great, but it's better than many products.

I have not personally dealt with official technical support, but non-official support from various blogs and websites is excellent. There are a few bloggers that are really dedicated to the products, as they are Microsoft people, but this is not official support per se.

Overall, I would say that product support is good and better than expected.

Deploying SCOM itself is of medium difficulty. I would say that it is not too easy and not too complicated. However, configuring all of the monitoring and all of the management packs is somewhat complex. It's an ongoing job and requires more than one person. Actually, in our case, it requires that everybody contribute.

If you want to configure SCOM to work properly and bring value to your organization, it is very hard, which is one of the bad things about it.

SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing. The entire suite is expensive but it comes with a lot of functionality.

Overall, I find that this is a good solution but the presentation layer is really bad. If the interactive part of the console were improved then it would be better.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We are using the SCOM server for monitoring our network devices, our Windows servers, and Linux servers.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring of Windows and Linux servers.

The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department. We are currently looking for a plugin for the dashboard to assist in monitoring the dashboard in the SCOM server.

At this time, SCOM is only being used in our IT department. Digital console is not available to our users, management team, or senior persons, and they are not allowed their own login to see what is happening in the network system. The only access that we have is to dump the reports to provide them to our management team.

It doesn't monitor the Fortinet devices well.

I have been using the Microsoft SCOM server for six years.

Because we work in a financial institution, we are not allowed to remove the SCOM server and replace the new monitoring software. We have been given permission by management to search for third-party software to provide us with the missing features, which is something that we require to make it easier.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

On-premises

We use it to monitor our internal work.

The feature I have found most valuable is the book feature. While we run the Sprint one we can add some setups for multiple sprints.

Some checking issues could be improved. Checking some activators. It would help if we could export in some cases, because it may be that some people want to move the screen from the book to share reports. If it was possible to embed it in a report, that would be good. In other words, I would like more customized reports.

I would definitely like to see the ability to go through the total life-cycle in the next release of SCOM, to cover everything. But in some cases, especially retrospectively, this is not happening, or not happening well. I'd like to see the retrospective outcome in the knowledge base. It would be good if it could accommodate some learning out of the box, together with information from the recording session. There are levels to it, but some of the records we keep often go to quickly deliver the project. But in most cases, they skip the retrospective part and lessons learned. It would be good to declare something in the knowledge base where people can easily put it and access their input of lessons learned. We've yet to see that in previous projects. But I'd like to get to the level where whenever a new person starts a project, they could visit the knowledge base and the retrospective section, and get some knowledge out of the box, which was not covered in the process.

On a scale of one to ten I would definitely rate SCOM an 8. That's because people should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately.

I have been using SCOM for almost three years.

There are less than 100 people in my organization using SCOM. It is not widely used in the company. Just some individuals from different departments.

Before SCOM we were using Microsoft Project or Excel. The advantages of SCOM are that it is definitely user friendly and a more appropriate solution for what we need.

The initial setup did not take more than five minutes. It was activated in general, initially. 

The setup was implemented with help from our internal colleagues.

One thing I would recommend to anyone considering this solution is to give more people access to it so that whenever people want to use the solution they can get information from past experiences and what's currently going on. Say for example I raised one concern in your query box, I don't know how it's progressing because it doesn't record that. You should give some ticket number to it and update it. In other words, sharing feedback even on issues you are not directly working on.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

On-premises

We mainly use SCOM for monitoring and reporting purposes. The system enables me to monitor the usage of the system and to change the target or number of logs. 

SCOM has improved our organization by simplifying the monitoring process. The system tells you what the bi-weekly or monthly usage was and that enables us to report this information to the manager. It shows if there was a connectivity issue that needs to be fixed and it's easier to concentrate on what needs to get fixed. System errors, therefore, get fixed faster.

At the moment the monitoring feature is the most valuable. It allows me to monitor the usage as well as the format of the system. Whatever the system owners want to know from our side, I am able to help with.

I don't really think anything needs to be improved. We will soon be trying to use it with Microsoft to log analytics and that will be cloud-based. 

I would like to have the ability to schedule my reports via email or through SMS. 

Then there is also an issue with capacity and limited space. That is something that needs to be improved.

Our company has been using this solution for a few years now, but I've only been using it for the past two years since I joined the company.

The nice thing about this solution is that you tell it what you want and then it will give you what you want. I love this about SCOM.

Our company currently has 280 employees working on this solution and we don't have any problems. We will soon be upgrading to the newer version, as well as moving office. I am not currently monitoring any of the network devices but at our new office, I will be monitoring the network connectivity. There will probably be even more people working online than we have right now.

The customer service and technical support was very good. There was a human error from our side. I am not sure if it was from the database or not because I was unable to restore my data for a couple of weeks. The Microsoft engineer came on site, and he assisted us with that. He sorted the issue out and explained to us why we are unable to get it sorted out ourselves. 

Since I started working with our company we have been using the 2016 version of SCOM. We are currently upgrading to the 2019 version.

The initial setup was done with the help of a Microsoft engineer. From what I saw, it wasn't a complex setup.

This solution makes people's lives easier. Especially that of our manager. No matter what report or information you have, sharing it with him it makes his life easier. It enables him to see if there is capacity that needs to be increased or if there are things that can be deleted. 

I would highly recommend it. I would rate it a seven out of ten. I wouldn’t rate it a ten because I would like for it to be fully cloud-based.

Our primary use case is to monitor if the system is healthy and running well. 

The features we find most useful would be the automatic thresholds when disks are running full. If CPUs are causing high CPU load then we will be notified with triggers.

Price is always an issue with Microsoft and could be improved.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is stable. It's working fine.

The solution is scalable. If you want to monitor more you have to buy more licenses, but you can add on. We don't plan to increase usage.

I haven't called technical support yet.

We had nothing essential in an enterprise managing console. This is relatively simple tooling, but we didn't have another solution on this scale.

The initial setup was straightforward. Deployment wasn't that long. Maybe a couple of days. We needed half a day for the installation and then three to four days for implementing and configuring all the monitoring agents. Deployment is not a big job, so you just need one person and then after that, you just need someone for an hour a day on the system.

Initial setup was done with a bit of additional support and then we added more and more services.

It's a Microsoft product so if you are using a lot of other vendors, other operating systems, then it's less compatible. For us, we're 99% Microsoft so it's not an issue. On this solution, the things we monitor are fine and perhaps other users will want more, but for our purpose and what we use it for, it's enough.

Once it's completed, you only get triggered by emails and you can respond to those emails so when the system does its thing it's not that complex. It's very simple.

I would rate this solution eight out of 10.

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. 

I've been working with it since 2006 with different clients in different versions.

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 this solution for monitoring our Microsoft servers.

In the beginning, we used this solution to monitor our Exchange servers. After we started using it, we went on to SharePoint, and then all of the Microsoft servers.

I am a member of the monitoring team. This solution saves us a lot of work, mainly in creating monitoring packages for Microsoft products, since those packages, created by the product team in Microsoft, can be downloaded directly from the console.   

All of the areas of reporting are very bad and need to be improved. It is not simple to get a report. Even the monitoring people, who are supposed to be familiar with the system, are having difficulty generating specific reports. Also, the information in the reports is not user-friendly.

The console is very slow, and not user-friendly. Even the browser for the web console is not very friendly, and I would not consider it useful compared to other ones that I have worked with.

I would like to see the inclusion of more monitoring templates, where I would just have to enter variables and nothing more. If there were a template then it would save time, rather than have to create it again.

The monitoring of Linux servers needs to be improved because it is hard compared to other products.

Between seven and eight years.

This is a very stable solution, and we have not had major issues within the past few years.

We started in a really big environment, and it did not grow, so I cannot really comment on the scalability. I don't expect our usage of this solution to increase because we are already at the maximum number of servers.

We only had one problem that we needed Microsoft support for. They helped us with the problem but it took time. It is difficult to rate their support given that we have only opened a single ticket in the past.

Prior to this solution, we monitored our Windows servers using HP Operations Manager, which is now owned by Micro Focus. The switch was made because we already had SCOM integrated within the company. We were already paying for it as we were monitoring the Exchange environment, and we didn't want to pay double. It was a simple business decision. It was not based on a technical comparison between products.

The initial setup of this solution is very simple. It is not complex to establish the environment.

While the setup is easy, we have a large environment, so it took some time to complete. In total, the deployment took between two weeks and one month.

We used a field engineer from Microsoft to assist us at the beginning. They also helped us out from time to time to upgrade the system, although I took care of the last installation of patches myself.

We have a lot of servers in the company and we needed some kind of monitoring solution. Eight years ago we started using Microsoft Exchange, and we asked Microsoft how we should go about monitoring the Exchange environment. They suggested this solution and we adopted it.

This is a good solution, especially if your company is based on Microsoft products. For example, there is a new version of Active Directory and they contacted us to let us know that the monitoring is supported. On the other hand, the interface needs improvement, and there should be better support for monitoring Linux servers.

If the user interface, reporting, and support for other operating systems are all improved, then this would be a perfect product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring. Predominantly, it is for infrastructure monitoring in the Microsoft space.

This solution helps our application teams by allowing them to drill further into issues and perform a root cause analysis. This is possible because we first built out the monitoring platform and made sure that all of the components were being monitored. Then, we created a distributed application view, which is a drawing of all of the components being monitored for each application. This is what we then provide to the application teams. 

The most valuable feature is the reporting, and the customization is quite flexible.

The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved.

I would like to see more focus on application monitoring in the next release of this solution.

Approximately seven years.

The stability is pretty good, although it depends on the infrastructure. We normally end up having issues with hypervisors and SQL servers, but it comes down to how those platforms are being administered, as well. From an application point of view, this solution is pretty stable.

This solution is scalable and very good in terms of availability and performance capability. It is very flexible, but you need to have your training properly done beforehand. If so, then it will benefit you a lot. If you need to expand at a later stage then you can do that as well.

We currently have more than three thousand users that vary from managers to developers and engineers.

I have never had to contact technical support.

Personally, I have used an in-house solution and I have used SolarWinds before. It was not a case of switching because these were with different companies.

The initial setup depends on the size of the environment, but on average, it will be more complex than straightforward.

The complexity comes from understanding the various components that contribute to monitoring a specific item on the server. First, you have to understand the Management Pack. Then, you move on to the workflows, and this leads to understanding the rules and monitors. There are bits and pieces that you need to understand in order to make it work properly in your particular environment. This will further depend on things like whether you have restrictions in place, or whether the networking is good or bad. All of these things play a role.

While the deployment time varies depending on the environment, on average, deployment takes about five months.

All of the companies that I have worked for have handled it internally.

One person is suitable for deployment, although this again depends on the company and the environment. If one person is in charge of the SQL environment and the hypervisors then they can do it alone. Obviously, if other departments are in charge of these things then they will need to be relied upon, but generally, it can be done with one person.

With respect to maintaining the solution, a team of three people, with two juniors and one senior, might be ideal.

If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement.

My advice to anybody looking to implement this product is to plan properly.

Overall, this is a good solution, but there is room for improvement in application monitoring and the dashboard.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

This is the main monitoring system for our company. We use it for monitoring, reporting, and analytics.

The most valuable features for us are the monitoring, the health explorer, and the console.

The console feature is very poor, and it would be very good for us if this were improved. The application monitoring feature is also poor.

I would also like to see better training materials. What we currently have is very light.

The ability to connect to cloud-based solutions would be very good.

Fifteen years.

We have approximately fifty users at this time. The IT operations team uses this solution, and there is a manager who uses the reporting functions as well. 

I like the service that we receive from the Hungarian technical support team. It is very useful and has good coverage. 

This is an easy solution to install.

I like SCOM and have used it for many years.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.