SCOM Reviews

Real time monitoring/alerts. Pro-active response to warning alerts are invaluable and have saved disasters quite a few times.

We heavily rely on SCOM as our pro-active monitoring tool. We have prevented various problems and have been able to resolve issues quickly with the informative detail raised in SCOM alerts, it assists our department in being pro-active in regards to resolving issues with servers/services rather the reactive. The level of monitoring from overview health to granular object monitoring is excellent.

I've been using it for four years.

I wasn't involved in the deployment.

We've had no issues with the stability.

We have needed to increase the VM resources as we’ve added more servers and increased monitoring packs, but that’s to be expected.

Microsoft support is generally excellent, we’ve never raised a call for SCOM though.

We have some in house monitoring that’s looked after by our NOC team, however, this is basic SNMP monitoring, so nothing in comparison.

It's not straightforward, SCOM is relatively “noisy” out of the box, so time is required to tailor the alerting, adjusting threshold triggers and over-riding alerts that are not required to ensure alerts captured are relevant and require action.

It was done in-house.

Very difficult to gauge. Using most or all of the Security Centre Suite ensures that the license cost is very reasonable considering what’s in the suite. To just use SCOM would be a very expensive license per server in my opinion, best to use multiple products in this suite.

Ensure you have plenty of resources to throw at the environment, space for data warehouse and SQL as it will be resource hungry for SCOM (server estate size relevant of course). Be prepared for some initial time investment and ensure regular updates and management packs are applied to make the product as useful as possible.

• Monitoring Windows servers and services
• Monitoring Linux servers and services
• Monitoring disk space, performance and unexpected errors
• Customized views
• Ability to implement remote login and ping directly from the SCOM console

SCOM is a required tool in my job since I am responsible in overseeing multiple virtual and physical servers and services for a bank.

The warnings and errors I receive such as low disk space warnings allow me to easily determine the impact it has on the server and call out the required people to get the issue resolved before it's too late

Having the ability for it to be integrated with third party ticket systems or other monitoring software would make an even better tool for people like myself within administrative or monitoring positions.

We've used it for one year.

There were no issues encountered during the deployment.

Because SCOM currently runs on a Citrix session, SCOM sometimes becomes slow or crashes when there is too much going on.

There were no issues scaling it.

I've never had to contact Microsoft for a SCOM issue.

We are using Centreon and Nagios monitoring software. These two are web-based and maybe if SCOM can incorporate a web console, it would become a real powerful tool.

Since SCOM and its customized features were already set-up when I arrived, I cannot comment on this. I have not installed SCOM in the past so I also cannot comment on the installation process.

A third party vendor set-up SCOM before I started in this position so I cannot comment.

In order to use all the features in SCOM, one must learn the tool from the inside out and then customize it so that it fits the paricular business. This way you know the foundations and are able to build a robust tool to monitor and control a large amount of servers and services across the world

One of the most important features of SCOM is the Reporting Server role which runs on the SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). It’s responsible for rendering and scheduling reports. With Operations Manager, you have extract reporting capabilities and multiple report libraries that you can select from to customize reports to your own granular requirements.

It will help you to visualize the data in your environment. The reports provide high-level summaries and detailed information about your systems and can be e-mailed on a specified schedule or simply exported and printed out. The reporting server performs queries against the Operations Manager data warehouse database and returns the results in a number of easy-to-read formats.

Another point, you can import management packs available for Microsoft products, which you can customize thresholds of several counters of each product. Also, you can create your management pack and define your customizations.

This tool could be improved especially for tasks for our Capacity Planning Team and Monitoring Team. The Capacity Planning Team collect data through the reports from the Operations Manager for the memory, CPU and disks during the month. The use this to make dashboards to show their customers about their environment. With this, it’s possible to show environment of each customer.

For the Monitoring Team, it helps monitor a simple and complex environment in IT sending determinate alerts. For example, if your team receives a determined kind of alert, they will work on the solution before that problem occurs. Through the Operations Console, the Monitoring Team can see critical and warning alerts and if necessary, dispatch for a responsible team is the Database Team, Operating System Team or Exchange Team, etc. It’s clear that it's also possible to send alerts creating split groups for Database Team, Operation System Team, and send alerts for the respective products to the team responsible. It depends on each organization.

I think that it should be made possible to monitor private systems, which are developed in each company. In my opinion, this option already exists in SCOM 2012, however we have a lack of resources to develop this.

In this company, SCOM has been in place since 2006, starting with MOM in 2005 and after that, it was upgrade to SCOM 2007.

I've used it to monitor several Microsoft Servers, which I've customized thresholds to support in Exchange, File Servers, SQL Servers, Clusters and others products.

I had issues with SCOM 2007 and MOM 2005, regarding the view of alerts in the Console Operations. It delayed showing critical alerts to the monitoring Team, because they could not see alerts in the Operations Console. For this kind of issue, I had issues with database maintenance as well.

I have a contact at Microsoft Premier, and I find it necessary to us them to open a case with Microsoft, if they think that it's possible to fix the issue.

In another company, I’ve had experience with BMC Patrol, Tivolli and SiteScope as NETQoS products, but this tool I’ve worked with administration.

There were no issues with setting up SCOM.

Follow the best practices and there should be no issues.

SCOM is a monitoring tool that looks after the vast majority of your private and even public cloud. In my experience having a good insight into specific product monitoring surrounding the Microsoft suite such as Exchange, Active Directory, Lync, SQL and the System Center suite is something that all my clients seek. For me the addition of Microsoft knowledge base articles that point to the cause, explanation and resolution to a product specific issue is invaluable and the ability to add your own knowledge base articles that specifically relate your environment is awesome!

Having a round the clock watchmen offers great peace of mind. Typically my organization uses it for monitoring our virtualisation environments specifically Hyper-V and VMware as well as all the services we run from it. We've had outages at two am and three am that was automatically resolved by SCOM saving us time and money. The saving came from not having to rely on highly priced out of hours staff to resolve any potential issues.

In the world that is monitoring, sometimes the decision makers want to see and hear all the issues that may occur during business hours (as well as out of hours) and (rightly or wrongly) SCOM gives you exactly that! Its revered to as an "Alert Storm". SCOM uses something called "Management Packs" and that is where the alerts come from, but, managing these can be a little convoluted to say the least, I'd like to see these made a little simpler but still keep the same functionality, basically these management packs need to become a little more user friendly. Almost always, these alert storms can put IT managers and operators off the product and give the impression that everything is broken or not working properly, so making them easier to work with will help SCOM administrators (especially if they are new to SCOM) manage and understand what the product is showing them.

I've been using it since 2007.

There were no issues with the deployment.

From a stability point of view, personally I've rarely seen SCOM fall over because of SCOM, I've seen SCOM fall over and die due to hardware issues, visualization issues or resource issues. But the good news is if you've setup SCOM correctly, the product will tell you why it fell over! This means that you can put the preventative measures in place to stop it happening again.

SCOM is "highly available" out of the box (those are Microsoft words not mine) but it really is true, so scaling your SCOM set-up is easy, just install more SCOM servers!

I've had such a mix of technical support scenarios with SCOM it’s a difficult one to answer. Microsoft support of the product is pretty good, with regular updates and good internal knowledge and relatively fast response times. However, other vendors have created software the plugs into SCOM and support for these add-ons can differ wildly! But overall its pretty good.

Personally no, I stared in IT in 2007 and it's all I've ever used. However some of my clients have made the jump from other products to SCOM. Depending on their requirements, SCOM can offer a wide range of monitoring solutions and more often than not, it’s been a successful transition.

It never use to be, but since the 2012 release the deployment side of SCOM was simplified greatly. This was obviously great news for I.T pro's like myself as the client conversation became a little more straight forward. However, installing SCOM was the easy part, making it work after the install is where the fun begins, this side of the setup however remains a little more challenging.

SCOM's greatest attribute is that you can customize every monitor to specifically match the intended system. For example, you can monitor two servers for high CPU usage and customize it so one alerts if it goes above 95% and the other only alerts over 98%.

If SCOM is implemented correctly, it can take away the need for administrators to constantly monitor things or perform health checks. SCOM can be set up to alert when an issue occurs and SCOM is often easy to link to a ticketing system so a ticket will be generated automatically when issues occur. SCOM can even be set up to send emails/SMS when a problem occurs in your environment.

The System Centre Operations Manager (SCOM) is great at alerting you when something breaks. It's not so great at reporting. For all of the information that SCOM collects and stores it has no good way to put this information into a useful reporting format. For example, it would be fantastic to be able to have a historic view of the memory usage on a server to assist with pinpointing the root cause to the issue.

Also, SCOM comes with many built-in monitors. Anything that isn't already there can often be add by installing a management pack. These management packs include a heap of monitors for a specific item (EG exchange). The main issue is that by default most items alerts are enabled. This means when you install SCOM or add a management pack you will need to tweak all of the sensors or you will be over run with alerts. It's a turn off what you don't want situation rather than, the more sensible, turn on what you do want.

There were no issues deploying it.

There have been no stability issues.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Microsoft offers many partnerships to businesses. These partnership agreements can get you some great discounts on software/support. To become a Microsoft partner you often only need to have staff with Microsoft certifications. The more certificates you have the better your partnership. Microsoft are great to call for support as they have a wealth of knowledge. They may not always be the most helpful, but by logging a ticket to Microsoft you will often get your management temporarily off your back.

SCOM is capable of so much that it can actually be somewhat overwhelming. But if you know how to use it effectively, one of the great things about it is that you can really tailor it to your specific environment and get as much (or as little) alerting as you need.

SCOM also provides for administrative roles and selective alerting, so if you have a team that only monitors a specific subset of servers or a specific application, you can create designated roles for them and give them limited console access for just those resources that they are responsible for.

In my previous position, there was basically no true infrastructure monitoring at all – they were relying on alerts configured per system or device, and consequently there was a lot of firefighting and working reactively to problems that occurred.

My first priority when I started was to implement enterprise monitoring and alerting, and SCOM was approved. Once it was in place and tweaked to that environment, we experienced a lot less firefighting and were able to prioritize issues as they came up. Less late nights, too.

In some ways, SCOM is a double-edged sword. It can do so much, even by default -- monitoring and alerting of everything from Windows servers and applications, to Linux machines, to network devices including routers and switches. However, because of this, you can get overwhelmed fairly quickly, and if left unchecked, you’ll get too many alerts for too many objects. When that happens, your team starts ignoring alerts because they simply can’t get to them all, and that is just as bad as not having any alerting at all.

For SCOM to be really great, I’d love to see Microsoft come up with a quick and simple way to enable common critical monitoring and alerts by default. Then, as you get more familiar with SCOM, you can gradually tweak and enable the more customized and intricate stuff.

I have been using Operations Manager for almost three years. I set up and deployed it (with assistance from a consultant) at my last job, and it was already in limited use at my current position, where I currently administer it.

SCOM can be somewhat tricky to implement.

There have been no issues with the stability.

With SCOM 2012 R2, a single management pool deployment can handle up to 150,000 objects - according to Microsoft.

Tech support and customer service depends on your relationship(s) with Microsoft, but Microsoft support, whether you like it or not, is pretty consistent across the board. If you've dealt with it previously, at least you know what to expect.

I have used and evaluated other enterprise solutions. I will say that, while Microsoft sometimes does things that seem oddly questionable, SCOM truly makes sense once you get familiar with how it works. SCOM uses management packs, which are basically pre-packaged building blocks of rules and monitors, to allow configuration and tweaking of monitoring for each service or application

SCOM can be somewhat tricky to implement, and if you’re implementing more than one System Center module, you definitely need to be careful about the order you deploy them in. However, there is good documentation online from Microsoft and other sources, so take your time and read the documentation completely to avoid having to start all over. I have worked in mainly small to mid-size environments, but scalability, from my understanding, is generally not an issue for SCOM.

In both cases I was involved in, we had a consultant work with the internal team to deploy and configure SCOM. As I mentioned before, implementation can be tricky, and it’s mainly because there are a lot of smaller details to pay attention to (specific user & group creations, proper installation order, etc.). So I would advise bringing in a consultant to do initial deployment if you don’t have the experience in-house.

I don’t know specifics about pricing and licensing, but if you’re familiar with Microsoft, you can get very good deals buying a certain level of licensing and getting System Center thrown in.

SCOM is capable of providing full-featured infrastructure monitoring, alerting and reporting, especially for Windows-centric production environments.

I have heard a lot of people say that to do SCOM right, you really should create a full-time position, or at least a full-time System Center admin who works only on System Center stuff. Because you’re only going to get out of it what you put into it. If you don’t put any time into it, it’s not going to work well for you.

The flexibility which Operations Manager (SCOM) gives to monitor anything in any way is the main valuable feature to me. A big second would be the amount of management packs for Microsoft and other products which can be plugged in and give you a fast start to your monitoring.

In every case so far we managed to move from a slow reactive type of non-monitoring toward a proactive monitoring for different layers within the organization and real insights into their IT environment from different angles. Including helpdesk, system admins, IT management, company management, departmental staff and managers. Creating good dashboards makes the monitoring come more alive as well and move it over and above a long list of mixed alerts.

Areas for improvement in my opinion are the resource footprint of the SCOM infrastructure side, the web console (drop Silverlight please!) and a few of the management packs.

I have been using MOM and SCOM since the year 2002.

During the years we did see deployment issues. Often related to people not reading the documentation and not installing the prerequisites correctly (for instance SQL). In some cases it was related to in-place upgrades between major versions, which we have been warning against for years in the community. And one of the previous versions had some bugs in the command-based setup version in not accepting one of the setup parameters correctly (which the setup wizard did do correctly).

The stability of the product is fine as long as the scaling is done right according to the types and amounts of monitored objects. There are calculation models for it, but experience in designing SCOM implementations helps a lot with that.

We did encounter scalability issues when monitoring a large amount of network devices which turned out to have more monitored objects than expected (for instance a switch stack which is seen as one switch but turns out to have a few more ports and interfaces than a simple switch). In such cases a scale out or a second management group might provide what is needed.

SCOM is part of the System Center Suite and part of the datacenter management solutions provided by Microsoft. The amount of customer service depends on the amount of licenses and software assurance for instance you aquire.

Technical suport is given by Microsoft for their products through the usual channels. Next to that there are the Technet Forums where also a lot of community members answer questions. There are a lot of blogs run by community members and community leaders and MVP's which provide a lot of information.

Yes we used several products and also customers we are new to have existing solutions. Often a whole lot of them. The reason for switching is always to try to get as much as possible monitoring and dashboarding and reporting and alerting and therefore insights into as few products as possible. This is one of the reasons we standardize to SCOM.

The initial setup is very simple if you follow the documentation, best practices setup guides and use the sizing calculation models. Install the prerequisites right the first time and the rest flows from there.

We are a consultancy for the System Center products and I specialize in SCOM. I usually work with one or more people at a customer to get the basics done and installed and next work with the rest of the organization to make it friendly and accessible for all.

I think this depends on the organization and their wishes. In general a lot of organizations of a certain size already have the System Center licenses. The ROI comes from reacting more proactively to upcoming disruptions, current disruptions (and being able to inform users calling helpdesk) and being in control.

SCOM comes as part of the System Center stack. So if you buy one product you will have them all. Some organizations already have the licenses needed. Some have special pricing (education organizations for instance).

Yes other products are in evaluation. There are several big monitoring products which have been around for years and years. And there are niche players for monitoring specific parts of the infrastructure. With those last you may get deeper insights into one aspect, but lose the ability to add it all together.

I do like this product a lot and have followed its advances since the MOM2000 version and continue to do so toward the 2016 version and beyond. One thing to notice lately is there are more possibilities when combined with Microsofts OMS solution in a hybrid scenario to get even more value out of both products.

Deep integration with Windows provides in-depth monitoring and the management packs model ensures that products in the environment are supported or will be supported.

Proactive monitoring has helped us prepare and mitigate potential issues before they even happen. This comes in the monitoring of general server health and custom alerts for event log entries that are known indicators of potential issues.

GUI performance is the one aspect where I can see that improvement on it will make customers happy.

3rd Party Plugins for SCOM are also great, but some of them are quite expensive to implement due to the depth of function they provide. Maybe Microsoft should integrate the basic functionalities of some of them.

I've used it for two years.

The deployment of SCOM is pretty straightforward. You just need to make sure that the pre-requisites have been installed correctly and then SCOM itself should be a breeze to install.

Stability is subjective and based from experience. It is directly affected by the server hardware where SCOM is installed.

No. SCOM is scalable as you can add Management Servers as needed. You can also add more resources to the host server and it will not cause issues in SCOM.

For enterprise customers, Microsoft is one of the best providers of customer service. The system in place for the customer service ensures that customers will get the value they have paid for.

As with the Customer Service, the technical support of Microsoft is very good since they are the ones who develop the product itself. It follows a process where you will be first served by level 1 support but they will escalate to the product team as need to ensure the issue is resolved.

Free tools found online are good but require a lot of knowledge in scripting. The SCOM Management Packs takes in the lead in this space.

It was straightforward. You just follow the setup guide provided but just need to make sure the pre-requisites are installed properly.

I have experienced both as part of in-house team and also as part of the vendor team. The vendor was experienced in the deployment and management of SCOM and have been since the early versions of it.

We did not calculate the ROI as our SLA is internal only. However, the fact that we can proactively monitor issues that may cause downtime is a statement of the benefit of SCOM.

Please contact your Microsoft Account Manager regarding this. It is different for each customer and for each country. The System Center licensing has different criteria and you should get the most applicable for your environment.

We have evaluated some of the "free" monitoring solutions. Some are easy to use while others are a bit complicated. We implemented SCOM because not only it was included in our System Center License, its usage was also straightforward.

SCOM can monitor a whole lot of products, not just generic server components. Make sure that you contact the product vendor and ask if they have Management Packs for SCOM.

We used SCOM for monitoring the health of the servers. The SCOM agent was very reliable in our environment and used to trigger alerts immediately, which helped us to take care of the servers without any critical impact to the client.

SCOM has helped us to reduce the time taken to address the issue and identify the false alerts triggered in an efficient manner. It's a reliable tool when it comes to monitoring and can be implemented in an environment which hosts critical information and has high revenue for the organization.

I feel that the stability of the tool has room for improvement and I would like to see that in the next version.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There have been issues with instability.

It has scaled for our needs.

SCOM is one of the most commonly used monitoring software used for large scale enterprise level. Being a Microsoft product, the Management Packs available are very useful for extensive monitoring of various Microsoft products such as Windows Server OS, Hyper-V, SCCM, SharePoint, Exchange, etc.

It has always helped to streamline our monitoring in various areas and helped to provide good reports to various in-house teams as well as provide alerting for the whole of our data center.

SCOM can move on to provide more on Cloud, Big Data, container and docks monitoring. Also, APM monitoring is really lacking in SCOM and they really need to look into this to keep up their strength in the IT market.

I've used it for four years.

A few glitches since the SCOM installation requires a good requirement analysis first before deployment. Eg : Creating service accounts in Active Directory and permissions as well sizing up how many Management Servers you will need and other factors like resource pooling.

SCOM is always known to be very unstable when it comes to SCOM Agents which are installed locally on all the servers.

SCOM is well known for scalability so I've never faced any issue in this portion. You can add any Management Server to the existing SCOM infrastructure anytime with little down time though.

I would give MS customer service 8/10.

I just had two experience making call to the MS customer service for raising issue to the Support Team.

I would give MS SCOM Support: 8/10

The level of technical support really varies from person to person. In one of my issues I did receive a very technically strong support engineer, in other case it was totally opposite.

I had a deployment with Solarwinds SAM which is very cheap product compared to SCOM, and almost gets the work done as SCOM if you are looking for basic monitoring and not much of customization and production environment is from small to medium.

The initial setup is not very straightforward and requires good preparation work to be done before you can install and make SCOM up and running.

It was an in-house implementation. If we do go through vendor it sholud not take more than 5 days to make SCOM up and running well with the baseline from Microsoft.

ROI turned out to be pretty good since we had good centralized monitoring for our whole data center and all the outages were quickly escalated from the Command center to the relevant Team.

BMC BPPM, HP OVO , IBM Tivoli.