Datadog vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.

Incentivized

Well suited for IT Departments that can budget the funds and time needed for setup and maintenance of SCOM. The end product is well suited for medium to large environments that have 100's of resources that require monitoring and reporting. Enterprise level statistics are at your fingertips with a few clicks of a mouse after the product has been configured and agents have been deployed. As I said previously, we are a small business and I was fortunate enough to be able to budget this product into our environment. It did take us a while to configure and fully deploy, but as a result, we are well-informed and are able to extract detailed information as it pertains to usage/consumption of our workstation and server resources to include performance metrics and any errors that may arise.

Incentivized

• Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
• Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
• Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
• DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
• Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.

Incentivized

• SCOM can manage Windows OS systems from desktops to servers very well.
• SCOM is platform agnostic in that we manage physical and virtual machines with no differentiation.
• SCOM can quickly deploy emergency security patches and the best part is it can provide detailed results of success and failure rate of patch deployment.

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• It is a monster of a system and really needs a person managing the system full time
• Options are a bit clunky especially when you need to set overrides.
• Takes a lot of time and effort to setup alerts as you want them, don't rely on the out of the box options you need to invest time into the system to get what you want out of it.
• Make sure you size the underlying database server/s correctly (Microsoft provide a tool to calculate based on number of objects you plan to collect data on), it is a datawarehouse underneath after all.

Incentivized

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.

Incentivized

Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.

Incentivized

Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard

Incentivized

The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.

Incentivized

Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.

Incentivized

Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth

Incentivized

I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.

Incentivized

SolarWinds stacks well on the ease of use with an easily installable version and highly modular (products can be added to the basic installation and are easily managed from a single endpoint. System Center Operations Manager was selected because the majority of the environment is based on Windows products and it was part of the licensing agreement. It offered an easy way to consolidate the monitoring tools to provide a single point of management.

Incentivized

• Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
• Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
• Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.

Incentivized

• Since we are at the tail end of our POC, we have no immediate ROI to report.
• That said, during the POC, we immediately identified several issues within TFS that we immediately addressed and will potentially save us hours of lost time and troubleshooting.

Incentivized