Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) vs. Reliability Toolkit

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

• 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

• 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

Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard

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

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

• 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