Best centralized monitoring platform!
Rating: 8 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
In fact, we are developing custom monitoring solutions on the System Center Operations Manager(SCOM) platform for our customers and, of course, we are using it to monitor our IT infrastructure. So my feedback will include both parts. We have many cases, when SCOM helps our enterprise customers to address the following problems:
1. Address Availability and Performance issues of the hardware and software components of IT infrastructure (e.g. Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server)
2. Monitor custom services, created inside organization.
3. Detect IT services outages and quickly resolve it
SCOM is not just a tool - it's IT monitoring platform with great extensibility options and it can solve much more problems with right customization.
Pros
- Microsoft workloads monitoring: SQL Server, Windows Server, Exchange and other Microsoft products.
- Data Visualization. With the custom dashboard capabilities, available in SCOM 2012 we can create advanced UI in SCOM console. One of the best examples there - SQL Server Monitoring Management Pack.
- Extensibility. This is very important feature, which allows end-users to add their custom monitoring scenarios using Powershell.
Cons
- Network monitoring. That is definitely not the strongest area of SCOM. Major competitors already doing it much better
- Performance and resource usage. First-time users can be very confused by the latency and resource consumption by console and server components
- New features. Last years SCOM couldn't demonstrate enough new features in new releases. I wish it has more.
Likelihood to Recommend
Of course SCOM works better, if your IT infrastructure is mostly Windows-based. As I mentioned before, most popular Microsoft workloads, such as Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange are perfectly covered. At the same time, you have to check, what part of your IT components has SCOM Management Packs out of the box. For example, HP and Dell provide SCOM integration for their servers.
RY
Roman Yuferev
Practice Leader in Engineering at VIAcode (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
7 years of experience