AppFog (discontinued) vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) vs. Virtana Platform

It was very good to use in small scale projects. Considering the high end projects with many instances and multi-platform architectures, it is better to test before the application is deployed. I think few of the questions can be general - who are the system users and what size is the application focussing on? How much resources are required? Will the application require any additional services?

Incentivized

More appropriate for:

• Pure Microsoft ecosystem environments (Windows Server and SQL server) and the most common Linux and UNIX platforms.
• Environments where cost is less of a factor than settling on a single platform for monitoring
• Environments where the administrators are familiar with the setup and installation of SCOM.

Less appropriate for:

• Pure UNIX/Linux shops, especially versions not supported out of the box by SCOM.
• Shops that cannot afford the engagement to setup/configure and maintain on a continuous basis.
• Shops that cannot dedicate personnel to the care and feeding of SCOM, especially when supporting larger environments.

Incentivized

Overall I would say that we have been very happy with Zenoss. It has been a great server monitoring tool. There are certain aspects that we would like to expand into, such as Capacity Planning, Network Performance Monitoring, and log analysis. We have coupled Zenoss logs with Splunk for external log management, but would like to start using some of the built-in analysis tools.

• Quick deployment of pre-built virtual machines
• Some of the virtual machines also are readily available with a pack of softwares
• Good Stability. Using it as a student, I have never experienced any downtime issues with the projects deployed on AppFog.

Incentivized

• Allows us to visualize our systems in a single interface and see the status of health as well as relevant performance metrics.
• A flexible and powerful interface with active alerting covering domain controllers, SQL servers, etc...
• Allows you to customize your views and workspaces for specific tasks and needs.
• Reporting is powerful and flexible.

Incentivized

• Monitoring Windows, Unix/Linux, Infra apps, storage, virtualization, converge infra etc..
• Integrate with other monitoring tools and receive events for aggregation and correlation
• Integration with ITSM( SNOW) for auto ticket creation

Incentivized

• Though it is good and easy for developers, it lacks operational activities and monitoring tools.
• It is easy to deploy WAR on AppFog with its console but sometimes it can lack on the performance and feasibility.

Incentivized

• One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required.
• SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained.
• The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.

Incentivized

• It can be tricky to set-up depending on what you want to do.
• They have their own proprietary way of visualizing metrics, which is clever but does have a slight learning curve.

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

Anytime we've had issues they have been very responsive and professional.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Primarily because it used to have a good free tier earlier, which it does not anymore. It's simple, and things are available to use. Compared to it's competitors, it does has less features, but that kind of acts in its favor. That adds to the simplicity, and ease of use for a new user.

Incentivized

We used Altiris and WSUS and in the beginning Altiris had the better admin interface than SCOM, but it is no longer the case as SCOM has refined their admin interface. Altiris still has better and more robust group assignments for management roles and those two other tools can better manage non Windows OS devices than SCOM but for a large enterprise Windows shop, if you can afford it, SCOM is the way to go.

Incentivized

We strongly prefer Metricly for AWS Cost Analysis -- whereas other tools are easier to use on a traditional monitoring basis. To be clear, Merticly's monitoring tools are GREAT, but they require tuning and manual setup that we didn't have the time for on a small Platform Operations team. We have worked closely with Metricly to expand on their cost analysis capabilities, and plan to use them going forward.

Incentivized

• Our project was deployed with good efficiency and easily accessible.
• The platform was much recommeded across the groups and peers.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to provide an Enterprise Event/Alert management solution to the Global company
• It has taken a long time to get it to provide valuable alerts and information, lots of user resources and investment.
• It assists with 24/7 monitoring and out of hours support

Incentivized

• We're a reseller/Integrator, so this question has a somewhat different meaning to our business. For us, Zenoss Cloud allows us to provide a single Cloud-based monitoring platform that can address virtually all our clients' use cases, dramatically simplifying our training and staffing requirements. Instead of training Engineers on several platforms, including the installation of physical hardware/software, we can focus on a single platform.
• The faster time-to-deployment and always-on cloud platform is a great fit for DevOps environments and newer software-defined data center platforms. The ability of Zenoss to support these environments solves what has been a major blind spot, slowing adoption of platforms that have been difficult to effectively manage with legacy monitoring platforms.
• For clients, the ability to consolidate from multiple prem-based tools to a single cloud-based platform is huge. Eliminating multiple licenses and ongoing hardware & administration costs can show a 1-2 year ROI.