IT-Conductor vs. Microsoft System Center vs. ScienceLogic AI Platform

For companies with more than 10 Windows devices and needing to standardize the OS, AV, access, share resources, and install software. SCCM is the way to go. This software is unnecessary if the business is all remote users and not in an office-type setting. There are cloud offerings or none to accomplish what a business needs.

Incentivized

For Windows, the issue is in higher resource consumption related to WinRM monitoring, which provides better options then the SNMP monitoring, which on the other hand is less resource intensive. The problem is also with support for OS with other than English language.

Incentivized

• Allows the grouping of devices by user.
• Allows controlling updates being deployed to user devices.
• Allows for the repurposing of machines by being able to load new or updated software on machines that already are in the system.
• Allows us the ability to wipe a machine clean and restore it back to the configuration that was assigned the machine.

Incentivized

• Best overall coverage of montioring different technologies.
• Easy to use in any environment
• Customizable being able to generate your own reports, dashboards, DA's, RBA's, etc.
• Have very good out of the box integrations with other monitoring solutions such as ServiceNow
• Always improving and regularly releasing new versions and upgrades to the system/DA's.
• Interactive community

Incentivized

• The product could improve in the area of having better mechanisms in place with how the SCEP client is deployed/installed from the server on the management side. We have run into this firsthand with the client not installing on an endpoint, and then having to take the time to investigate why it was not installing.
• A second improvement that can be made is to keep trying to improve the products detection rate for finding malware/viruses. The case can be made that there are some products out there that do a better job at this and have a higher detection rate.

Incentivized

• Dashboards are quite old and are of Iron age. Need to have AP2 dashboards only instead of AP1 and consistent new design across all functionalities.
• Reporting is not improved since Y2020 and need to revamp completely. Need to integrate Dashboards and Reporting. PowerBI Like functionality to be given OOTB. Reports should be extracted in Excel, PDF, HTML and should be heavily automated.
• Create and Open APIs for basic and advanced monitoring data extraction.
• Topology based Event Correlation and Suppression should be improved drastically. Need to identify critical network interfaces based on Topology and monitor them. Basic customization of Dynamic App and/or Powerpack to exclude/include certain metrics/events to be permitted OOTB instead of customizations.
• Integration with ServiceNow to be improved and to be taken to next level. Automation Powerpack should be made available OOTB as part of base product and to be priced attractively.
• Take product to next level where we can monitor actual impacted IT or Business Service instead of metrics and events BSM and Topology map to be auto discovered and identify the network dependencies and alternate paths automatically instead of manual creation of BSM.

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

Incentivized

It is simply because of all the best possible autonomy solutions it is providing and getting better day by day. Using AI and Devops along with handy automation, The monitoring and Management of devices becomes much easier and the way it is growing in all the aspects is one the best reasons too. Evolution of the SL1 platform in the autonomy monitoring and management is quite appreciable.

Incentivized

It is not user-friendly for the most part. With IT infrastructure, sometimes it cannot handle excess requests. Every few months, you will need an upgrade in terms of server resources to keep up with incoming alerts and requests. This does not happen all of the time, but it does happen when there are too many requests.

Incentivized

The core functions are there.
The complexity is due to the complexity of the space.
The score is based on comfort (I no longer notice the legacy UI) and the promise that I see in the 8.12 Unified UI (a vast improvement).
It is also based on the fact that with 8.12, you can now do everything in the new UI but you still have the legacy UI as a fallback (which should now be unnecessary for new installations)

Incentivized

SL is always there and online when you need to get info from it. The only times when SL was not available in our own data center, was when network links from out side of the data center was down and those links were not in our controll. Having a central database and people accessing it all over the world, may put a bit of constarin on the performance of the dashboards when reports gets generated, but that is far and few n between.

Incentivized

SceinceLogic SL1 architecture helps the platform to give a top-notch performance in every respect, Data collection to reporting happens very smoothly. With the new user interface pages load much faster. Individual appliances carrying the individual task ensure things are working without lag. Integration with ticketing tool(SNOW) is well managed by the ScienceLogic, no issue or much delay has been observed while interacting with an external tool.

Incentivized

There is a fair amount of documentation out there to help you when you have questions or run into issues with this product as well as tutorials on some of the more common tasks. Between the documentation and the overall ease of use we haven't had to deal with direct Microsoft support for this product.

Incentivized

So far, it's good as part of my overall experience, except for a couple of use cases. The support team is well knowledgeable, has technical sound, and is efficient. When support escalates to engineering, the issue gets stuck and takes months to resolve.

Incentivized

It was good, Do the online training first and understand it and you will get the most out of the in-person training that way. This also takes you to an advanced level which is very good and the training as been overhauled once again along with new product coming in such as Zebruim / Skylar, worth going through again if it a while back that you first did this.

Incentivized

There are a lot of educational materials and courses on the SL1 training site (Litmos university). However the recording quality is sometimes not very good - screen resolution is low. There is a lack of professional rather than user-oriented documents and there are mistakes in documentation and education is not well structured.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Implementation is smooth if we are to just support the out-of-the-box features available in ScienceLogic. For any custom requirement, having to go to SL1 Professional Services is the worst part of procuring this suite. And more often than not, SL1 Professional Services also ask to raise feature request. So, you subscribe to Professional Services to only hear back from them that "This feature is not supported and needs to have a separate feature request". At times frustrating.

Incentivized

We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows Updates, causing IT to have to constantly touch machines after they were imaged and update or manage them with a much more hands on approach.

Incentivized

Science logic SL1 is so user friendly and it's really easy to navigate between function. I would recommend Sciene logic SL1 to all of them who are looking for really useful monitoring tool and expecting easy way of managing it.

Incentivized

Our deployment model is vastly different from product expectations. Our global / internal monitoring foot print is 8 production stacks in dual data centers with 50% collection capacity allocated to each data center with minimal numbers of collection groups. General Collection is our default collection group. Special Collection is for monitoring our ASA and other hardware that cannot be polled by a large number of IP addresses, so this collection group is usually 2 collectors). Because most of our stacks are in different physical data centers, we cannot use the provided HA solution. We have to use the DR solution (DRBD + CNAMEs). We routinely test power in our data centers (yearly). Because we have to use DR, we have a hand-touch to flip nodes and change the DNS CNAME half of the times when there is an outage (by design). When the outage is planned, we do this ahead of the outage so that we don't care that the Secondary has dropped away from the Primary. Hopefully, we'll be able to find a way to meet our constraints and improve our resiliency and reduce our hand-touch in future releases. For now, this works for us and our complexity. (I hear that the HA option is sweet. I just can't consume that.)

Incentivized

• It has allowed the enterprise to standardize on a single platform for monitoring.
• Easier troubleshooting of issues with Microsoft platforms.
• Greater visibility of issues across platforms when applications are hosted in a mixed environment.
• Additional costs for monitoring systems that are not directly supported with additional packs (iSeries, Linux on Power).

Incentivized

• Once a powerpack is developed and configured for a device for one customer, it is easy to deploy the same powerpack on a second customer estate and configure specifically for that customer without having to reinvent the powerpack. This saves time and therefore money.
• Once the customer estate tuning is complete, the Operations team have come trust the alerts. This is especially true when transient or self-correcting alerts are automatically cleared without ops team involvement, but a record is still available for audit and debugging purposes. This saves time and therefore money.
• When setup correctly, it provides good visibility into applications, devices and whole customer estates. This saves time and therefore money when issues arise.

Incentivized