Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) vs. OpenText Business Process Monitor

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

It is really good to have Business Process Monitor for being proactive with monitoring critical business services. And it is even more recommended along with APM. However, you will still need some training in order to configure them as they are sophisticated tools.

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

• Being proactive in monitoring critical business services.
• Uses pre-saved scripts using Vugen.
• Almost all protocols are supported by it.

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• The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.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 depends heavily on Vugen so it would be great to give more courses on writing scripts in the Business Process Monitor trainings.
• When issues arise, we don't have insights into if the issue is from the script itself or if it is a real issue. Here you lose trust in determining which is right until you interfere personally. As an example, one day I got an alert from a business server and the issue was that the script didn't finish successfully and thus it kept the session opened. So the next schedule of the script will fail, not because there is a real issue on the business service, but because you need to go yourself open the application, close all pages, then log out so that the script will continue to monitor.

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

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 didn't try anything else as we are satisfied with Business Process Monitor.

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

• Proactive.
• Monitors critical services by simulating every step you could use and get alerts for performance issues and availability issues.
• Has almost all the needed protocols to write a script.

Incentivized