Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) vs. Sentry

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

Great for standard web application performance monitoring, analytics and error reporting. Shows line level code errors, gives insight into performance issues (plugins, API issues, etc.). Automation and scheduled scanning in production gives client visibility into 'after deployment' value. Also lets a relatively small number of developers keep tabs on a handful of different site/applications without needing a bunch of tools. The UI is pretty complicated and can be overwhelming for new users. Documentation could be better for the learning curve,

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

• Great web interface. Lots of data available in a really clean format, with filtering options and more.
• Per-user exception tracking. User is complaining about something being broken? Look up their account ID in Sentry and you can see if they've run into any exceptions (with device information included, of course).
• Source map uploading. Took a little while to figure this out but now we have our deploy script upload sourcemaps to Sentry on each deployment, meaning we get to see stack traces that aren't obfuscated!
• Very generous free tier – 10,000 events per month. We're nowhere near that yet.

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

• Alert Configuration. Would be really helpful to have multiple logical groupings within the "If" section of a single configurable alert.
• Alert Copying. Being able to copy an alert from one project to another would be super beneficial.
• Alert Tags. Better UI around how we select which tags are getting sent with each alert instead of a tiny text box.

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 used Rollbar but didn't like the configuration its not easy. And also doesn't support wide features like Sentry although its a cheaper option but doesn't have the dash-boarding like Sentry and its was not easy to integrate webhooks for different purposes. Somehow many people in company where not able to understand Rollbar dashboard who were very much used to Sentry.

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

• It helped stabilize our system in the beginning
• We had to take it down later due to internal reasons and majorly because of cost-cutting process
• If someone has a unstable system and have no way to figure out what to do, can use sentry at least temporarily along with some other APM to fix their system faster

Incentivized