Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) vs. AlertSite

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

AlertSite is used in our organization to monitor our website and web applications in real-time to collect the super important metrics reflecting web page load time but from the user end (E2E) and that approaches helps us to understand what our website is experiencing in real-time.

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

• The Deja-Click Recorder is an excellent tool.
• Good UI that translates to large NOC screens well.
• Easy Alerting and Reporting.

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• The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.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

• Tool is complicated for Alert creation
• AlertSite GUI need improvement. As compared to Datadog, it needs improvement in GUI
• While using AlertSite, many times we faced false alerting, they need to take a look at it to improve performance.

Incentivized

Reviewing other cost saving options

Incentivized

Pretty good product only issue was cost

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

I've been unable to contact support after several attempts.

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 moved all of our services to Site24x7 after several years with AlertSite. We looked at Uptrends and Pingdom to name a few whilst evaluating options. Pingdom lacks functionality and Uptrends we found to have quite a steep learning curve. AlertSites platform and in particular the Deja-Click recorder is a standout tool against the other platforms. Sadly the upscaling costs of multi-location transactions can quickly add up.

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

• A negative thing is Monitoring locations would have issues and cause false-positive alerts and due to that monitoring team's repetitive work has increased.
• A positive thing that I have noticed so far is the fact that the AlertSite customers support team is trying to build relationships and go the extra mile to make sure we can overcome any occurring issues and they are quick to respond and provide sufficient guidance for implementing efficiently, and fix products issues.

Incentivized