TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Microsoft System Center vs. SolarWinds Pingdom vs. VMware vCenter

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Microsoft System Center

    Score8.4 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft System Center is an enterprise-grade IT Operations Management (ITOM) suite designed for the centralized administration of data center infrastructure, virtualized environments, and hybrid cloud workloads. The platform provides unified management across heterogeneous environments, including support for Windows Server, Linux, and Azure Stack HCI. System Center is Microsoft's ITOM stack for organizations that maintain a significant on-premise footprint, vs the company's Azure-based…

    $1,323

    per month

    SolarWinds Pingdom

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.

    $14.95

    per month

    VMware vCenter

    Score8.4 out of 10
    N/AVMware vCenter is an advanced server management software that provides a centralized platform for controlling vSphere environments for visibility across hybrid clouds. VMware vCenter is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.

    $6,044

    per year

    Pricing
    Microsoft System CenterSolarWinds PingdomVMware vCenter
    Editions & Modules
    Standard Edition
    $1323
    Datacenter Edition
    $3607
    Synthetic Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Real User Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Enterprise
    Custom Pricing
    Basic
    6,044
    per year
    Production
    6,244
    per year
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Microsoft System CenterSolarWinds PingdomVMware vCenter
    Free Trial
    NoYesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details———
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    Microsoft System CenterSolarWinds PingdomVMware vCenter
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    cPanel
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)
    Score8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Microsoft System CenterSolarWinds PingdomVMware vCenter
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.3
    (58 ratings)
    4.5
    (64 ratings)
    8.3
    (55 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    8.4
    (5 ratings)
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    7.8
    (7 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (14 ratings)
    4.1
    (54 ratings)
    9.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Microsoft System CenterSolarWinds PingdomVMware vCenter
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Microsoft
    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
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    The VMware vCenter server is very useful in maintaining the CPU/RAM/datastore resources are balanced when there are multiple ESX/ESXi host servers. It is clear what resources are being used, and it is easy to migrate VMs to different ESX/ESXi hosts. Being able to remotely connect to the VM servers in vCenter when you cannot have other remote connections helps in maintenance and troubleshooting.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Microsoft
    • 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
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
    • The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
    • Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    • VSAN storage management and redundancy - high performance IO with built in fault tolerance across the cluster, not reliant on a single hardware item
    • VM fault tolerance. The ability to relocate a running VM and restart VMs from failed or isolated nodes
    • Resource management and alerting. Tracking load across physical systems and allowing us to rebalance for better utilisation
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Microsoft
    • 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
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    • Currently, the HTML 5-based vSphere Client lets you manage the essential functions of vSphere from any browser, however, it would be nice if they would port all management functions over to the HTML 5-based Client.
    • Performing updates and upgrades to the infrastructure is a bit challenging for someone that may not be as intimate with vSphere. I think the updates/upgrades should be more integrated into the UI and provide the ability to push to the hosts, etc...
    • It would also be nice to have a more robust snapshot management tool to prevent snapshot overgrowth. It would be nice to be able to set a lifespan for the snapshot(s)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Microsoft
    Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    We are very dependent on this software, it has become a much needed tool to perform the daily tasks that are required to maintain the virtual server environment. VMware has become very pricey over the years, so we are looking for alternatives for cost savings strategy, but nothing has been found to be on par to what we are currently using
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Microsoft
    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
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    I work with vCenter for 10+ years and i love it. I can find my way around and can help building and expanding the platform. It is easy to use and there are a lot good communities for the extra support when needed. Even the Homelab community is of great value.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Microsoft
    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
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    VMware support has always been fantastic and they have been invaluable in solving tougher issues that have been run into. Most of the time, any oddities encountered are fixed by available updates. This can be deduced by support quickly with logs within vCenter. We have not run into something yet that support was unable to help with. They either have a solution already, or they are able to find one quickly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Microsoft
    Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    Since moving away from the Windows Server hosting the vCenter application and instead using a virtual appliance, it has become much easier to implement and deploy the new versions. We can easily create a snapshot or clone of the vCenter vApp to ensure any problems encountered during the upgrade can be mitigated with a fall back to the old version to prevent unscheduled downtime.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Microsoft
    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
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
    2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    Citrix Xen Server.... Great Hypervisor but very limited in terms of functionality
    MS Hyper-V... [VMware vCenter Server] is better for almost everything and appliance form makes a clear winner for security and ease of deployment
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Microsoft
    • 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
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
    • In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
    • Its time to explore other alternatives.
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    • The positive impact of vcenter is definitely felt in larger organisations in terms of being able to manage multiple servers all in one environment
    • It will decrease the amount of time your server engineers will have to spend in the server room or datacenter.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds Pingdom Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot