Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.
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Watchman Monitoring
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Watchman Monitoring is a read-only IT Alerting, hardware monitoring, & high-availability beacon reporting SaaS designed for resale by IT professionals looking to provide proactive support to their offerings. The Watchman Monitoring Client has a single focus: to detect and report issues.
If you are in IT consulting or manage any fleet of computers, both Mac and PC (and yes Linux) - you should have this installed. It will be able to provide you the information needed to repair computers and avoid productivity loss by users.
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The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.
Would like to see non-computer deployment agent - such as Synology.
Since it's mainly reporting, this isn't necessary improvement, but it would be good if it can receive data - so in case we can't ping a machine, maybe use Watchman as a backdoor - but that would go against it's main principles.
We are very pleased with the support provided by the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager team. At first, we were quite hesitant to contact support, but the support team showed a very proactive approach and helped with a bunch of issues which would be much harder to overcome on our own, especially when deploying the platform for the first time.
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.
I've been using it since the day it came out - there have so many times where a machine has had an error reported by Watchman that we've been able to save the client before something terrible happened.
The ROI is there - you can easily resell this product to your clients, or wrap it into your product offering.
