Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) vs. Nagios XI

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

Nagios is best suited in an large organization where it is production 24/7, but in SME (small/medium enterprise) you have to pay a lot to the administrator. Instead use some graphical and easy to use tool like IDERA.

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

• 3rd party integrations via open API.
• Extremely flexible and configurable long term storage of the very detailed performance information (years of per 1-5 min perf data numbers).
• Small Nagios XI footprint (very efficient MySQL DB and flat files for perf data), making it powerful tool for thousands of checks and hundreds of reports.
• Responsive support, willing to provide resolution outside the box and by various means possible.

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• The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.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

• The mobile interface is newly developed and needs more development. It should provide more options for the audit log and add more detail for the configuration rollback options.
• The scheduled report should be included in standard edition.
• Master Node is configurable on LINUX platform only. We had to hire a Linux administrator

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

Only because I never give out 10s. Nagios support goes above and beyond in helping with issues, workarounds, specific cases and requirements. Tracks customer implementation and history of the most important issues. Can’t complain (except that the team is small and quite probably overworked). Time to resolution could be much improved if only there were more folks to help around.

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

Cost efficiency is the main reason which we opted [for] Nagios as we were previously using IDERA tool with comprehensive database monitoring solutions, but the slow performance we are getting while monitoring the instance of the database.

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

• Reduction of at least 10% of false alarms.
• Increased network traffic by 5%.

Incentivized