Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Here System Center Operations Manager is being used across multiple departments.

System Center Operations Manager is a highly versatile and efficient monitoring tool which we are using to perform monitoring of our various servers and datacenter equivalent. We also generate performance analysis using System Center Operations Manager so we can predict when a certain resource will be exhausted and in this way we can plan for it accordingly.

The most amazing thing about System Center Operations Manager is that it is highly integrable with any other vendor hardware and software through what are called management packs. Using these management packs, which are readily available, one can monitor a large amount of hardware without worrying about the underlying vendor.

The second most amazing thing is that System Center Operations Manager alerts are highly customizable based on specific needs and requirements. We can granularly configure the alerts based on a wide variety of criteria and even create our own custom criteria, too. We can then create specific groups to forward the alerts to the relevant team so they can see it and take appropriate action promptly.

SCOM helps us in many ways. According to the software and application that our institute needs, this helps you to check and monitor and give proper support to the dedicated application or software.

We installed and configured Microsoft System Center Operations Manager back in 2013 and have been using it ever since. We purchased both Microsoft SCCM and SCOM. Both take time to set up and configure properly for your individual environments. We are a small business with approximately 170 workstations and around 17 servers, so both products are a bit overkill for us, but it is really nice to have the technology that the big guys use and take advantage of all the power they provide to our IT Department. We use SCOM primarily as a watchdog to monitor servers and workstations and keep us abreast on how they are performing. It monitors processor and memory usage as well as hard drive storage consumption. It also lets us know if a server goes off-line and send us an email so we can attend to the issue proactively.

Our company just finished up a proof of concept of Systems Center Operations Manager. We are going to adopt SCOM for monitoring the health of our Team Foundation Servers and SQL Servers. We decided to take a look at SCOM due to some issues we had with our TFS Servers which resulted in severe latency throughout the system. We realized that we needed to get a better handle on monitoring the system health. Our goal is to have a holistic view of the system, to be able to predict and correct issues before they happen, or at the early warning signs of degradation. We need to be able to capture various performance metrics and retain a history to establish the baselines of what healthy looks like and understand when and why the system trends away from that healthy baseline. Keeping our development shops running at their top pace is vital to our business. TFS and SQL are the lifeblood of our SDLC, therefore the development teams efficiency rely on these systems. Long term goal is to roll out SCOM to other areas of the organization.

We currently use SCOM within the IT Department to provide Event Alert Management across our whole server estate. Each sub team will have there own alerts and for me particularly as the DBA team we have the SQL packs installed to provide additional information about the Instances on servers. From my point of view we use this system primarily for Alert Management. We have it set up to send an email warnings when disk space is low and if an instance is offline and also for performance metrics that might need further investigation (such as high wait times).

System Center Operations Manager is being used to monitor our Microsoft Windows, VMWare, HP hardware, and critical application environments. We have been successful in monitoring in-house applications as well products we have purchased through native, purchased, free (community) and in-house developed management packs. It is being used primarily by our IT organization, but we also have some people outside of IT that use System Center Operations Manager. We have used System Center Operations Manager to increase the stability and reliability of our IT organization as well as automatically correct issues it discovers.