Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is being used for our office automation department that manages not all, but many user-related services and servers. To be able to manage efficiently and monitor the landscape of servers, System Center Operations Manager is used and has been for a couple of years now. It is a big product so it mainly makes sense if you have quite a few servers and/or services to monitor.

It is used by IT infrastructure team to monitor server infrastructure including private cloud and server environment. Around 150 virtual server running on Hyper-V cloud as well as Virtual servers running on VMware VSAN . O.s includes most of Microsoft but some are Linux . We rely on SCOM for monitoring our server environment completely . Email alerts are configured for service owners and infrastructure team . Dashboard for mission critical servers for NOC team . And team wise dashboards .

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.

SCOM is currently being used to manage and monitor Microsoft Windows, Linux/UNIX, and iSeries environments. It is currently used by the Infrastructure team to gain visibility over CPU, disk, network reach-ability. It is the de-facto monitoring system for the enterprise.

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.