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Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Overview

What is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?

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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Learn from top reviewers

SCOM- The monitoring OG

Rating: 8 out of 10
December 30, 2023
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We use SCOM to provide enhanced monitoring to our customer's Windows servers as a managed hosting service. Proactive monitoring is the biggest business problem that SCOM addre...
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Amit Sanwal
Engineer - Information Technology
Infrastructure Engineer
Rackspace
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)8 years of experience

Microsoft's monitoring solution--the best but still getting better

Rating: 9 out of 10
May 7, 2021
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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...
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Uzair Ali Khan
Administrator - Information Technology
Senior Systems Engineer
Pakistan Petroleum Limited
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)5 years of experience

SCOM to manager all your systems

Rating: 8 out of 10
October 23, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
We are using Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager in our organisation mainly for event management and monitoring. We are able to integrated Operations Manager with mult...
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Muhammad Mulla
Engineer - Information Technology
Systems Administrator, Core Infrastructure & Microsoft Systems
Cancer Research UK
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)3 years of experience

SCCM offers good value for all the functionality

Rating: 8 out of 10
October 18, 2019
IncentivizedVetted Review
We use SCCM for deploying all of our end user laptop\desktops. It is used across our entire organization.
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Ted Cook
Executive - Information Technology
IT director\System Administrator
T3kOPS
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)5 years of experience

Microsoft Systems Center Operation Manager, pricey & powerful

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 18, 2019
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 tim...
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Joe Spradlin
Director - Information Technology
Director Of Information Technology
Fort Walton Machining, Inc.
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)7 years of experience
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Awards

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Pricing

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Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

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What is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?

Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

Integrate HPE OneView with Microsoft SCOM-Demo#13

YouTube

UCS Management Pack for Microsoft SCOM

YouTube
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Features

Application Performance Management

Application performance management software monitors software to ensure performance and availability

6.1
Avg 7.7
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Product Details

What is Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)?

Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option. It supports both datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring, and can recommend possible root causes or corrective actions when impactful thresholds are crossed on the monitored environment. SCOM also features adjustable thresholds for alerts, as well as a variety of prebuilt monitoring integrators with additional third-party integrators available.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a monitoring and application performance management option, with the core datacenter and cloud-based systems monitoring.

Reviewers rate Threshold alerts and Server availability and performance monitoring highest, with a score of 10.

The most common users of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

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(1-5 of 20)

Best centralized monitoring platform!

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
October 30, 2015
RY
Roman Yuferev
Practice Leader
VIAcode (Internet, 51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
7 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
In fact, we are developing custom monitoring solutions on the System Center Operations Manager(SCOM) platform for our customers and, of course, we are using it to monitor our IT infrastructure. So my feedback will include both parts. We have many cases, when SCOM helps our enterprise customers to address the following problems: 1. Address Availability and Performance issues of the hardware and software components of IT infrastructure (e.g. Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server) 2. Monitor custom services, created inside organization. 3. Detect IT services outages and quickly resolve it SCOM is not just a tool - it's IT monitoring platform with great extensibility options and it can solve much more problems with right customization.
Pros
  • Microsoft workloads monitoring: SQL Server, Windows Server, Exchange and other Microsoft products.
  • Data Visualization. With the custom dashboard capabilities, available in SCOM 2012 we can create advanced UI in SCOM console. One of the best examples there - SQL Server Monitoring Management Pack.
  • Extensibility. This is very important feature, which allows end-users to add their custom monitoring scenarios using Powershell.
Cons
  • Network monitoring. That is definitely not the strongest area of SCOM. Major competitors already doing it much better
  • Performance and resource usage. First-time users can be very confused by the latency and resource consumption by console and server components
  • New features. Last years SCOM couldn't demonstrate enough new features in new releases. I wish it has more.
Likelihood to Recommend
Of course SCOM works better, if your IT infrastructure is mostly Windows-based. As I mentioned before, most popular Microsoft workloads, such as Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange are perfectly covered. At the same time, you have to check, what part of your IT components has SCOM Management Packs out of the box. For example, HP and Dell provide SCOM integration for their servers.

SCOM - Bigger than the sum of its parts

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
February 25, 2016
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Legal Services Company, 1001-5000 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
2 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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).
Pros
  • Centralised Reporting of Alerts/Warnings/Performance metrics - good when trying to provide an enterprise solution that all teams can use.
  • Management packs can be installed for other products e.g. SQL Server and I believe some third party applications
  • Can setup thresholds for alerts so you receive a warning before you receive a critical alert so you have time to avoid a system outage/issue
  • Alerts can be sent via email or can use text service and we hook that into an automated phone system that will contact out of hours support and read the message for critical alerts.
  • Can customise dashboards - we paid for consultancy to create a RAG (Red amber Green) dashboard for our 3 SQL environments (DEV/PROD/DR) for a quick one stop heads up for any issues.
Cons
  • It is a monster of a system and really needs a person managing the system full time
  • Options are a bit clunky especially when you need to set overrides.
  • Takes a lot of time and effort to setup alerts as you want them, don't rely on the out of the box options you need to invest time into the system to get what you want out of it.
  • Make sure you size the underlying database server/s correctly (Microsoft provide a tool to calculate based on number of objects you plan to collect data on), it is a datawarehouse underneath after all.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is great for alert/event management but requires a lot of time invested into setting it up correctly. But is a very powerful tool. Performance monitoring is less suited and more difficult to get anything out so we use it alongside other tools. But you can always push any alerts from other tools to system logs and get SCOM to pull them and alert.

SCOM a good but dying product.

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized
March 13, 2020
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology
Transportation/Trucking/Railroad Company, 10,001+ employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
3 years of experience
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
SCOM is used to monitor all our Windows servers and their services. Those include:

- AD
- SQL
- Exchange
- Azure
- Lync
- Office 365
- Windows 10
- Windows File Services
- Windows IIS
- Windows Servers
- DNS

It is currently critical to our Windows monitoring throughout the company. The fact that the SCOM licenses are included with SCCM licenses is a plus for us.
Pros
  • Windows Server monitoring
  • SQL
  • AD
Cons
  • Not much development. Seems like MS is not developing it anymore.
  • Not so good with Linux.
  • Hard to use with Azure.
Likelihood to Recommend
- Good to monitor Windows-based services.
- Hard to work with cloud-based monitoring.
- Not much application monitoring.

Great monitoring extension for your System Center

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
February 01, 2018
AP
Andrey Perepelitsyn
Microsoft SQL Server DBA
DBI (Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
1 year of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
System Center Operations Manager is used across IT departments of our organization. It provides monitoring capabilities for our on-premise infrastructure and part of Azure-based VMs across the VPN gateway. SCOM helps us to monitor our hosts 24*7 and address issues immediately when an alert is triggered. Flexible configuration of SCOM allows us to set different threshold for alert in prod and non-prod environments
Pros
  • Windows Server monitoring
  • SQL Server monitoring
  • Integration with Operation Management Suite
Cons
  • Linux monitoring could be better
  • Possibility for agentless monitoring could be helpful in some cases, but it has a lot of limitation in SCOM
Likelihood to Recommend
Works best with on-premise Windows Server monitoring, it is able to capture all possible windows logs and performance counters to track and analyze performance and send alerts when metrics are exceeding thresholds. Even after an incident was resolved you can see the condition of the server before it to analyze what caused the incident and how to avoid it in future.

System Center Operation Manager in a Medium Sized Company, a review

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
August 18, 2017
FV
Fabrizio Volpe
Senior Consultant
Unify Square (Computer Software, 201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
2 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
This is a System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2012 deployment used to monitor and support a four nodes Hyper-V cluster (Windows Server 2012 R2). The company uses it in conjunction with other System Center products, like Data Protection Manager and Virtual Machine Manager. All the production servers are virtual and running on the above solution (last count was over 100 virtual machines). SCOM is not in use for the management of workstations or clients.
Pros
  • SCOM does excellent work in monitoring Microsoft Operating Systems and back-end solutions like Exchange and SQL Server. The information gathered is useful and the (free) management packs add in-depth counters and monitoring data.
  • Agent deployment and updating, that with other solutions can be a complex task, is usually easy to perform. Also for endpoints that are in an external network or DMZ, a certificate based approach allows to get the result without requiring too high of a configuration effort.
  • The product is also able to manage non-Microsoft platform and devices. The list of Management Packs is really long and covers many of the main players in the IT industry.
Cons
  • SCOM requires a lot of fine tuning to be really usable, especially from an alerting point of view. The default thresholds are meant to be good for a generic scenario, but each IT department has to spend time in calibrating them on their specific needs.
  • The most recent rollup updates have improved SCOM from all the points of view. Using it some time ago was not easy, due to a series of limitations and flaws (often I have seen agents going in "unknown state" with no motivation, just for example). I think that some companies have now a negative perception of Operations Manager due to this not so brilliant past.
  • From a security point of view, SCOM requires some specific configurations. The required rules and permissions on firewalls, specifically, are something that usually requires some conversation and clarification with the network and security managers.
Likelihood to Recommend
The effort and infrastructure required for SCOM make it a product that is a good fit for medium or large companies. There is also a cost to be considered, especially if the System Center Suite is not part of the licensing that the company has already. However, any company with a good number of Microsoft servers and services (I would say at least 50 servers, just to give an idea) will see the benefits of a product that is able to easily gather information and monitoring data. My considerations are based on an on-premises data center, so the above could not apply to people using SCOM also for Cloud deployments monitoring.
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