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Operations Manager from a System Center Expert
October 28, 2015

Operations Manager from a System Center Expert

Brody Kilpatrick | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

2007, 2012

Overall Satisfaction with System Center Operations Manager

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.
  • Windows OS Monitoring - Out of the box, System Center Operations Manager does a wonderful job of monitoring Windows Operating System health, performance and configuration. It provides detailed reports and the data required to quickly make technical decisions.
  • Community - The System Center Operations Manager community is huge. It is rare that we need to purchase a third party application to use along with System Center Operations Manager. Because System Center Operations Manager has been around for quite a while, many experts in the community are available for writing and sharing advanced management packs and monitoring strategies.
  • Flexibility - System Center Operations Manager provides the flexibility to perform any monitoring that has ever been requested of me. While the product is simple in its native form, it can be expanded with the authoring tool, add-ons, and visual studio authoring extensions.
  • Network Monitoring - System Center Operations Manager provides network monitoring, but it is relatively new, clunky, and feature-poor. It is improving, but if you need to do advanced network monitoring, use a dedicated product.
  • Consoles - System Center Operations Manager has two consoles - the web console and the desktop console. Both can be slow at times, even with a healthy back end. It has never been a huge problem, but when you are moving quickly, you can sometimes be caught up waiting a couple of seconds here or there.
  • Objective: Increase Reliability - Positive - Operations Manager gave is the deep level monitoring we needed to fix the underlying issues that affect the stability of the infrastructure and applications.
  • Objective: Provide Executive Level Dashboards - Neutral - Operations Manager has dashboard capabilities, but we added Savision LiveMaps to Operations Manager to provide better dashboards.
  • Objective: Reduce Overall Product Cost - Positive - We were able to remove many paid products from the environment with Operations Manager Monitoring.
SolarWinds Application and Server monitoring is the right choice for many organizations. However, it does not provide the flexibility of monitoring that System Center Operations Manager provides. Smaller organizations might want to consider SolarWinds for application and server monitoring, but medium to large organizations might want to try System Center Operations Manager. As far as network monitoring though, SolarWinds beats System Center Operations Manager 10-to-1.
Is your environment primarily Windows, or it is another OS? System Center Operations Manager is not the right tool unless the environment is primarily Windows. Are you monitoring at least 100 devices? If not, System Center Operations Manager might be overpriced. Do you need deep level monitoring of technologies such as Exchange, SQL Server, Active Directory/DNS/DHCP? System Center Operations Manager handles them very well. Do you need the ability to create extensive or custom monitoring of in-house applications? System Center Operations Manager will provide the flexibility.