Item: Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

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 and Cons

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.

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.

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

N/A

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, MS SharePoint, SQL Sentry

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 - Bigger than the sum of its parts

Overall Satisfaction with System Center Operations Manager