SCOM 2012 Review from a sort of smart guy.
February 26, 2016
SCOM 2012 Review from a sort of smart guy.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with System Center Operations Manager
We use SCOM to monitor our servers and network devices. It is used mainly by the technical IT staff. Other than the hardware, we also use it to monitor services and certain event log messages. We also use SA Vision Live Maps to visually represent our environment. There are several flat screen TVs in strategic areas (including our 24 hour help desk), that display the SA Vision Live Maps view. When a monitor goes red it is reflected in the Live Maps view and the appropriate team is notified.
For the network monitoring component we use Jalasoft Xian Network Manager which also works in conjunction with SCOM. We do not use the native SCOM network monitoring feature as Jalasoft does a better job of monitoring the network objects.
- SCOM in conjunction with SA Vision Live Maps makes it easy to create a visual dashboard of you environment. You can create hierarchical maps to represent your entire environment to a geographical scale and drill down when a problem arises.
- If you have an application that can send messages to an event log, you can easily create monitors and rules for specific errors that you care about and send those alerts as e-mails.
- SCOM is both agent and agentless so you have the option to get better monitoring by installing an agent. We have had few issues of a SCOM agent on a server.
- You need to stay on top of SCOM because you can easily bog down your performance if you are not constantly addressing problematic alerts, or a bad management pack.
- Network monitoring is there but compared to other SCOM plugins like Jalasoft, the Microsoft implementation is lacking. Jalasoft seems more straight forward and easier to implement.
- When your SCOM environment slows down you will need to open a Microsoft call and depending who you get, it can take weeks to address an issue. We currently have some issues that have been open for more than a month.
- SNMP monitoring is also not straight forward and you can't import MIBs.
- In the beginning it was hard to get all the admins to get on board with our SCOM procedures because there were a lot of false positives and needless pages for being made. However several years later there are fewer skeptics and each team find some value in some of the features.
- SCOM is an expensive solution the more servers you have.
We only had What's Up Gold in the past. What's Up Gold could not monitor services or performance of a server. It only would ping for up and down and we also used it for some SNMP monitoring with printers. SCOM had more features and was a more robust solution.