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Microsoft Systems Center Operation Manager, pricey & powerful
April 18, 2019

Microsoft Systems Center Operation Manager, pricey & powerful

Joe Spradlin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with System Center Operations Manager

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.
  • Allows us to visualize our systems in a single interface and see the status of health as well as relevant performance metrics.
  • A flexible and powerful interface with active alerting covering domain controllers, SQL servers, etc...
  • Allows you to customize your views and workspaces for specific tasks and needs.
  • Reporting is powerful and flexible.
  • Pricey for small business platforms
  • Setup and configuration are not intuitive for "unseasoned" IT professionals.
  • Allowed us to proactively monitor consumption of resources (storage) to proactively schedule upgrades if necessary
  • Allows us to proactively visualize if a server or workstation processor is being over utilized and in need of a replacement, configuration change/upgrade.
  • There have been no negative impacts other than the time it takes to get it set up and configured. Knowing what you want to monitor and the thresholds you wish to set take can take some time, but the ROI comes quickly after that.
We didn't consider any other alternatives, nor did we try or demo any other product prior to our purchase of SCOM. I know there are several other products out that perform many of the same functions and more such as SolarWinds, however, those products are pricey as well and we decided to stick with the Microsoft product in the end.
Well suited for IT Departments that can budget the funds and time needed for setup and maintenance of SCOM. The end product is well suited for medium to large environments that have 100's of resources that require monitoring and reporting. Enterprise level statistics are at your fingertips with a few clicks of a mouse after the product has been configured and agents have been deployed. As I said previously, we are a small business and I was fortunate enough to be able to budget this product into our environment. It did take us a while to configure and fully deploy, but as a result, we are well-informed and are able to extract detailed information as it pertains to usage/consumption of our workstation and server resources to include performance metrics and any errors that may arise.

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
9.2
Application monitoring
10
Database monitoring
10
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
7
Application performance management console
9
Collaboration tools
7
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
Not Rated
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
Not Rated
Server availability and performance monitoring
10
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
10
IT Asset Discovery
10

Evaluating System Center Operations Manager and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
We wanted a comprehensive product that would give us the peace of mind to not only have the support of Microsoft behind us but the reliability and power of the software itself. The software does take time to configure and set up, but the end product is a very user-friendly and powerful product allowing IT to monitor the status of their hardware at any time.
I would take the same approach as I did originally. I look at what the industry is using in medium to large enterprises and pick from industry standard choices. I extensively evaluate each product and get the buy-in from other teammates to ensure product usability and ROI for our company. I look at reviews on each product and look more at the negative points for each product first to make sure that the issues won't affect our environment in a negative fashion.