Scom 2012

rockstar81

Does anyone use scom 2012 if so how do you find it? What do you like/think it goes well? Any downfalls in it? How long have you been using it and how large is environment (servers,networking equipment etc)

Thank you

lsud00d

I use SCOM 2012 at my current customer site. It has expanded in it's capabilities throughout its versions and 2012 is by far the best. It's good for automated monitoring and notifications, alas I do not have myself in the email list because I haven't tuned it to the point where that aspect is useful, i.e. there are too many notifications even though the environment is generally healthy...the fatigue is heavy.

I've been using it for ~9 months and it monitors a server/application environment (Orion does network monitoring) of around 400 objects.

I prefer Nagios to SCOM, personally. I haven't dug into it extensively but the monitoring packs are still somewhat cumbersome to manage. Again, I probably attribute this to not focusing direct effort on the product for an extended amount of time.

BUT...for monitoring a Microsoft-centric environment, it's good. The little things like SPN, application pools, IIS health, MSSQL services, .NET issues...I think this is where it shines versus other monitoring systems. The roll-up concept is interesting because it points to other things to troubleshoot along the way if the core issue is not what SCOM is indicating.

Also I still haven't linked it into the rest of the System Center suite, Orchestrator in particular. ::jots down on "things to do" list::

blargoe

The best thing about SCOM is that it does Windows monitoring very well, Microsoft Applications as well as the application developers put effort into the management pack for that application (usually very good as well), does *nix monitoring "well enough", and just about any application/service can be adequately monitored with either some customization on your part or a 3rd party add on from a vendor. Once you learn the quirks of the solution, it is not that difficult to manage, and does most things "well enough".

I also evaluated Solarwinds Orion, and while it is great at network/host monitoring, when you try to throw in deep application monitoring it becomes burdensome to administer and is not as feature-rich as SCOM and others.