Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

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.

Incentivized

Pingdom is well suited to monitor any of your public facing IPs, so you receive an alert by text message or email when the IP you are monitoring does not respond for a given length of time, from an impressive 10ms to 30s. This allows you to be pretty granular with the alerting. It's less appropriate for monitoring IPs on your LAN, unless you NAT these through your firewall.

Incentivized

• SCOM can manage Windows OS systems from desktops to servers very well.
• SCOM is platform agnostic in that we manage physical and virtual machines with no differentiation.
• SCOM can quickly deploy emergency security patches and the best part is it can provide detailed results of success and failure rate of patch deployment.

Incentivized

• Alerting, particularly the integration with PagerDuty.
• Reporting: the ability to go back and view the history of each status check (including details about every failure) as well as graphs and reports over a longer time period.
• Weekly uptime report emails are very convenient.
• Programmatic configuration is possible with a third-party Terraform plugin.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• sometimes sends false alerts
• there should be some threshold value for when an application is not reachable, it should alert after 30 seconds and keep sending hello packets for those 30 seconds and if still there is no response, then it should send the alert.
• too many unwanted metrics.

Incentivized

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard

Incentivized

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.

Incentivized

Customer service from Solarwinds has always been stellar. We've never gone unnoticed, even though we're currently within their tail segment. They're a great partner to us and indeed an important one. When we've had to submit a ticket, we've always received a response within 24 hours. I'd highly recommend SolarWinds to any organization with a server network

Incentivized

Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth

Incentivized

SolarWinds stacks well on the ease of use with an easily installable version and highly modular (products can be added to the basic installation and are easily managed from a single endpoint. System Center Operations Manager was selected because the majority of the environment is based on Windows products and it was part of the licensing agreement. It offered an easy way to consolidate the monitoring tools to provide a single point of management.

Incentivized

We have only used Pingdom for these needs, so I can't speak directly to competitors. That being said, for the reasons we used Pingdom it was fantastic value and the fact we never bothered to look for a competitor speaks volumes about our satisfaction with the product.

Incentivized

• Since we are at the tail end of our POC, we have no immediate ROI to report.
• That said, during the POC, we immediately identified several issues within TFS that we immediately addressed and will potentially save us hours of lost time and troubleshooting.

Incentivized

• Our client has continued to use our services
• It has helped our organisation keep up to date about any site traffic fluctuations and help us make educated decisions on appropriate server resources for the site
• The service is relatively inexpensive making it easy to cost into our maintenance charges

Incentivized