NPM 11.5 / SAM 6.2 Fun – Forum – Network Performance Monitor (NPM) – THWACK

One of my customers is still on an ancient build of SCOM 2007 since 2009. It runs perfectly fine.

It does things Orion in 2015 will never do out of the box.

• Alerts for AlwaysOn SQL, log shipping – automated discovery of all SQL objects.
• Alerts for Clusters out of the box with no need to do time consuming configurations that Orion requires
• Dynamic management of disks/volumes – Orion has burned me for years with disks added by someone and remains unchecked in List Resources – no, I’m not going to do the discovery, import automatically BS.
• 2 stage CPU alerts (% + Queue) without crazy customization
• The ability to report on a group of servers that are dynamically managed based on registry entry – Orion wants you do to custom properties – does anyone realize how stupid this is?
• The ability to quickly create summary performance reports on a group of servers without the idiotic “custom property” nonsense that Orion uses. Come to think of it, there is no summary server report for Orion, you have to create it yourself. Fun times when a PM wants a report that I can do with SCOM in literally 30 seconds.
• Over 500 monitors and rules for SQL out of the box – All alerting is automatic, no need to build hundreds of triggers. With Orion you get 2 or 3 SQL alerts out of the box. I feel sorry for people that get sucked into Orion without any clue how deficient AppInsight is from an alerting perspective when you have hundreds and hundreds of instances.
• If an admin in a remote site adds a server to SCOM there is nothing else he needs to do. With Orion you have to manually assign everything you want monitored. Assign triggers. Manage custom properties. Manage reports by hand. SCOM is all automagic once you have your groups configured,
• Custom Availability reports with extreme granular views of any object under the sun. To do the same with Orion would take hours to produce that I can do with SCOM in 30 seconds.
• The ability to override a monitor based on a group or class – Orion gives you very little customization opportunities – see AppInsight for SQL – good luck managing that if you have more than 3 SQL servers. Someone’s response to this another thread was you need to learn 4 or 5 languages to manage SolarWinds. No thanks, that is ridiculous, SCOM does it for me automatically.

I will never forget the day our Admin enabled the component failure emails in Orion and we woke up to 1900 emails. He turned them off and we haven’t turned them back on since. The uncontrollable nature of Orion is its worst feature. 90% of or servers are RED due to idiotic monitors that you cannot control easily. If you have more than 10 servers good luck managing all of the worthless alerts and events that SolarWinds spits out every 3 seconds for components.

Of course SCOM has its weak points as well. TONS OF THEM. But, if you had to give me a choice between Orion and SCOM, and alerting is your number one requirement – I’d choose SCOM any day hands down.

I believe that SolarWinds give s people a horribly bad false sense of security for alerting. I would love to get rid of SCOM and replace with Orion, but SolarWinds is years away from dynamic management of objects based on classes with easy access to overriding based on dynamic groups of servers.

SCOM is so much better in so many ways, but its easy to hate on Microsoft just for being Microsoft. I have identical large environments – one with SolarWinds and one with SCOM. SCOM gives me an advantage in so many ways, but these are things SolarWinds sales people do not comprehend, and they are things my managers do not comprehend – again – the false sense of security is epic. I will root for SolarWinds to get better but there is no way I can recommend it for a large SQL centric shop with over 1000+ servers. its to unwieldy to control effectively and the ability to not create reports and alerts based on dynamic groups of servers and having to use the custom property nonsense is just not for me.