Top 5 SCOM issues and how to solve them

Many organizations aspire to a world where everything is in the cloud. But, in reality most IT enterprises still rely on traditional on-prem monitoring technologies. As a market-leading monitoring tool, SCOM is ideally placed for the job; monitoring both on-prem workloads or workloads that link up to the cloud.

So, as SCOM is central to most companies’ monitoring, it is essential you understand how to be successful with SCOM! But, as with all mature tools, SCOM hasn’t received much love and has degraded over time.

In this blog, we will discuss the top 5 issues with SCOM and how to overcome them.

1)      SCOM is noisy and slow

SCOM can be its own worst enemy monitoring everything, all the time. As a user of SCOM, I am sure you want to narrow down what gets your attention and understand where best to place your energy, to sustain a great level of service.

Firstly, you need to streamline SCOM, so it delivers only the data you want to see. Cookdown’s Easy Tune does exactly this, by tuning up your Management Packs. This will stop you drowning in alert noise, save time by allowing you to tune SCOM in bulk from CSV files, not having to manually create overrides, and instead focus on the alerts and metrics that matter to your business.

Why not give it a go? You can download our Free Easy Tune MP, here.
 

2)      SCOM’s data warehouse is too big

A company’s data warehouse is usually the largest database a company uses when dealing with SCOM data, making it expensive to manage and maintain. They often take a long time to backup, slow down reporting, consume more hardware space and if they fail are time-consuming to recover. Typically, a SCOM data warehouse is set up to overwrite old data when it gets to capacity, so if you want to store more data you have two choices: store less data or increase your database size.

It is so important to keep your data warehouse in good shape and only store the data you need. Often, the data that is consuming the most space is: Alerts, Events, Performance, and State data. So, if you reduce these, then you will be well on your way to minimizing the size of your data.

Check out our blog on, Why it is important to reduce the size of my SCOM data warehouse?, for our tricks and tips to solve this issue.

3)      Override sprawl

Have you ever wondered where all your SCOM overrides are stored and how to find their target? Then look no further we’ve created a nifty PowerBI tool, to help visualize your overrides so you can manage them more effectively. To find out how PowerBI finds your hidden overrides in SCOM and turns them into simple Sankey Diagrams, check out our webinar >>>

The good news is you don’t need any PowerBI skills to use our tool, simply download it for free here.

4)      Managing multiple monitoring tools

SCOM is probably one of your more mature monitoring tools, this makes it the perfect center for your monitoring universe, seeing as it has been around for over a decade, it is rock solid! Its class structure, Management Pack make it ideal for extending and expanding. It can sit alongside your other ITSM tools, and even work in synchronicity with these, to streamline your entire monitoring estate.

Good news. Cookdown’s Connection Center is a simple, code-free solution to integrate SCOM with any other ITSM, DevOps, or communication tools. It is simple to set up, with just a few clicks in a wizard-driven UI, leaving you to enjoy these cool features and options.

True Two-Way Sync - automatically close Alerts when Incidents are resolved and resolve Incidents when Alerts close, no more manual work. Plus see each Incident state in SCOM! 

Correlate Server Down Alerts - when a server is down, subsequent Alerts from that same server are not raised as Incidents, until the server is back up. 

Maintenance Mode - schedule SCOM Maintenance Mode from your ITSM tool. 

Customized for SCOM - correct handling of SCOM monitors vs. rules and full Alert details, including Alert context, pushed through to Incidents.  

ITIL Compliance - customize workflows using native tools. Plus, raise Tasks from Alerts, not just Incidents - so you’re always ITIL compliant! 

CMDB Discovery Package - populate your CMDB and associate each incident with the correct CI for full integration.

You can get set up in a matter of minutes, just download your free 30-day trial of Connection Center right here.

If you are not entirely convinced why not schedule a demo with one of our experts to talk through your specific use case. 

To see what Connection Center can do for your business, go to: cookdown.com/connection-center

5)      Dashboard that data
SCOM has endless data in it, but it can be hard to present this in a way that adds value to you and your stakeholders. The native dashboarding is fine but somewhat basic.

So now you’ve got all your data in order you’ll want to put it into a format that makes it user-friendly and easier for your stakeholders to understand. We recommend adding a dashboard to take your monitoring to the next level. Check out our sister company, SquaredUp, for best-in-class dashboarding solutions.

There you have it, the top five SCOM issues and how to resolve them. Follow these five simple steps and you’re destined for SCOM success!

But, if you would like a little help along the way then you can always take advantage of our FREE SCOM HEALTH CHECK, our experts will give SCOM a full service to help you optimize SCOM’s future performance!