SCOM - Systems Centre Operations Manager

The Complete, automated management system for all your environments, systems and applications

This is a market leading suite of tools, developed by and used by Microsoft for managing and monitoring systems, operations, availability and performance. This multifunctional suite allows for total management of operations, monitoring everything from client applications to switches, firewalls, CPU usage, server health, disk space and database connections – all the way through to application monitoring. SCOM deploys an agent on every monitored server which can test a vast range of metrics, sending comprehensive and customisable data back to the central management systems on performance.

SCOM is so powerful that it can even extend beyond the operational level to include checks to ensure, for example, that websites are live and that applications are performing well at times of peak usage.  Because it is completely customisable, it means that, if required, performance alert thresholds can be set differently for different machines and in accordance with individual client needs. This rich ability to customise the monitoring allows SFW to create an “application perspective design” which allows SCOM to monitor all the dependencies required to run a client application. There are a number of key benefits to the way in which SFW uses SCOM to help its clients:

Proactive Prevention

SFW’s system engineers don’t just wait for alerts to tell them that there is a problem. They all access and use the Operations Manager console, which gives a real time view of servers, systems and performance so that they can start monitoring, fixing and resolving issues before they happen and before it becomes a problem to your users so downtime is minimised / negated. Each system monitored can also have automated resolutions applied through the SCOM console

Best Practice

SFW uses application management packs from Microsoft for products such as SharePoint, CRM and many others, which are set to adhere to Microsoft’s best practice standards and thresholds, ensuring that your system is managed in an optimal way. Where required, SFW can customise these thresholds to meet the unique needs of individual clients. Management packs are also widely available for non-Microsoft products.

Total Transparency

SFW aims to make its delivery of support as clear and transparent as possible so that clients are assured of its dedication and reliability. As such,  via SCOM, SFW offers clients the option to gain their own view into its work for them providing, upon request, viewing access of their support requests (open and closed) and reports

Customised Reporting

SCOM delivers customisable reporting functionality which SFW uses to deliver easy to digest, graphical reports and dashboards which show how well the client application is performing and how SFW’s support is delivering against key Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics in comparison to previous months.