SCOMathon 2023 Round-up

SCOMathon 2023 has been another huge success! The community came together to share all their knowledge on SCOM across 18 sessions, including 2 keynotes, 5 vendor sessions, and 2 panel discussions. We went live for just shy of 12 hours and covered everything from SCOM in the cloud era to AI for SCOM to MP authoring.

There’s a plethora of material from the basics to advanced SCOM usage that you can explore from SCOMathon 2023 on our YouTube channel.

Plus, you all raised a grand total of $5,154 for Girls Who Code by your attendance – we donated $2 per attendee per session. Thank you to our sponsors SquaredUp, Silect & NiCE for their charitable contributions!

We couldn’t have done any of this without our amazing SCOMathon sponsors: SquaredUp, Silect, NiCE, GripMatrix, and OpsLogix. Thank you for making this another brilliant event!

Most popular sessions

Some of the most popular sessions, with well over 100 attendees each, included:

Hybrid monitoring with SCOM MI and visualizing on SquaredUp dashboards

From the evolution of on-prem monitoring to Azure observability and visualizing it all in SquaredUp, the power of hybrid monitoring is undeniable. Organizations are already undergoing digital transformation and are using Azure, so SCOM MI is the ideal next step. Plus, coming soon is a much deeper integration of SCOM MI with Azure Monitor.

Is SCOM struggling for survival in the cloud era? Here’s how to save it

We all know that the world around SCOM has rapidly evolved to become cloud-based and serverless. So, where’s SCOM’s place in all this? Right at the center of the modern engineering stack! Richard demonstrated that, with SquaredUp Cloud as the single pane of glass, you can harness all the power of SCOM alongside your tools in the cloud.

Top 10 mistakes when implementing SCOM

SCOM isn’t easy. But Dieter ran us through what he believes to be the top ten mistakes to avoid when setting up SCOM. His highlights include thinking it’s easy(!), not preparing enough, tackling it all at once (it’s a marathon, not a sprint), not doing proper maintenance, and not closing SCOM projects properly. He wrapped up with the four high-level steps to success. Check out the full session on YouTube for all the tips.

Panel sessions overview

We also had a fantastic lineup of panel members across the topics of ‘AI for SCOM and beyond’, ‘Open source and SCOM’, and ‘Microsoft monitoring, what do we want to see?’

AI for SCOM and beyond

The AI discussion centered on event management in monitoring with AI in SCOM. There’s the powerful possibility of using AI to detect patterns and trends that could lead to the occurrence of an event. If you’re interested in finding out more about our panelists’ perspectives on AI and SCOM, take a listen to the half hour discussion here.

Open Source and SCOM

When discussing open source and SCOM, our second panel looked at how open source can benefit (and has already benefitted) SCOM. There are many open-source management packs that are loved by the SCOM community but the open-source factor is often in conflict with how enterprises want to manage their environments as they have no support contracts in place. However, there is also a huge percentage of people who want to contribute to, and use, open-source management packs in SCOM as they’re extensible, free, and are often not sealed, so are also customizable.

Microsoft Monitoring, what do we want to see?

The final panel discussion on what our panel of experts wants to see in Microsoft monitoring, based on their collective experiences. Microsoft monitoring goes beyond just SCOM as there’s Azure Monitor, Azure Sentinel, status.office.com, and others. So, they lay out their wish lists for monitoring with Microsoft tools, including ease of use of Azure Monitor and a better baseline understanding of the resources that exist in Azure to know whether they are healthy. Find out more about what made the wish list in this session.

The Keynotes

SCOMathon Welcome

Bruce Cullen opened the event with a recap of how SCOMathon even came to be. You may remember May of 2020, the rapid cancelling of events, and the gaping events hole left behind. That’s when SCOMathon was born! Plus, he shared his personal highlights for what to look forward to this SCOMathon 2023.

What comes after SCOM MI?

That was the topic of our next keynote. Bob Cornelissen (a.k.a. SCOM Bob), questioned how the powerful and refreshing SCOM MI for the cloud sits against the backdrop of an increasingly cloud centric world and workloads becoming increasingly more serverless. Bob ran us through what’s possible today and outlined the clear place SCOM has in the future.

SCOMathon Closing

Closing out SCOMathon 2023, Bruce wrapped up with some fun stats. There were 4 Microsoft MVPs in attendance, 2 Microsoft staff, and 5 SQUPers (SquaredUp employees). Bruce also highlighted some of the most interesting talk moments, including the SCOM product roadmap promise of Arc-connected VMs and Azure Monitor integration with SCOM MI. He also loved the Google Trends data shown on various cloud vs. on-prem infrastructure terms. See what else Bruce picked out as key takeaways from the core sessions.

SCOM Resources

The SCOM Community is amazing and we’re thrilled to have been able to gather so many of you in one (virtual) space!

If you want to join in with discussions, join our Slack Channel.

To get all the SCOMathon recordings as well as our monthly SCOM webinars – Coffee Breaks – subscribe to our SCOMathon YouTube channel.

If you have any SCOM questions, join Community Answers where peers and experts will help you on your SCOM journey.

And follow us on social media to keep up to date with what’s on next. Join us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Plus, check out our Training Tools page with some fantastic resources.

That’s a wrap for SCOMathon 2023! Thanks once again for coming along, chatting in the comments, sending in great questions, and sharing your knowledge. And, as always, our enormous gratitude to our speakers, panel members and our sponsors.

Join us for our next Coffee Break!