The Big SCOM Survey 2021: Full results

Aakash Basavaraj / Bruce Cullen / Christian Heitkamp / Harold Dyck / Jonas Lenntun / Richard Benwell

Below is the full list of results for the Big SCOM Survey 2021. We surveyed 81 SCOM users with the same 27 questions we asked in 2020. We include comparison charts at certain points to track how the SCOM landscape is changing. Click here for the results from 2020.

SCOM and the Monitoring Landscape

43% of respondents have 0-1 management groups. 17% have 2, another 17% have 3, and 16% have 4-10. The remaining 5% are split across 11-500 and participants who were unsure.

The majority of respondents have below 10 management servers. 44% have 1-5 and 21% have 6-10.

37% of respondents have 1-5 gateways. 33% have none. 12% have 6-10. The remaining 18% are split across 11 and 141+, with 2% indicating that they are unsure.

Most respondents have between 101 and 2000 agents (61%).  Of these, 24% have 1001-2000, 20% have 101-500, and 17% have 500-1000.

Comparing 2021 to 2020, there has been a steep increase in respondents running SCOM 2019. 60% of 2021 respondents run SCOM 2019, in comparison to 44% in 2020.

There has also been a significant drop in respondents running SCOM 2021 R2 (19% in 2020 to 10% in 2021) and SCOM 1801/1807 (10% in 2020 to 5% in 2021).

On the flip side, what SCOM is used to monitor has remained fairly consistent.

The majority of respondents (56%) primarily use custom MPs for additional rules & monitors. 23% use them for monitoring application specific components, and 18% use them for monitoring additional platforms/technology.

Most respondents’ organizations have been using SCOM for between 7 and 15 years (69%).

There has been an interesting spike in respondents selecting ‘other’ when asked about the monitoring tools they use aside from SCOM. Stay tuned for our upcoming experts’ analysis to see what the pros make of it.

These are the ‘other tools’ respondents specified they are using:

The SCOM administrator

The majority of respondents across both 2020 and 2021 were in charge of administering SCOM, Windows Monitoring, and Infrastructure Monitoring.

Interestingly, there has been a steep increase in respondents with the job title ‘Monitoring Engineer’ and a similarly steep drop in respondents with the job title ‘Infrastructure Engineer’. See what the industry leaders make of it at our upcoming experts’ analysis.

The majority of respondents have been using SCOM for 7-15 years.

SCOM integration and alert interactivity

Out of all the respondents who selected ‘Yes’, the majority send their alerts to ServiceNow, SCOM, Service Manager and ‘Other’. There has been a 10% drop in respondents who send all their alerts into SCOM, and a similar increase in respondents who selected ‘Other’. See what the experts have to say.

The majority of respondents use SCOM Operations Console, SquaredUp and SCOM Web Console to create dashboards and reports for SCOM.

The majority of respondents tune their management packs using the SCOM Console.

Attitudes towards SCOM

SCOM’s NPS rating dropped from 36 in 2020 to 31 in 2021.

There has been an increase in respondents indicating that 3-4 people are involved in administering SCOM.

In contrast, there has been a decrease in respondents indicating that 1-2 people are involved in administering SCOM.

The majority of respondents expect their SCOM use to grow over the next year. However, in comparison to 2020, a bigger proportion of 2021 respondents expect their SCOM use to reduce.

Here are the reasons specified for respondents who indicated a projected reduction in SCOM usage.

2020:

2021:

Here are the reasons specified for respondents who indicated a projected growth in SCOM usage.

2020:

2021:

The majority of respondents (54%) expect to continue using SCOM for 5+ years.

Changes in MP adoption and MP authoring

Veeam for VMware continues to be the most popular paid for third-party MP. GripMatix’s Citrix MP is now the second-most favourite, having gone from 2% to 9% of respondents indicating that they use it.

There has been a 10% increase in respondents using Visual Studio Authoring Extension to author custom monitoring, and a 6% drop for SCOM Console.

Distributed Applications, Synthetic Transaction Monitoring and Enterprise Applications (SquaredUp) continue to be popular choices. There has been a notable decrease in respondents who selected ‘We don’t monitor applications’.

There has been a 4% increase in respondents who indicated that SCOM is hosted in the Cloud.

Above are some of the most common responses. Notably, 2021 saw a steep increase in respondents asking for ‘More cloud monitoring’ and ‘Better Azure Monitor integration’.

Below is the list of all the features respondents would like to see: