Catchpoint vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

A Solid product, provides meaningful accurate data results from synthetic monitoring. Catchpoint as a vendor has acted as a reliable business partner and promotes good relationship with customers and provides them with meaningful support. Support engineer and account manager make efforts to maintain helpful relationship for services offered. Been able to work with us to provide input for code changes and enhancements for payload used for synthetics.

Incentivized

More appropriate for:

• Pure Microsoft ecosystem environments (Windows Server and SQL server) and the most common Linux and UNIX platforms.
• Environments where cost is less of a factor than settling on a single platform for monitoring
• Environments where the administrators are familiar with the setup and installation of SCOM.

Less appropriate for:

• Pure UNIX/Linux shops, especially versions not supported out of the box by SCOM.
• Shops that cannot afford the engagement to setup/configure and maintain on a continuous basis.
• Shops that cannot dedicate personnel to the care and feeding of SCOM, especially when supporting larger environments.

Incentivized

• Easy to login with SSO
• Easy to review the test runs over the last hour or specific time period
• Easy to check the results of any Catchpoint test that ran. This helps to understand why the test results may or may not be what is expected
• I can't wait for the new Symphony UI to be completed because it is so much richer that the previous UI

Incentivized

• Allows us to visualize our systems in a single interface and see the status of health as well as relevant performance metrics.
• A flexible and powerful interface with active alerting covering domain controllers, SQL servers, etc...
• Allows you to customize your views and workspaces for specific tasks and needs.
• Reporting is powerful and flexible.

Incentivized

• Script recording could be more stable. Should be as smooth as chrome developer recording.
• Needs a way to modularize the code so we don't have to repair in broad sections when it breaks because of some unplanned code change on our end.
• How about a tutorial on selenium as relates to Catchpoint.
• Some of the functions could have better descriptions.

Incentivized

• One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required.
• SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained.
• The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.

Incentivized

we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures
service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level
agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any
network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the
availability and response time service levels

Incentivized

It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.

Incentivized

Catchpoint's customer support has been very impressive. They are always available when we needed help with setting up any tests that may also include help with scripting. They held an in-person workshop in our office to help train our internal resources with the scripting, dashboards, and metrics.

Incentivized

Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.

Incentivized

very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly

Incentivized

Primary reason we went with Catchpoint is that they offered us actual backbone testing locations. All the other features like a filmstrip and traceroutes have been very beneficial as well and were not available in the competitors' solutions.

Incentivized

We used Altiris and WSUS and in the beginning Altiris had the better admin interface than SCOM, but it is no longer the case as SCOM has refined their admin interface. Altiris still has better and more robust group assignments for management roles and those two other tools can better manage non Windows OS devices than SCOM but for a large enterprise Windows shop, if you can afford it, SCOM is the way to go.

Incentivized

• The ROI has been very good with this product, we have seen multiple folds of time-saving by using this tool and preempting any risk associated with non-performant times of our server, hence increasing the team's capability to respond to certain downtime scenarios and the level of action that needs to be taken.
• Catchpoint’s observability solution makes it easier to have global visibility of our website's performance and to fix issues quicker
• I don't have any negatives, every good product comes with a cost, that is the fact but the Catchpoint tool has ultimately improved our ROI much beyond the changes that we pay

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to provide an Enterprise Event/Alert management solution to the Global company
• It has taken a long time to get it to provide valuable alerts and information, lots of user resources and investment.
• It assists with 24/7 monitoring and out of hours support

Incentivized