I’m running a small test lab in Azure that has some VM’s and PaaS components to try out a few things before migrating some on-prem systems. I want to get the monitoring right as part of this so I’m comparing SCOM + Azure MP against Azure Monitor and a couple of third-party tools. Squared Up is central to our monitoring so I’m only looking at things that I can definitely bring in alongside our SCOM data i.e. Azure Monitor Logs, AppInsights, WebAPI’s etc.
SCOM is surprisingly good at the whole “hybrid monitoring” thing and it’s making a strong case for using it across all our on-prem and Azure resources, but I dont have a problem with splitting out Azure monitoring if going native is a better option. I think what I’m seeing in Azure Monitor is richer than what the Azure MP is giving me in SCOM, but alerting is definitely giving me a headache!
I’m sure loads of you have done this already so I wondered if you could share any general advice or considerations?
If you still have a lot of IAAS running and are not planning to migrate to a more modern architecture in the near future, I’d say SCOM is still a solid choice. If you plan to migrate everything to PaaS and SaaS then maybe SCOM is not the best option.
I would consider migrating to Azure Monitor if:
They add something like distributed applications where you can combine different azure resources into one application.
They have a management pack like functionality for each Azure resource type. With Azure Monitor you have to define everything yourself which can be a daunting task in bigger environments.
The dashboarding experience is still quite poor.
The platform is constantly improving though, but it still has a way to go in my opinion before I would consider migrating away from SCOM. I do really like Application Insights and Log Analytics as an additional information feed for SCOM/Squared Up.