If you’ve been following IT monitoring discussions on Reddit, Microsoft Tech Community forums, or X (formerly Twitter), you’ve likely encountered a persistent narrative: “SCOM is dead.” The announcement that Azure Monitor SCOM Managed Instance will retire on September 30, 2026, only seemed to fuel this narrative further. Skeptics argue that Microsoft is abandoning System Center Operations Manager in favor of cloud-only solutions, leaving on-premises infrastructure monitoring in the dust.

But here’s the reality that often gets lost in the noise: Microsoft just released SCOM 2025 in Q4 2024, with comprehensive support for Windows Server 2025, SQL Server 2022, and a commitment to mainstream support extending through at least 2030. If SCOM were truly dead, why would Microsoft invest engineering resources into a major new release with a decade of support ahead?

The truth is more nuanced than the “SCOM is dead” soundbite. While Azure Monitor SCOM Managed Instance is being deprecated, the retirement actually reinforces Microsoft’s strategy: organizations should choose either full Azure Monitor for cloud-native workloads or on-premises SCOM for hybrid and on-premises environments. The retirement isn’t a death knell; it’s a clarification of Microsoft’s dual-path monitoring strategy.

In this post, we’ll examine what’s new in SCOM 2025, explore why on-premises and hybrid monitoring remains critical for enterprise organizations, and discuss how purpose-built add-ons can extend SCOM’s value even further. Whether you’re a longtime SCOM administrator or evaluating your enterprise monitoring strategy for 2025 and beyond, understanding SCOM’s current state and future trajectory is essential for making informed decisions.

What’s New in SCOM 2025: A Platform Built for the Next Decade

SCOM 2025 represents more than just an incremental update. Microsoft has positioned this release as a future-proof platform with support extending for at least the next decade, following the company’s Fixed Lifecycle Policy that provides 5 years of mainstream support and 5 years of extended support. Let’s break down the key improvements and what they mean for enterprise IT operations.

Full Support for Windows Server 2025 and SQL Server 2022

One of the most significant updates in SCOM 2025 is comprehensive support for the latest Microsoft server technologies. The platform now fully supports Windows Server 2025 for both management servers and monitored agents (including Standard, Datacenter, and Server Core editions). This ensures that organizations investing in Microsoft’s latest server infrastructure can maintain consistent monitoring without compatibility concerns.

On the database front, SCOM 2025 supports SQL Server 2022 with Cumulative Update 11 (CU11) or later for the Operations Database, Data Warehouse, and Reporting Server roles. This requirement for the latest CU demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to security and stability. Organizations can also continue using SQL Server 2019 (with CU8 or later) or SQL Server 2017, providing flexibility for existing deployments while offering a clear upgrade path to the latest database platform.

According to Microsoft’s official system requirements documentation, the combination of SCOM 2025 running on Windows Server 2025 with SQL Server 2022 represents the recommended configuration for new deployments, offering the best performance, security, and long-term supportability.

Enhanced Security Features

Security remains a critical focus for enterprise infrastructure tools, and SCOM 2025 delivers meaningful improvements in this area:

• OpenSSL 3.1 to 3.3 support: Updated cryptographic libraries ensure secure communications across monitored infrastructure
• Reduced CredSSP and NTLM dependencies: Addressing modern security best practices by minimizing reliance on legacy authentication protocols
• TLS 1.3 support: The latest transport layer security protocol for encrypted data transmission

These security enhancements are particularly important for organizations subject to compliance requirements such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, or SOC 2, where maintaining current security protocols is not optional.

Improved Browser Support and Web Console Functionality

SCOM 2025 modernizes the administrative experience with support for current browser versions, including Microsoft Edge version 121 and later (with IE compatibility mode) and Google Chrome version 121 and later. The web console has received important fixes, including resolution of issues with security policy settings (allow-popups and allow-forms) and HttpParseException errors affecting favorite reports.

These improvements may seem minor, but they significantly impact day-to-day operations, allowing administrators to manage monitoring infrastructure from modern browsers without compatibility workarounds.

Simplified Licensing Management

SCOM 2025 introduces more flexible licensing options. Organizations can now register product keys during initial setup or post-deployment through the Operations console. The new Set-SCOMLicense PowerShell cmdlet enables remote license registration from any management server, simplifying license management in distributed deployments.

Proven Stability and Maturity

While some observers characterize SCOM 2025 as primarily “security and version updates” rather than groundbreaking new features, this perspective misses a crucial point: for enterprise infrastructure monitoring, stability and maturity are features, not bugs. SCOM has evolved over nearly two decades, with a vast ecosystem of management packs covering hundreds of technologies, from Microsoft workloads to third-party applications.

Unlike newer monitoring platforms that require extensive custom configuration, SCOM’s management packs provide out-of-the-box monitoring with established health models, proven alert tuning, and years of community refinement. This maturity translates directly to faster deployment times and lower total cost of ownership.

SCOM in Hybrid Environments: Why On-Premises Monitoring Still Matters

The cloud-first narrative often overlooks a fundamental reality: most enterprise IT environments are hybrid and will remain so for the foreseeable future. According to industry analyses, cloud workloads represent only a small percentage of total enterprise infrastructure, with the majority remaining on-premises for regulatory, performance, or cost reasons.

The Hybrid Cloud Reality

Organizations face complex hybrid scenarios combining legacy on-premises data centers with cloud IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS resources. This hybrid reality creates both challenges and opportunities for monitoring strategies. As Microsoft’s own guidance acknowledges, customers have significant investments in SCOM and need unified monitoring across on-premises, Azure, AWS, and other cloud platforms—not separate monitoring silos for each environment.

SCOM excels in this hybrid context because it was purpose-built for comprehensive infrastructure monitoring regardless of location. Organizations can monitor on-premises servers, virtual machines, network devices, applications, and cloud resources from a single platform, maintaining consistent health models and alerting across the entire estate.

When SCOM Outshines Azure Monitor

While Azure Monitor is powerful for cloud-native Azure workloads, several scenarios favor SCOM for enterprise monitoring:

1. On-Premises Expertise and Control

SCOM remains Microsoft’s best solution for monitoring on-premises servers. Organizations maintain complete control over the monitoring infrastructure, data retention policies, and customization. For regulated industries where data sovereignty and audit trails are critical, keeping monitoring data on-premises provides clear compliance advantages.

2. Deep Application Monitoring with Management Packs

SCOM’s management packs provide metrics out of the box for specific applications like SQL Server, Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory, and hundreds of other technologies. These management packs encode years of expertise about what to monitor, appropriate thresholds, and troubleshooting workflows. Azure Monitor requires manual configuration to achieve similar depth, and migration tools don’t exist because the underlying architectures differ fundamentally.

3. Customization for Unique Use Cases

SCOM offers superior customization capabilities for unique applications and monitoring scenarios. Organizations can create custom management packs, execute local scripts on monitored systems, and build sophisticated health models that Azure Monitor cannot replicate. This customization is essential for monitoring proprietary applications or industry-specific systems.

4. Service-Level Monitoring and Alert Suppression

SCOM provides robust tooling for ticket management integration, service monitoring (grouping infrastructure components into business services), alert suppression, and health state rollup. While Azure Monitor has some of these capabilities, it lacks the maturity and integration depth of SCOM’s established ecosystem.

Real-World Enterprise Examples

Consider a financial services organization with data center infrastructure supporting trading platforms, customer databases, and compliance systems. Regulatory requirements mandate specific data residency and audit capabilities that cloud-based monitoring complicates. SCOM allows this organization to maintain comprehensive monitoring with complete data control while selectively using Azure Monitor for cloud-native disaster recovery systems.

Another example: a healthcare provider using custom SCOM management packs to monitor specialized medical applications. The organization built monitoring for performance, availability, and health of their clinical platforms directly within the SCOM framework, enabling proactive incident detection that would require extensive custom development in Azure Monitor.

SCOM vs. Azure Monitor: A Strategic Comparison

The comparison between SCOM and Azure Monitor isn’t winner-take-all; it’s about choosing the right tool for specific workloads:

As Microsoft’s own documentation suggests, most customers benefit from a hybrid monitoring strategy that leverages SCOM’s strengths for on-premises infrastructure and server workloads while using Azure Monitor for cloud-native resources. This approach allows gradual cloud migration without sacrificing monitoring coverage during the transition.

Enhancing SCOM with Add-ons: How Specialized Tools Multiply SCOM’s Value

While SCOM 2025 provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities out of the box, purpose-built add-on tools can significantly enhance efficiency, reduce operational overhead, and extend SCOM’s functionality. At SCOM Synapse (formerly SCOM Connect Tech), we’ve seen firsthand how the right tools transform SCOM from a monitoring platform into a true operational efficiency multiplier.

The Alert Fatigue Problem

One of the most common challenges facing SCOM administrators is alert fatigue. Without proper maintenance mode management, engineers face two problematic scenarios:

1. Forgotten Alert Management: Engineers manually disable alerts before maintenance windows and forget to re-enable them, creating permanent monitoring blind spots
2. Alert Noise: Engineers don’t disable alerts during planned maintenance, generating hundreds of false-positive alerts that condition operations teams to ignore notifications

Both scenarios undermine SCOM’s core value proposition: providing actionable, timely alerts when infrastructure problems actually occur.

SCOM Alert Update Connector Pro: Intelligent Alert Management That Eliminates Noise

Tools like SCOM Alert Update Connector Pro address alert fatigue through intelligent workflow automation. This powerful web-based solution integrates seamlessly with SCOM to help organizations create personalized alert workflows for different teams, ensuring that each group receives only the alerts relevant to their responsibilities—with the context they need to take action.

Key benefits include:

• Personalized Alert Workflows: Create team-specific alert rules that automatically route alerts to the right people with the right information, eliminating the “spray and pray” approach that leads to alert fatigue
• Selective Ticketing: Easily choose which alerts should create tickets in your ITSM system from a fast web interface, preventing ticket system overload with hundreds of low-priority or informational alerts
• Custom Field Enhancement: Enrich alerts with team-specific data, priority levels, and routing information that tells your ticketing system exactly how to handle each alert—including which queue should receive it
• Alert Noise Reduction: Organizations report dramatically reduced alert volume by filtering out non-actionable alerts before they reach operations teams, allowing staff to focus on genuine incidents rather than sorting through noise

The typical SCOM deployment suffers from a common problem: hundreds of alerts sit in the “New” state, overwhelming operations teams and causing important alerts to be missed in the flood of notifications. Alert Update Connector Pro solves this by acting as an intelligent filter between SCOM and your downstream systems, ensuring only relevant, properly contextualized alerts reach your ticketing system or on-call teams.

Instead of complex rules scattered across your ITSM platform that require constant updating, Alert Update Connector Pro centralizes alert logic in an easy-to-manage web interface where you can quickly create, test, and deploy new alert workflows without scripting or development work.

Advanced Automation Scenarios

Beyond scheduled maintenance, SCOM administrators can implement sophisticated automation scenarios:

Gateway Outage Automation

For organizations using SCOM gateways to monitor remote sites, network or gateway outages can trigger hundreds of heartbeat failures and “computer unreachable” alerts. Custom management packs can automatically detect gateway failures and place downstream agents in maintenance mode, suppressing cascading alerts until connectivity restores. When the gateway returns to healthy status, maintenance mode automatically ends and normal monitoring resumes.

Agent-Initiated Maintenance Mode

Organizations can enable systems administrators to place their own servers into maintenance mode directly from the monitored Windows computer using the Start-SCOMAgentMaintenanceMode PowerShell cmdlet. This distributed approach empowers teams to manage maintenance windows without requiring SCOM console access or creating bottlenecks through central operations teams.

The SCOM Synapse Approach

At SCOM Synapse, our philosophy is simple: SCOM’s monitoring capabilities are only as valuable as your team’s ability to focus on actionable alerts. Our add-on products are designed to:

• Eliminate repetitive manual tasks through intelligent automation
• Reduce alert fatigue so operations teams trust and respond to SCOM notifications
• Extend SCOM’s accessibility beyond specialized administrators to entire IT organizations
• Integrate seamlessly with native SCOM capabilities rather than requiring parallel systems

By enhancing SCOM with purpose-built add-ons, organizations maximize their SCOM investment while reducing operational overhead—achieving the best of both worlds.

Conclusion: SCOM 2025’s Future is Bright for the Right Organizations

So, is SCOM dead in 2025? The evidence overwhelmingly says no. Microsoft’s release of SCOM 2025 with comprehensive modern platform support and a commitment to at least a decade of support demonstrates that on-premises and hybrid infrastructure monitoring remains central to enterprise IT strategies.

However, the more nuanced answer is that SCOM 2025 is the right choice for specific organizational contexts:

• Hybrid and on-premises environments where cloud-only monitoring creates gaps or compliance challenges
• Organizations with significant Microsoft infrastructure (Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory) that benefit from mature management packs
• Regulated industries requiring on-premises data control and detailed audit capabilities
• Enterprises with custom or proprietary applications needing deep customization beyond what cloud monitoring platforms offer
• Organizations with existing SCOM investments looking to modernize their monitoring infrastructure without wholesale platform replacement

Evaluating SCOM Fit for Your Organization

When evaluating whether SCOM 2025 is right for your environment, consider these questions:

1. What percentage of your infrastructure will remain on-premises over the next 3-5 years?
2. Do you have regulatory or compliance requirements that favor on-premises monitoring?
3. Are you monitoring primarily Microsoft technologies where SCOM management packs provide immediate value?
4. Do you need deep customization and local script execution for specialized monitoring scenarios?
5. Is your team already trained on SCOM, or would cloud-based monitoring require similar training investment?

If you answered yes to several of these questions, SCOM 2025 deserves serious consideration in your monitoring strategy.

The Path Forward: Hybrid Monitoring Excellence

The future of enterprise monitoring isn’t about choosing between SCOM and Azure Monitor—it’s about strategically deploying both for hybrid excellence. Use SCOM 2025 for comprehensive on-premises and hybrid monitoring with mature management packs and deep customization. Leverage Azure Monitor for cloud-native Azure workloads and modern observability workflows. And enhance both with purpose-built tools that reduce alert fatigue and increase operational efficiency.

Take the Next Step

If you’re currently running SCOM 2019 or 2022, now is an excellent time to plan your SCOM 2025 upgrade and evaluate how add-on tools can enhance your monitoring strategy. At SCOM Synapse, we offer:

• Free trials of our SCOM enhancement tools so you can evaluate their impact in your environment [INTERNAL LINK: Free Trial Page]
• Expert webinars covering SCOM 2025 best practices, hybrid monitoring strategies, and automation techniques [INTERNAL LINK: Webinars Page]
• Consulting services to help you optimize your SCOM deployment and reduce operational overhead [INTERNAL LINK: Consulting Services]

SCOM 2025 represents Microsoft’s continued investment in enterprise monitoring for hybrid and on-premises infrastructure. For organizations with the right profile, it’s not just relevant—it’s essential. Don’t let the “SCOM is dead” narrative distract you from the facts: SCOM 2025 is here, it’s supported for the next decade, and it remains the gold standard for comprehensive Microsoft infrastructure monitoring.

Ready to see how SCOM 2025 and purpose-built add-ons can transform your monitoring strategy? Contact us for a personalized consultation or start your free trial today.