Why Do i need SCOM 2012 R2 with Exchange 2013 ?

Question

This is a question is commonly asked now a days with the "Managed Service" Feature of Exchange 2013 , why do I still need SCOM for just my Exchange monitoring ?
I have my understanding that still with managed service in exchange there are several component's that needs to be monitored outside the managed service , but I am looking for some nice bullet points.
Please help.

Answer 1

If you are a small shop, then you may not need to spend the money on SCOM to monitor Exchange 2013.  However, if you have a large deployement, then you might want to have System Center OM.
While Exchange 2013 does store performance data (configurable I believe) for maybe seven days, you will not have long term trend and performance data.  I understand the Exchange 2013 MP is not collecting performance, but this doesn't mean you cannot
replicate what it is doing in a custom management pack for Exchange 2013.  Now you will have a single repository for all of your Exchange 2013 servers, where you can see performance history, look at trends, etc.
Furthermore, events that might help you with KHI are going to roll out of the event logs on your exchange servers, unless you are archinving that data, even then, with no centralized location, it will be very hard to keep track of the issues you have experienced. 
With SCOM agents sitting on those servers, that data will be stored, again, in a single database, where you can report on KHI's and what not (SLO/SLA included).
Furthermore, we know Exchange 2013 runs checks on potential failover candidates.  These checks should come back healthy in order for the server to be considered a good failover candidate.  What if these checks detect an issue with a potential failover
candidate?  Wouldn't you like to know, so that you can address that before it impacts the Exchange service?  Again, this is where SCOM would come in, not just for monitoring for these things, but other issues like network, hardware, software, OS,
etc.
So, like I said, if you are a small shop, you can probably forgo the expenses.  If you have a large 2013 environment, then SCOM will be beneficial, but understand that you will probably have to add too the Exchange 2013 managememt pack in order to get
the most out of it (since they stripped this latest version down compared to E2K10 MP).
Regards, Blake Email: mengotto<at>hotmail.com Blog: http://discussitnow.wordpress.com/ If my response was helpful, please mark it as so, if it answered your question, then please also mark it accordingly. Thank you.