Buy vs. Build: Choosing a Dashboard Layer for Your SCOM Data

Buy vs. Build: Choosing a Dashboard Layer for Your SCOM Data

Series: The State of SCOM in 2026 — Part 7

We've covered why the decision to redeploy on-premises got forced in the first place, why SCOM 2025 is a platform worth trusting, how to migrate onto it cleanly, and what service-level dashboarding gets you once you're there. The last question left is the practical one: which tool do you actually build that dashboard layer on?

Once you've decided your SCOM data deserves a better front end than the console — and most teams eventually do — the next question is which front end. The realistic shortlist usually comes down to three approaches: an open-source visualization tool like Grafana, a general-purpose BI tool like Power BI, or a purpose-built dashboard layer designed specifically for SCOM data. Each is a legitimate choice. They're just not solving the same problem.

Option 1: Grafana (or another open-source visualization tool)

Grafana's appeal is obvious: it's free, it's flexible, and it has a large plugin ecosystem and an active community. The honest trade-off is what it costs in effort rather than license fees. Grafana has no native SCOM connector out of the box — getting SCOM data into it typically means going through a third-party plugin or building your own data pipeline against the SCOM SDK or Data Warehouse or patching together SQL queries from Kevin Holman. The limitations are:

• It doesn’t know the SCOM health model so drill downs are complicated to build.
• A lack of correlation between alerts and services. Alerts need context if they are to be prioritized effectively.
• Scalability. The “monitoring team” usually end up having to create all the dashboards which makes them a bottleneck.

It's a build option wearing a low-cost sticker: cheap to license, labor-intensive to run and difficult to scale to enterprise level where service management and service availability are key.

Option 2: Power BI (or another general-purpose BI tool)

Power BI's case is different — it's usually a tool your organization already has, and it's excellent at what it's built for: business analytics, rich formatting, and DAX-based aggregation over structured data. For SCOM specifically, that usually means running SQL queries against the Data Warehouse, or scheduling refreshes through Dataflows or a Power BI Gateway.

The catch is that this is fundamentally a reporting tool, not an operational one. It's a good fit for a monthly service-health report to leadership. It's a poor fit for "something just went red and I need to know what, right now" — the refresh cadence and the query-based model aren't built for that kind of real-time operational use.

Option 3: A purpose-built dashboard layer - SquaredUp Dashboard Server

SquaredUp delivers role-based dashboards that work for operations staff, service owners, and management without three separate build efforts.

A tool built specifically around SCOM's data model integrates natively — no separate database, no ETL pipeline to build and maintain, no plugin versions to track. No separate security model.

Dashboards are built from tiles that read directly from the SCOM SDK API, optionally blended with other providers (SQL, Web API, PowerShell) if you want to pull in context from outside SCOM, like a CMDB or ServiceNow.

How to actually decide?

A few honest questions cut through most of the debate:

1. Do you need this live, or periodic?
   1. Live incident response points toward SquaredUp or Grafana.
   2. Monthly or quarterly reporting points toward Power BI.
2. Who's maintaining it in twelve months?
   1. SquaredUp delivers dashboards out of the box and customization that doesn’t require any knowledge of SQL.
   2. Grafana will require a team that knows SCOM and SQL.
3. Who's actually looking at these dashboards?
   1. Engineers can see SCOM metrics in either SquaredUp or Grafana.
      1. SquaredUp provides self-service out of the box for teams to easily create their own dashboards without any knowledge of SQL.
      2. Grafana will require teams to know SQL or wait on the monitoring team to create the dashboard for them.
   2. A service owner who just wants a health summary of their portfolio or an IT director glancing at a dashboard for confirmation that systems are running want service level monitoring which SquaredUp delivers out of the box.
4. Is SCOM your only data source, or one of several?
   1. If you're already consolidating Prometheus, Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, Service Now, VMWare, SCOM and more into one view, then SquaredUp Dashboard Server and SquaredUp Cloud deliver a single pane of glass across your hybrid Cloud estate.
      
      There's no universally correct answer here — only the one that matches how much engineering time you're willing to spend maintaining the dashboard layer itself, versus how much of that time you'd rather spend on the systems it's monitoring.