Both solutions offer powerful monitoring capabilities for the enterprise, with specific benefits that vary per organization. For Microsoft shops, SCOM certainly offers more comprehensive monitoring coverage—even Office365 and Azure apps are covered. Organizations with a disparate toolset and heterogeneous environment may find Splunk a better fit.
Splunk is relatively easy to deploy and use, offering users a set of dashboards with easily accessible features and intuitive configuration options. In contrast, SCOM is notoriously complex to and difficult to configure, run and maintain. That said, its interface will be immediately familiar to Windows-based IT admins and operators.
Splunk boasts a large community of users and supporters and provides resources such as its Answers database and User Groups. SCOM have Technet resources at their disposal but not much else, save for Reddit and Google.
