With distributed applications, SCOM has so much potential to provide valuable overview dashboards. The two main options are, out of the box, pretty bad.
1. SLD - extremely limited
2. Visio - complicated to setup, slow, requires a lot of work in sharepoint to trim the excess sharepoint junk out of the way, terrible looking default dashboards (when you export a visio diagram, by default you get a diagram 4 miles wide among other problems), and tweaking this initial terrible view is extremely time consuming for a single dashboard. We're planning on around 20 dashboards for critical application ecosystems.
Is there an alternative to these? I like the IDEA behind coretech http://www.coretech.dk/products/dashboard-scom/ and Squared-UP http://www.squaredup.com/content/dashboards but the online demos for these are both very limited- seems like these are one-man startups that have a great idea, but not a lot of depth.
SAVision also has some options- but it looks like you have to have your executives load a full scom console. A simple, quick loading web dashboard without a lot of extra components is the goal.
I've seen some nice work from Catapult Systems and In-Front consulting, but those seem to be custom engagements. Is this the only way to go for what I'm looking for?
Thanks for any input on how to make SCOM a reasonable dashboard choice where I'm not going to spend days at a time getting it to look decent and something quick and attractive I wouldn't be embarrassed to show to a executive.