Share your experience using IBM Tivoli CMDB [EOL]

In Freshservice, I typically use it for day-to-day tasks.

A quick, specific example of how I use Freshservice in my daily work includes getting some incidents, working on service requests, and handling change requests.

When I receive incidents or change requests, I use Freshservice by logging tickets, assigning them, and tracking progress; once the ticket comes into our queue, I acknowledge the case, work on the case, ensure that the SLA is not affected, and then provide the resolution within three to five working days. For change requests, once the change has been created, I work on it, send it for implementation, and then resolve it by closing the change.

An additional aspect of how I use Freshservice in my workflow involves handling outages, where I receive alerts stating an instance is down. When the instance is offline, I acknowledge the alert and work on that as well, eventually resolving it.

In my experience, the best features Freshservice offers include the ability to create solution documents, which can be saved in Freshservice, allowing us to search for those documents later.

The user-friendly interface of Freshservice helps me and my team day-to-day because once we create any solution document, we circulate it so that if anyone needs it, they can refer to the SOP document and work on their cases effectively, making solution documents very useful for daily operations.

Other helpful features of Freshservice include reducing dependency on support teams, leading to faster resolutions and fewer tickets, along with the service catalog that allows us to raise requests for malfunctions on laptops, access requests, software installations, and password resets. We also engage in problem management to identify root causes from recurring incidents, and we utilize reporting and analytics dashboards to track ticket volume, SLA compliance, agent performance, and resolution times, which are all excellent features available in Freshservice.

Freshservice has positively impacted my organization by enhancing the productivity and efficiency of our team, where each individual agent has benefited. Earlier, we faced challenges, but creating a few dashboards in Freshservice has provided insights into individual performance and aided in SOP creation and storage. Additionally, we can track alert creation for specific instances, seeing whether those alerts are recurring and the basis for triggering them, making this functionality very helpful.

I believe Freshservice can be improved by offering more advanced features and customizability.

In terms of improvements, I suggest enhancing performance for larger networks and addressing workflow automation by implementing additional conditions and options, facilitating easier creation of complex workflows, and improving the mobile experience, as accessing Freshservice on mobile can be challenging.

A better mobile experience is a factor that keeps me from rating it a perfect 10, alongside the need for more features and enhancements.

An area for improvement in Freshservice includes enhanced security, particularly in advanced security monitoring.

The main areas for improvement I mentioned earlier focus on implementing more granular access controls.

I have been using Freshservice for four years.

Freshservice is very stable.

Freshservice can handle growth in users or tickets easily.

Freshservice has scaled well as my team's ticket volume has grown smoothly without challenges.

There was an instance when I reached out to customer support regarding an issue related to the automation workflow of Freshservice, and my experience was satisfactory.

Before Freshservice, I did not use a different solution.

I cannot comment much on the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Freshservice as it was already preset up in my company.

My company does not have a business relationship with the vendor besides being a customer, as we are a reseller.

We have not observed a return on investment from Freshservice, as we have not seen a reduction in employees needed or any significant savings.

I cannot comment much on the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Freshservice as it was already preset up in my company.

Prior to choosing Freshservice, I evaluated other options such as ServiceNow and BMC Remedy.

I strongly recommend Freshservice to every support team.

Freshservice has positively impacted my organization by enhancing the productivity and efficiency of our team, where each individual agent has benefited. Earlier, we faced challenges, but creating a few dashboards in Freshservice has provided insights into individual performance and aided in SOP creation and storage. Additionally, we can track alert creation for specific instances, seeing whether those alerts are recurring and the basis for triggering them, making this functionality very helpful. I would rate Freshservice a 9 out of 10.

My main use case for Device42 is that we use it as a CMDB and affinity map to check out network topology or determine when we need to decom something in a life cycle. We use it for many different purposes.

A quick specific example of how we use Device42 for one of those purposes is that being able to deploy it at a customer site and do a mapping of the environment gives us an overview of how we would go about structuring the rest of the products that we would put in place. We use the topology map to build out, say, network segments or understand server affinity mapping architecture and build our disaster recovery plans around that.

In addition to my main use case, we use Device42 as a lifecycle manager as well, and I know many people do not use that, but it does have functionality to be able to pull data CMDB-wise.

The best features Device42 offers, in my opinion, are the network mapping and topology; I think that is the best functionality of the software.

What stands out for me about the network mapping and topology is the visualization, which is the biggest part of it. Being able to see the topology and affinity mapping out in front of you on the screen in the way that they create it is very handy.

Device42 has positively impacted my organization by definitely speeding up our discovery process when we are working with clients or new clients up front with the onboarding. To build out a proper DR recovery for people, it is a necessity to understand their environment, and Device42 helps us understand those environments much quicker compared to manual intervention or running other tools in a segment and several other applications to gather roughly the same type of mapping data.

Device42 saves a significant amount of time, with onboarding and discovery being reduced significantly, specifically around understanding how to build out a client's circuits and network topology. Typically, we have to match that on our side to do a proper disaster recovery environment for individuals, and we build out clean rooms and do the full setup at a hot site. Being able to match that identically with a mapping that we know to be the source of truth and to be accurate saves weeks and weeks of time within the discovery process.

I think Device42 can be improved by adding more features around the CMDB aspect and lifecycle management. I do not think many people use it for that functionality, but if they were to expand the subset of tools available with that and maybe dig a bit deeper with what you could do with the data mining from that, it would be beneficial. Making it expansible into other types of reporting that does not exist right now, or perhaps a complete reporting engine, and being able to visualize that data from the lifecycle pieces of it in a more consumeristic way would be valuable. We want to be able to go to that and just look at the reporting for CMDB to understand, at a fast pace, when lifecycles are coming up and help us identify and manage those into, say, the capacity planning process and all that. I think that data could be useful in many different functions if the mining aspect and reporting aspect were improved and extensive.

I have been using Device42 for five years.

Device42 is stable.

I feel Device42's scalability is easy; I do not have a problem with adding devices to it or any other aspect within that, or installing it in multiple places and using it. Everything works scale-wise. I feel it scales fine.

I have only used customer support a handful of times, but they have always been responsive, pleasant, and solved my problems. I have no complaints there.

I previously used Cloudscape for affinity mapping before switching to Device42. IBM bought them, and then it turned into another product, and so it just seemed to be a hassle continuing with that product, and that is when we started using Device42.

I have not seen a return on investment in terms of cutting employees and have not really tracked the monetary savings that we have. The time investment is the biggest piece that we have noticed as a whole, and it is significant. We are saving weeks and weeks of time during discovery processes, and that is repeatable. Onboarding a new customer, we save time. Every customer we onboard and we use Device42 as a mapping agent, we save time with. Eventually it extends into major time savings over the course of a year.

I evaluated Cloudscape before choosing Device42.

My advice to others looking into using Device42 is to definitely take into account the flexibility of being able to use it as a CMDB source or data source with lifecycle management. I feel many people miss that aspect of it or do not use it for that, but it can be quite flexible in that direction. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.