BMC TrueSight Operations Management Reviews

If you have a TrueSight umbrella, it is a capturing tool that used to be called BPPM (BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management), or Patrol, and it proactively monitors your IT infrastructure, e.g. the data center containing your server applications, or database, middleware, or network devices.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is used for proactive monitoring where it has a connection with the email engine, so you can receive alerts. Through this solution, you can monitor your infrastructure, understand where the problem is coming from, and more easily understand your infrastructure. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is a firefighter that will help you when problems come.

There are many features that are most valuable in BMC TrueSight Operations Management.

First, its proactive monitoring feature is highly developed. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is an intelligent tool that's able to understand day-to-day operations and consistently gives alerts. The alerts are not automatic for some activities, e.g. some alerts are given monthly, while some are given more frequently.

The consolidated dashboard where you can enjoy a single pane of glass to look at the full infrastructure from the servers to the VMs, to the clouds, to the application, to the database, to the network devices, including having a topology, and having a tendency map of the topology of key offerings, is also a valuable feature of this solution.

There are still many things that can be improved in BMC TrueSight Operations Management.

They need to dig deeper into the layers of application monitoring. They're very strong in server and network monitoring, but they're still lacking on many of the sites, and there's still much work to be done on cloud monitoring.

These are the areas that need improvement for this solution.

We would be expecting additional features in the next release, as they always come up with good features and updates during version upgrades.

I'd like to see more features in the application side as they are lacking, when compared to AppDynamics or other competitors who have advantage over application monitoring features.

On the Cloud side, what I'd like to see on the next release is for this solution to be 100% on the Cloud, rather than it being a hybrid model.

These are the things we are looking forward to in the next release.

Our company has been a partner of BMC for almost 18 years, and that's the amount of time we've been using solutions from BMC.

This solution is 100% reliable. It's stable.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is easy to scale. It can easily take any load, and any of the tools out there. It's an enterprise level tool.

We contacted BMC technical support several times. The L1 and L2 support team need improvement in terms of product knowledge, but most of the time, they're always available and always trying to help us out.

There were many cases where there was a lack of response, or a longer response time. If a product defect has been found, for example, the case has to be escalated to a senior or another department, e.g. R&D, which means we have to wait for a response from that senior or from the R&D department, and that usually takes time.

The initial setup for BMC TrueSight Operations Management is straightforward, but it's not that typical when deployed on-premises. It depends on the environment of the customer, the infrastructure, and how dependent it is. It also depends on the complexity of that environment, and what kind of tools they have in their network devices.

There can be a number of things that could make the setup straightforward or complex, e.g. If the environment is very clean and only have one or two volumes when they're using Cisco or SP, then it's easy to improve, but when the variants are too much, then it could take time.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is not on the cheaper side, but its pricing is on a case by case basis. Small, medium, and large-sized companies can afford it. Its licensing model is simple and based on the devices. You get the licenses based on the number of servers or network devices.

There are no hidden costs from BMC. They are very transparent with their customers. Everything's in front of the customer, including charges. They are really transparent. What we say and what BMC says, we make sure to deliver to the customer. Everything's very, very clear, including pricing and charges.

I evaluated AppDynamics.

We are a partner of BMC Software, RiskNow, and Atlassian.

We have experience with all end-to-end BMC tools, starting from BMC Remedy ITSM for automations, to their operations management tool: BMC TrueSight Operations Management, which is used for monitoring, etc. We recommend these tools for our customers to use, except for application monitoring, as we didn't find a good tool for this on the BMC side, so we went with AppDynamics, then moved to Cisco. We are also looking into Dynatrace and exploring if our customers can use it.

We're always recommending the latest version of BMC TrueSight Operations Management to our customers, and we keep on upgrading if a new version is available.

Most of our customers have this solution deployed on-premises. If it was deployed on cloud, then we wouldn't have to take care of the upgrade, because it will be done automatically. Though cloud deployment is picking up, most of our customers are still deploying on-premises.

Apart from being a reseller of this solution, we also perform 100% implementation and other processes for our customers. We do end-to-end customer management.

After deployment, BMC TrueSight Operations Management only requires normal maintenance, or it can be taken cared of under managed services. Maintenance of this solution is hassle-free. It's just normal updating, e.g. patching.

This solution works well for any company size: small, medium, or large. It can take the load off any enterprise, no matter the size. It can be onboarded for a very big conglomerate without any challenge.

My advice to others looking into implementing BMC TrueSight Operations Management is to first find a partner for this solution. Once the implementation is done successfully, they can start using it. This is a beautiful solution and it works 100%, but it will still depend on how you're using it and how you're taking care of it. You need to take care of it so you can use it for a long time.

I'm rating BMC TrueSight Operations Management a ten out of ten.

TrueSight Operations Manager includes infrastructure monitoring, as well as application performance monitoring. The premier use case that I have seen, over the last few years is infrastructure monitoring, along with network monitoring. The overall use case is monitoring of IT infrastructure, including the network; monitoring, alerting, and event management.

Occasionally we have seen a couple of customers who are interested in the application performance management as well.

The actionable alerts that we get from monitoring the infrastructure or application are the end-result of the monitoring. Most of our customers are interested in those alerts and in having a ticket created out of the alerts in their ITSM solution.

I have deployed this solution, along with other BMC solutions, for many customers across multiple verticals, like healthcare, banking, and telecom. I have done eight to 10 implementation projects of TrueSight. Our company sells BMC Software solutions and we implement, develop, and support them.

In a project that we're working on for a telecom company, at the time we started implementing TrueSight Operations Management, the number of alerts or events, and subsequently the number of tickets from those events, was really high. After applying the intelligent thresholds in TrueSight, and doing all the event management to correlate the related alarms and deduplicating of the alarms, and suppressing unwanted alarms, we have been able to reduce the number of events, and hence the number of tickets, by almost 60 percent.

Before that, their data center NOC team was overwhelmed with the number of tickets and the number of events. By applying the intelligent thresholds, which are called signature thresholds in TrueSight, we have been able to reduce the noise and the false negatives and even false positives. We have been able to give them only the most important actionable alarms and tickets. This has freed up a lot of time for productivity for the network operations team. They have been able to focus on different things, along with their regular stuff.

It also helps maintain the availability of infrastructure across a hybrid or complex environment. Because TrueSight can monitor network devices, databases, storage, cloud environments, and a mix of on-prem and cloud, our solutions keep checking the availability of all the devices in the infrastructure and they alert you when there is an issue. So it definitely helps in maintaining the availability. You can also configure predictive alerts or intelligent thresholds or predictive thresholds. Using them, TrueSight will try to give you an alert before something goes wrong. It will look at the threshold and it will look at the trending data for a particular metric, and before that threshold is crossed, it will give you a predictive alert saying that this threshold may be crossed in the next 15 minutes or 30 minutes. So it helps maintain the availability of your environment.

In addition, it helps to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect application performance, if you're monitoring an application using TrueSight APM. You can monitor an application and record the important transactions in the application that you're interested in. That is called synthetic monitoring. For example, on a banking site, the user login could be the transaction you record.

The app visibility part discovers the application automatically, and it can even monitor at the code level. For example, if there is something wrong in a transaction, maybe on the HTTP response or at the Java or .NET code level, it can indicate where the problem may be in the application. TrueSight also has Probable Cause Analysis. If you are monitoring your IT infrastructure completely, it can correlate the alerts and give you the most probable cause of a particular alert. Again, this can help you figure out the underlying issues in the environment.

The TrueSight solution has built-in intelligence. It uses its analytical engine, an AI engine, to look at the performance data for anything that it's monitoring and it creates a baseline of the performance. Then, it gives you abnormality alerts based on the baseline. Even if your threshold is not crossed, but the baseline of that metric is crossed, it will intelligently give you an alert saying that this metric is trending above the baseline. There may be a case where the static threshold has been set too high, but TrueSight has the intelligent analytical engine that can analyze the trend or the baseline, and then give you an intelligent alert. The Probable Cause Analysis uses the analytics engine to figure out what the probable cause may be for a particular alert. BMC is making good progress in terms of AI.

Mean time to remediation is related to the Probable Cause Analysis and integration with some other components like orchestration or executing a remote action. It definitely helps in reducing the mean time to remediate, but it depends on the expertise of the administrator of TrueSight. In my current assignment we have implemented TrueSight for a large customer in the Middle East, and we have quantified how much we have reduced the meantime to remediate. For the top-priority incidents, we have reduced the MTTR from 12 hours to 1.5 hours.

One of the most prominent features and values of the solution is that it helps to reduce IT operations costs. If you are using Operations Management and TrueSight Capacity, you can get a real picture of how much your IT assets are utilized, and how much of their capacity is saturated or underutilized. It gives you a very clear picture of your entire IT infrastructure, including your network devices and your cloud infrastructure. Your entire infrastructure is monitored and optimized for capacity, and that helps you save costs in your IT operations. I would estimate savings of 20 to 30 percent. I haven't calculated it myself. There are much higher numbers claimed by BMC.

The event management part of TrueSight Operations Management, in my experience, is probably the best in the market. You have endless flexibility. You can build your own rules, you have the MRL language, and you can implement any kind of logic on the alerts. It may be correlation, abstraction, or executing something as a result of the alerts. You have almost the whole range of options available for event management using the available customization. I've seen a couple of other solutions, like IBM's and HPE's for event management, and TrueSight Operations Management is far superior to them in event management.

The breadth of the solution's monitoring capabilities is a major selling point for the solution because it is incomparable. You can monitor almost any kind of server, all types of storage, network devices, databases, and even do application monitoring. You also have the option to develop your own Knowledge Module. If something that you want to monitor is not available, you can build your own Knowledge Module to monitor whatever you need. We also have cloud monitoring solutions, which are doing pretty well now. We have AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and container monitoring. The breadth covered by BMC for monitoring of IT infrastructure is really extensive. That breadth of monitoring is really valuable because we can cover almost any monitoring use case that customers come up with.

Also, the end-to-end, automatic ticketing — from generating an alert or an event, to doing event management, and then creating a ticket from the event, as well as automatic closure of the ticket or the event from the ticket — this whole end-to-end flow, is a major selling point. Most of our customers who have on-premise ITSM solutions use BMC Remedy. It is the most popular on-prem solution for ITSM. When customers have Remedy ITSM, it becomes a really good decision to use TrueSight Operations Management, and to use the out-of-the-box integration between the two solutions. That way, the ticketing is done automatically from the event and vice-versa.

In addition, the solution provides a single pane of glass where you can ingest data and events from many technologies. That's one of the major selling points that BMC is pitching for TrueSight Operations Management. You can monitor everything: servers, networks, databases, and your applications. You can also implement capacity optimization and the Presentation Server has a single console, a view and dashboards, where you can see everything in one place.

Previously, BMC called TrueSight a "manager of managers" because TrueSight can be integrated with almost every other monitoring and ticketing tool. For example, in my current project, we have integrated at least 20 other monitoring and alerting systems with TrueSight, and all the other systems are sending their events or alerts to TrueSight. Then, in TrueSight, we are doing the event management to reduce the noise, and filter out unwanted alerts, and get only the required alerts. Even for other integrations, TrueSight acts as a single pane of glass, where you have all these disparate systems. You can integrate all of them with TrueSight and get all the events and alerts in a single window.

In terms of root cause analysis, BMC TrueSight has a couple of modules like Service Impact Management and the Probable Cause Analysis, which work together to help you identify related events. This module, on paper, has a lot of promise, but it is actually really complicated. There are really small pieces working together and you have to have a lot of expertise to get any value out of the root cause analysis piece of the solution. For that reason, most of the customers don't really get much value out of the root cause analysis part of TrueSight.

There are other areas with room for improvement as well. For example, the monitoring part requires four or five different types of agents to monitor different things in your infrastructure, which makes things very complicated.

In addition, to implement the Operations Management solution alone, you need a lot of hardware; a lot of servers and a lot of hardware resources. If you compare it with other solutions in the market, like Dynatrace or AppDynamics, the implementation of those products can be done using notably fewer servers. If you want to set up a standalone TrueSight Operations Management for a customer, you need at least 10 servers to implement Infrastructure Management and Application Performance Management. To do the same implementation for Dynatrace or AppDynamics or SolarWinds you only need three or four servers maximum, for the same environment. So the number of resources required for implementation is very much on the higher side.

The complexity of the solution is, again, a challenge. There are so many different components that it becomes almost a nightmare for the operations teams to do the administration and apply hotfixes, patches, and to do daily operations for the solution.

It's too complex, too many servers are required, there are too many different components in the solution, and a lot of agents are required.

Apart from that, some of the intelligence features could also be enhanced. For example, the AI part of TrueSight Operations Management should be enhanced to compete with other products in the market.

I've been using BMC TrueSight Operations Management for the last nine years, approximately.

Once the solution is deployed and the fine-tuning recommendations are in place, the solution is very stable. In my current environment we haven't seen any issue whatsoever in the last year. We have at least 20 servers running various TrueSight components, and none of them has had any issues in that time. So in that time the availability has been 100 percent and it has been 100 percent stable.

It does scale well, but my concern with the solution is that when you want to scale it up the complexity increases. That is mainly because of the number of different components or software pieces that work together.

The multitenancy mode of TrueSight has a lot of room for improvement. It's like if you have a building and there are many apartments in it, you can have multiple tenants in the same building. If you want to add a tenant, you just give them an apartment in the same building. But with TrueSight, to set up multitenancy, you have to set up separate "buildings" altogether, instead of compartmentalizing into "apartments," which makes everything much more complex.

I have been using BMC support for many years. Generally speaking, support is very good and, comparatively, it is much better than the competitors' support departments. But over the past couple of years, the technical expertise of the support team has consistently gone down. 

Generally, the response from BMC support is excellent. You get a response almost immediately. And if the support team is unable to resolve your issue, then they coordinate with their development or customer engineering team very quickly, which is the best part.
If you are trying to get technical support from Microsoft, for example, if the support team is unable to resolve your problem, it can take months to get to a higher level in the support hierarchy. And reaching the development team of the solution is almost unimaginable. But with BMC, this is one of the best parts. If your issue is not resolved by a support team within a stipulated time period, they immediately reach out to their development team and they usually fix the problem.

The initial deployment depends on the customer environment. If the environment is small or medium, the solution can be deployed fairly quickly, and similarly if the customer wants to deploy a standalone setup. But for a large customer, especially for customers who want to deploy the solution in a clustered environment, in a high-availability environment, or even in a DR environment, it's very complex to set up initially and it takes a fairly large amount of time to implement.

The initial setup means setting up the components, setting up the basic monitoring. The advanced configurations take extra time. For a small or medium environment, we can do the initial setup in a couple of weeks. A small to medium environment is where they are monitoring between 50 and 300 or 400 servers and IT infrastructure components, such as storage devices or hardware.

If you go above a few hundred devices, it becomes a large environment. For a large environment, it may take anywhere between two and four months to set up, depending on what kind of deployment the customer prefers: whether they want high availability, a  clustered setup, or a disaster recovery setup.

We do have standardized deployment configurations for customers and we recommend that customers use them. We are BMC's most prominent partner in the Middle East, so we have done quite a few deployments and we have created standard templates for deployment, for small, medium, and large customers. Generally, the customers leave it to us to decide the implementation strategy and then we use our standard deployment template for the given environment, and that makes things much smoother and faster. We already know which component to install when, what configuration should be done, and how much time it should take, ideally. And tasks can be initiated in parallel, like agent installations.

I would advise that you really give a lot of thought to how much you want to monitor and what the anticipated growth in monitoring requirements will be. These things should be considered in the planning phase and, accordingly, you should decide what type of environment to set up.

The licensing depends on the data streams and the event streams. If you are monitoring all the metrics for the monitored devices, the data streams and event streams will increase multifold as well. Therefore, filtering is very important in TrueSight. If you are monitoring the memory utilization for a server, for example, that alone has 20-plus attributes in TrueSight. If you let in all 20 attributes, the number of data streams will increase. If you're really interested only in the utilization metric, you may also be monitoring 19 metrics that you are not interested in and they will add to the data stream and the licensing cost will increase.

Consider scalability very carefully: how much you want to monitor and what components are very important. Then, depending on these two things, filter out unwanted metrics or attributes. If you do a good job at filtering the data, then your licensing costs will be manageable.

I'm not aware of the details of the licensing models of TrueSight's competitors, but our business team says that the cost of using TrueSight is higher compared to its competitors. But that often comes down to the filtering and the sizing. The filtering has to be done very carefully to bring down the licensing costs. 

The licensing module is good and fairly self-explanatory. It's not very complex.

There are different pieces which are licensed separately. For example, Service Impact Management and Application Performance Management are licensed separately. Large customers buy the entire solution with all the features but they don't necessarily use all the features, especially the Service Impact Management. The latter is very difficult to implement and to get value out of. My advice is to consider what features of the solution you are going to use and then just pay for those features, instead of paying for everything without even using it.

Without naming particular competitors, I can give you general pros and cons of TrueSight Operations Management, when compared with them.

One of the pros of TrueSight Operations Management is the breadth of the IT infrastructure monitoring capabilities. TSOM can actually monitor any component of your IT infrastructure, along with your applications. It does very deep-dive monitoring and you have many more metrics, compared to any other solution, as far as I'm aware. It gives you more in-depth diagnostics and performance data. 

Also, the support from BMC software is better than its competitors. 

The complexity of implementing TSOM — the number of components required to set it up and the number of servers you need — is one of the cons. And the number of different agents you need to monitor different things is another con.

TrueSight, as a solution, is a very large suite nowadays. In the last year or so, BMC has made the Orchestration module a part of the TrueSight portfolio. Then there are the Server Automation, Network Automation, and BladeLogic Client Automation pieces that are merged into the TrueSight portfolio. If you consider the entire TrueSight product suite, which includes TrueSight Operations Management, Infrastructure Management, and Application Performance Management, and you have TrueSight Capacity Optimization, TrueSight Orchestration, and TrueSight Automation — if you combine all these solutions you can see business innovation. You can automate a lot of mundane and repetitive tasks. You can automate a lot of administrative functions. You can integrate a lot of different components using Orchestration, and that helps reduce the human cost involved. And maybe you can use your human resources for more productive or more creative tasks, for things other than repetitive activities. So TrueSight can help businesses to innovate.

Overall, I would rate the solution at eight out of 10.

From a senior management perspective, they want to get an understanding, when there is an outage, what is the impact of that outage across the entire suite of the company's products. We have an Event Manager that integrates all of our monitoring tools. Since we are a large company, we have about 26 different monitoring tools in use. The idea is getting all of them into a framework which can feed such a model that displays the impact of an outage.

We have one application, which is fairly large. In the past, we had Level 1 and 2 NOC support teams who were responsible for watching dashboards. When they saw an issue in the application, they would call Level 2 or 3 support and escalate the call, if necessary. Now, through the use of this product, we have been able to reduce the headcount by five people, as we are able to eliminate the eyes on the glass. We no longer have people watching the dashboard. We have events which are processed automatically through the system and get to the right people. We had six people in L1s, and now have one. So, we reduced five out of six headcount, which is pretty significant. 

Also, the average length of time used to be 45 minutes before we had the right engineer on the line, fixing the problem. Now, it's probably three to five minutes.

The solution affected our end user experience management very positively. Our application teams are very excited about what we're doing with the reduction in headcount. More importantly, the automation that it has brought to us has streamlined so many manual tests, The teams are very happy with the way things are going.

The solution will help us maintain the availability of our infrastructure across a hybrid or complex environment. Right now, we can get to an event scenario or problem quicker than we used to. We are right on the cusp of releasing our service impact modeling. This will help us tremendously because we have a multicloud, as well as an on-premise environment. Any component should show the impact across its applications, regardless of where it's located. It has definitely helped in these environments.

We have improved our ability to get to a root cause because of the way their tools work. If you follow it down to the lowest level of the diagram, and a problem happens, it lights up a certain model in red. However, if you go down to the lowest member of the tree, you'll see who is the lowest person. So, if it's a database saying, "I'm out of disk space," then it may create all types of chaos. Following that tree down, you'll see the lowest level is the database server, and it has an event disk space issue. Then, right there, that's the root cause of all your application issues. So, it has helped us get to the root cause more quickly.

We're just now gaining momentum on the adoption of this product. We have seen with a database out of disk space, because we can get to the root cause quicker, we know what the root cause is. It can be remediated faster, but we can also eliminate the number of people who have to be on outage calls. There is no need to have network people on a call if it's a database issue. We let them deal with other things, so our operation becomes more efficient. The database people know exactly what the problem is, and quickly.

The most valuable feature is the event management piece of it. We have it integrated with a number of our different products. Thus, we can create events into a single Event Manager, which will create a Remedy ticket for us. This is a huge feature for us.

We have 26 different monitoring tools. The way this product works it allows us to define a custom event call. We can take all of our monitoring tools, and say "If you can put an event into this specific format, then we have a way of creating a common event across all of our monitoring tools." By doing that, we have a single back-end process that acts on all of the events. So, we only do a data transformation upfront when we are receiving events. This simplifies our back-end.

The solution has helped to reveal underlying infrastructure issues affecting app performance. We constantly have network issues. The network team had been capturing them, but it wasn't integrated into any impact model. By integrating them into an impact model, we could now catch and see the impact of them to our applications. 

It's a complex system. The implementation is fairly challenging. They have done a good job lately of getting videos out there. We would like more videos and self-training, though. Right now, you have to go to BMC's training classes to get a good understanding of the product, and those training classes are very expensive. While I understand they are a business and trying to make money, a lot of their competition has training available via YouTube. There is much more accessibility to competitors' training. 

In a large company of our size, we need multiple people in our company trained. So, I have to take the training classes. Then, I have to go and train the rest of my organization. I would prefer to say to the other people on my team, "Go to this link and..." Or, "Here's a list of training sessions that you can go to which are online and that are free." I think it would help the adoption of their product in the marketplace, personally.

It's a far more complex technology than I perceived at the beginning to deploy. I would have thought that the integration between their products would have been more seamless than it has been. This is what has made it a lot more complex than I anticipated.

From a technical standpoint, some of their products still have a dependency on Oracle Databases, and they are very well integrated in the cloud for a lot of their components. There is another database technology called Postgres, which they are partially integrated with. However, if they were to get all of their platforms integrated into Postgres, it would be much less expensive for companies, such as mine, to go to high availability, etc. The architecture really needs to be upgraded. I know they're doing a lot of this, but they need to keep doing it, and accelerate their process, so they can remain competitive.

Stability of the product is about a seven out of 10. As far as stability goes, it has mostly been very good. With some of the newer stuff on 11.3, we have to call to support a lot of times and get a patch sent to us because certain things just don't work. Those pieces would have hurt stability, but once you get it running, it's very good.

The overall scalability of its platform and the ability to support its website is pretty good. We have a couple people on our team who seem like they are pretty proficient at it. They can do things rather quickly. 

I don't use PATROL. It is pretty good if you use their native products, like PATROL for monitoring. We integrate other monitoring tools into TSOM, so we don't use PATROL. I am familiar with it though, and I have been trained on it. I feel like it's pretty labor-intensive to manage. For example, if I have a number of different classes of servers, there are a lot of screens that I have to fill out, deploy, and push out to my systems. There has to be a more efficient way to do this. My company is always pressuring us to be more scalable. It is not very scalable in the administration of its monitoring. It could be better.

For TrueSight Operations Manager, there are a limited number of people who use it, no more than 15 to 20 system administrators and support personnel, who are mostly in administrative functions. The reason that there are so few users utilizing the system is because all the events are automated. Most of our support teams and users look at Remedy, and there are over 3000 users looking at Remedy. So, a lot of the users of our overall system have no need to look at a TrueSight console. Their work is done through the way we have designed the system. They get a Remedy ticket and what's called a PagerDuty notification. They know when they get those two things that there's an issue along with all the information's contained within those two systems. They don't need to go to the TrueSight console. 

The technical support team is very good. I wish there where more the people. This includes the ones who I work with on the phone, as well as their field technical people. They are very good. 

I don't know if their technical support differs from their project team, but we are constantly revolving people in and out of our project because they get different assignments within BMC. Thus, I wish there more technical support people who had more longevity on our account. We will have a CMDB person assigned to us on the project from BMC, but in just three weeks, we'll find out, "Oh, that person has been reassigned, and they have to go to another account, where they have to do something different." We are constantly having to retrain people coming in from BMC. So, there is no permanence with their people on our projects.

This issue of changing technical staff is not limited to BMC. However, their resource pool seems sort of small.

We are constantly facing issues with having to call support because things didn't work as we expected them to, and I don't know why that is. We use BMC Atrium CMDB product (service impact model) and publishing service impact models seems to be challenging and problematic. We are constantly calling support, who gives them a bug fix, which fixes the problem. However, those bugs shouldn't have existed in the first place. If there is a bug fix in it that somebody knows how to fix, it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

BMC is one of our longest running partnerships. We have been using Remedy for many years. We have been using parts of this system since 1998. However, we have never put it altogether in the way that we're doing now. We didn't replace anybody else. We had used their products before, but not to their full advantage.

It's a complex system. We were dealing with a highly customized Remedy system which caused us a lot of issues. We had to wait for a Remedy upgrade to occur before we could deploy our systems. We were at this for about a year, and most of that time was waiting to get the Remedy implementation in place. Once the Remedy implementation and upgrade were completed, there were a lot of challenges with our CMDB data and the integration of the CMDB to a service model along with the publishing of a service model. 

We have Remedy, a service model, TrueSight Operations Manager, and TSIM. With a lot of technologies in play, making them all work together has been challenging, since each one of them is a fairly sophisticated technology. BMC could do something to make it easier.

It took about three months to deploy the core technology which solved our problem. We have been waiting a very long time on the Remedy upgrade, which was over a year. However, this was because our company had highly customized the prior Remedy version. Without that in the equation, the technology took us around three months to deploy. 

We are still enhancing it. That time frame was just to get it deployed. To make the full use and benefit of it, that will take well over a year. Both the technology and the organization, who is using it, need to be matured.

Right now, four or five of our core products are monitored and feeding this environment. Because we've been successful at it, we anticipate integrating more of our products and the monitoring of those products into our system. We have already built the integrations for the different monitors. It is just getting the different teams to want to use this system. That's why it's an organizational maturity thing. We could take them on very quickly, but there has to be a willingness on their part to do so. Part of our strategy is to make them want to use this system. That's on the event side. 

On the service impact side, we're working with senior management. This Friday, we have a demo with the CIO with this technology, because he is the one who is putting the pressure on the different application teams to onboard with us.

We have a multiyear onboarding strategy, where we're onboarding more applications and integrating them into this particular environment. Today, they are being monitored by their own support teams, who are now beginning to see the success that we are having. The challenge that we are having organizationally is, when we onboard their applications, we expose the issues of their products through Remedy tickets and outages. A lot of times, these teams want to hide that. So, we have political issues, as well as technological hurdles to deal with.

We did a lot of it ourselves, since we had the knowledge in-house, specifically on the event management side. We were an ADDM environment. So, we had bits and pieces of technology knowledge in our company, but in order to pull it all together, we used Wipro, as well as BMC in India to drive this. That's still the case. We're still using them to get this whole thing deployed in various pieces. 

Overall, our experience with BMC and Wipro has been positive. However, there have been challenges because the technical people have moved from our account to another account. We have a rotating team of people, which gets very challenging for continuity.

For deployment and maintenance of TrueSight, we need about four people. For the whole enterprise solution, we need 25 people for 24/7/365 support.

We have reduced headcount and shrunk the mean time to resolve. That's how we justify the expense of the product. It has really worked out.

It has helped us reduce IT Ops costs. We were able to replace the headcount of five out of six Level 1 technicians. We repurposed those people to higher level tasks. Without this solution, we would not have replaced that job function.

We did a five-year, multimillion dollar deal.

We haven't licensed the solution's machine-learning and analytics to deploy artificial intelligence for IT ops.

We looked at some of their competitors, but because of the technology and the base of knowledge that we already had in place, it made sense to stick with BMC. We decided to focus on making their products integrate the way they were supposed to and were designed to. That's what we've been doing since we had the knowledge and license in-house.

We also evaluated ServiceNow and BigPanda.

On the pros side, BMC and ServiceNow were very similar products. My biggest concern with BMC was they seemed to be declining in market penetration versus ServiceNow, which has been expanding considerably over the last several years. That was my biggest concern with moving forward with BMC. The pros with BMC were that we already had the knowledge in-house and the technology was proven for us. We knew it was fairly solid, so we felt confident that we would be successful with it.

One of the other differences between the two companies is the marketing organization from ServiceNow was a lot more consistent than from BMC. We probably get more calls even today from the ServiceNow account rep than we do from our BMC team. They show up every once in a while, and they do a big dog and pony show, then they go away for a bit. So, I don't think their marketing is as strong as it should be, or we're not a big enough customer for them. However, with the amount of investment we have in their product, they should be around more often.

There is one piece of BMC technology that we decided not to use. That's their Atrium Orchestrator. We use a different third-party orchestrator called Ayehu. We just found the Atrium Orchestrator from BMC to be too complex.

Make sure you have knowledgeable people on your staff. Give yourself plenty of time for deployment, if you think it will take three months, make it six months. Look at past companies' experience on time to deploy, knowledge, and staffing requirements.

The solution's event management capabilities are very good. In some ways, they are based on very old technology. I first started using it way back in the late nineties and the basic core of the product does not appear to have changed much since then. Back then, it was a very good product. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. The other things that the company has done since then. Its enhanced the website portal, which I have a very positive impression of. 

The website is fairly new, and it could be a little bit better. However, if I were to compare it to some of the other tools out there, it has a much nicer GUI and presentation. The web presentation is much more advanced than BMC's TSOM server.

We still have multiple panes of glass. E.g., we have an Event Manager screen along with a Remedy screen. We're getting closer to a single pane of glass and have fewer panes of glass. Where we had a lot of dashboards before, we now don't have anything, as we've replaced all of them. So, there are no panes of glass in our support. So, if you are a support personnel at our company, you are not looking at a screen. Instead you are looking at your cell phone, because we reach out to you when there's a problem and you don't have to look at anything.

We are using about five percent of our environment. We have what is called a limited deployment right now, because we have so much integration and automation going on. We needed to mature the support teams and the rest of the organization as a whole in what we're doing. Once we have achieved that, I anticipate a 100 percent of our applications are going to be feeding this system. After that, we will greatly extend our use.

The solution monitors our customer’s infrastructure.

The solution has major features that enable users to use the tool more effectively. The tool is flexible enough to be customized based on customer requirements.

The product must provide more AI capabilities. AI is already available but must play a deeper role in the solution.

I have been using the solution for the last 15 years.

The product has been in the market for more than 20 to 30 years, which tells us about the stability of the product and the enhancement that the vendor has done to ensure that the product is on top.

The product’s scalability depends on the person working on it. The administrators can make any required changes. Since I am experienced and certified, I do the maintenance myself.

The time taken for deployment depends on the deployment size and the environment. The installation process and configurations vary depending on the customers' environment. The initial components must be installed based on the customer's requirements and server availability.

Any customer who has multiple servers will not be able to monitor them manually. The tool helps to know the unknown. Instead of having a person, we use the tool to monitor the server for errors.

The cost depends on the usage.

I will recommend the solution to others. People who want to buy the solution must ensure that they use all the features. They must spend time with the tool before deciding to buy it. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

I am using BMC TrueSight Operations Management to monitor infrastructure and applications that are hosted on servers.

The most valuable feature of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is the dashboard presentation server.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management could use some enhancements in the application visibility tools.

I have been using BMC TrueSight Operations Management for approximately three months.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is stable.

The solution is scalable.

I am the only one using this solution in my organization.

The initial setup of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is easy. It takes approximately 15 minutes to do the installation. 

I would advise others to use BMC TrueSight Operations Management.

I rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management an eight out of ten.

ITSM is used for incident tracking. We have deployed it for one of our customers that is in the telecom domain. Service providers are using this tool to log tickets related to the product they are using from the main organization. They log tickets in case they're facing some issue with the services they're using or providing to their customers. 

Apart from that, we have implemented the end-to-end change management life cycle and the knowledge management module as a self-service tool. Basically in all ITSM modules, we are delivering solutions to the customer.

I'm currently working with product version 21.3. It's deployed on-prem.

Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers.

The UI for the end users could be improved and more flexible than it is now. If it becomes more flexible, it will be the best interface among all ITSM centers.

I have been using this solution for about 12 and a half years.

It's very stable.

It's highly scalable.

Technical support is very good.

It's straightforward. For complexity, I would rate it 1 out of 5.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

I am a certified TrueSight Operations Administrator where I monitor and implement BMC products. This solution is used to monitor various software infrastructures (i.e. servers, databases, hardware, etc.).

I like everything about this tool.

There are some small limitations with this tool in terms of reporting dashboards that fit all of the requirements of the individual customer.

I have been using this solution for the last ten years.

This is a stable solution.

This is a scalable solution.

There are some troubleshooting steps that we are able to resolve ourselves. In the event that we are unable to resolve it, we simply just raise a case with BMC support and that are always there to help if necessary.

This is a straightforward solution all around and there are three ways that you are able to install it: a silent installer, a command-line installer, plus Linux OS and Windows installers.

Depending on the project requirements, basic installation takes about five days for standalone setup. In the event that there is an HA setup that needs to be taken, an additional five or so days can be added to that time.

We have implemented this for a bank that has their entire infrastructure monitored by BMC and they have about five thousand users.

We use out in-house team to implement the solution for our clients. We have a team of three people for maintenance of the tool.

Annual licensing amount depends on the customers requirements. Support is an additional fee and there are options for three and five year support.

I recommend this solution to anyone looking for a standalone solution with high availability meaning that can be used depending on the customers requirements.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use BMC TrueSight Operations Management in a Microsoft-based environment which we feel is best for performance monitoring and management. In our company, most of the workload is on Microsoft but the new version of the solution can monitor the workload of Linux too. My multi-fact servers are readily available and best practices are being suggested. I do not have to work and create everything from scratch because most of the features are there. Most of the alerts are available and very active but there are times I have to modify the extra alerts.

The most valuable features are the rich reports, high performance, and the look and feel of the WebEx webpage are very good.

I have been using BMC TrueSight Operations Management for approximately five years.

The solution is stable. We have not needed to speak to the vendor regarding any issues, it has been operating very well.

The solution is scalable.

We have more than 200 users in my organization using this solution and there are approximately three staff members that log into the solution for management and to check the resources. We had plans to increase usage of the solution but because of financial issues, we are not able to at this time.

We have been in contact with technical support to align our objectives and to determine their effectiveness and for information regarding updates. We have been satisfied with the support and we have not needed them for any issues, only information.

The solution gives clear instructions of what systems are required. You are able to simply plug data as a virtual machine in your environment and they have the option of going to the cloud. In the cloud version, you can easily enable the subscription and start working, deploying, and integrate with your environment.

On the client side, I do not have to configure or update anything on the software. It discovers what is running on the client-side system and it automatically does everything.

We used a vendor to do the implementation because of our company policy and to make sure it was done correctly.

The solution only requires updates for the maintenance of the solution.

The price of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is very high. If there was more flexibility with the sizing of the licensing it would be helpful, especially during the pandemic. We have wanted to expend but the licensing cost is too high.

I rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management a ten out of ten.