BMC TrueSight Reviews

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.

We use the solution for infrastructure monitoring.

It is a very stable product.

The solution could improve its price.

I have been using the solution for some time now.

I do not see any complaints about the tool’s stability.

The tool is scalable. A small team of two to five people manages the product in the organization. The number of users in operations depends upon the size of the environment. When we operate, we need a team to monitor and take action. It is a completely managed service.

I haven’t received any complaints from our customers regarding the technical support team.

The setup is okay. It is not complex. The time taken for deployment depends on the project and the size of the customer.

To deploy the solution, we need to install agents, install the software, ensure that the servers and the prerequisites are ready, and ensure that the setup related to integration to the endpoints and security is ready. The problem is not in the setup and installation of the product. Usually, the problem is related to the infrastructure and facilitating access to the product through security procedures. The administration of the solution is easy. A couple of people can manage it.

The pricing depends on the requirements of the customers and the additional functionalities they need. The product is suitable for enterprise customers, not for SMEs. The tool is very flexible with its pricing. I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

We require market standards to understand the improvements needed in the product. Overall, I rate the solution a seven 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.

Our company is currently moving to consolidate the different programs we use. We regularly use Patrol and TrueSight, both are BMC products, providing the same functionality although completely different solutions. We are evaluating which is the right product for us and we're taking everything into consideration because the economy is not great and we have budget issues. Our business requires several complex configurations of systems; web servers, databases and processing environments. All of them must work together under proper performance and this is where we need a complex product like TrueSight. 

The business event manager tool that consolidates detailed information from a single instance of equipment is the most valuable thing for me. It provides support for the business tools and the IT services which come from several systems. Some are replicated and service tools provide the same functionality for some things. The end user service is made up of a lot of systems and it's what I'm interested in, and how I discovered that BMC TrueSight is good for us. I don't use the event management or monitoring capabilities, I work with user management capabilities. 

I think the solution is overly complex and requires a lot of resources. 

I've been using this solution for around 18 months. 

I haven't noticed any issues with stability. We sometimes have to call for failures or questions but on the whole, it's fine.

There are no concerns about scalability, it's performing well. We have deployed it where we have the most critical applications. We have changed our approach to new architecture and mobile. Instead of big servers, we have now deployed formal servers for web services. We're working on increasing the number of servers available. Our only concern is that it requires some investment at the beginning of the project and we have budget concerns. 

We don't use BMC technical support directly, we go through a partner. 

I am involved in the planning and the development of the solution, so from my perspective the initial setup is a little complex but not in itself, rather because managing the user services requires access to a CMDB. To get the best from this kind of product requires other processes and tools to be aligned with it. The consideration is that these tools provide very good functionality but getting the benefits requires other processes and tools. Our deployment is still in progress, we've been working on it for six months using a consultant from a third party, a BMC partner.

We haven't yet established what the final cost would be for licensing this solution, we're still working on that. 

These kinds of products provide benefits if you have other processes that require alignment with other IT solutions, like in sales and deployment and CMDB. Without that, you don't get the full benefits. At the end of every phase we stop and check the software products before starting the next phase of the project.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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.