BMC TrueSight Reviews

Park Place Technologies brought in TrueSight for three reasons. The first reason was the Presentation Server - the architecture. 

The second reason was the fact it has the AIOps piece. 

The third reason was their partner, called Sentry Software, out of France. We are a hardware maintenance company. We're probably one of the largest providers, worldwide, for replacing drives and storage equipment. We brought TrueSight in as a means of seeing if we could reduce the number of physical touches on a service ticket from eight to two. We've been accomplishing that with TrueSight and the Sentry software.

We provide post-warranty support for storage equipment and data center equipment. For example, if it's a VNX piece of storage gear that goes off warranty, we come in and we maintain it at a high level off of what the customer paid the OEM. We do the parts and the service in 35,000 data centers worldwide. TrueSight is enabling us to get that done in an automated fashion.

Sentry is the Knowledge Module we use in TrueSight. It has all the information about the storage equipment that we maintain. It tells us the part, the chassis, serial number, and all the detail that we spend a lot of time on phone calls with the customer trying to ascertain. We're doing that automatically now.

We brought the product in to handle the following: We're in 35,000 data centers today. We have 16,000 customers and we support about 400,000 assets. Those are big numbers. The pieces of storage equipment we provide have something native from the equipment manufacturers, the OEM, called "phone home." What happens is, when these devices start having a problem they send out an email that says, "I'm having this problem." To put that into perspective, we were trending towards 2,000,000 emails at the end of 2017, and growing. We would have to read 2,000,000 emails to find out what was going on. Something lower than seven percent actually had a problem we really had to read, and something well below one percent of those were actually a service event.

Before we brought in TrueSight, there were 8.2 touches via email or phone call after the ticket had come in, including exchanging log files with the customer through to our resolving it. And on the customer side, they had somebody having to look at the equipment to make sure it was actually working. From those 8.2 physical connections with them, we're down to two with TrueSight.

And here's the big difference. Instead of these things sending all of that information out in those emails, it's captured in the Knowledge Module, the policy and the agent, on the customer side of the firewall. What TrueSight does is that when it installs it takes a week to come up with what's called a dynamic baseline. It says, "For this piece of equipment in your environment, these are the key performance indicators that we're going to watch for." We can see events live when they happen. There are predictive and proactive warnings of failures or potential problems. But all that we ever get, the only thing that's communicated to us, is when there's a failure. So we can see all the chatter and we can look at that by customer, but we don't really need to. And if it's a predictive event, it will send us a notice saying, "We think this part's going to fail in two weeks," and we can help that customer.

But ultimately, what we get is a service ticket: "Failed part at this location. Here's the part number, the serial number, and the recommended remediation." That comes into our support center.

Eventually, when we have it all set up the way we envision it, the info will come into the support center and a ticket will be created and it will automatically connect to the tech and the tech will reach out to the customer. We haven't turned that on yet.

Right now, it comes in and we read it. We call the customer and say, "You have a failure." In most cases, the customer didn't know they had it yet, because it's that fast. We call them up and say, "You have a problem. We have the part, and when would you like Larry to come on site?" Because it's storage, they have to schedule downtime. Then we go out on site, we fix it, and we're done. So it's two physical touches now: We call them and they say, "Yes, it's completed."

So 2,000,000 emails have gone away, pretty much, and it all gets done at the customer site. What we see now, instead, is a couple of hundred or 1,000 service events, versus millions of emails. And we have the right part, the right chassis, the right location.

In our industry, there is about a 75 to 78 percent first-time fix rate, meaning repair personnel do not have to go back to a given site within a week. As a company, we were at about an 86 percent first-time fix rate. With TrueSight, we've never gone below 98 percent.

It's all done with software. I read all of the service emails from our customers. Customers are used to finding a log file and talking to our expert - and if a customer has five different pieces of equipment, there are five different experts involved. Now, they send a note in and they'll say, "This is resolved. I just want to make sure this process is working the way it's supposed to. I didn't call anybody. You called me to tell me I had a problem that I wasn't quite aware of. Now, I have a part, it's fixed, and we're good. Is that how it's supposed to work?" It's funny, because they were used to eight different interactions with us, as opposed to two. It's really cool.

It's taking an extremely manual process and, with the AI piece, literally helping us make better decisions. It's what AI is all about. It's really amazing. I'm excited about it because now, instead of our support center people trying to find the right part, they're calling the customer and saying, "By the way, you have a problem. We have a solution for you, and we notice in the same cluster you may have a failure in a week. Would you like us to look at that while we're there?" It's predictive, proactive maintenance. That is what it enables us to do, versus reactive.

Today, when we are proactive, it's for a fan or it's heat or it's a battery. We get notice they are about to fail and they fail pretty quickly thereafter. But when we start getting to operating systems, there are days, as you know, when you have gone on to your computer and it's been slow. On those days of the month, you can probably look in your network and find that there was a big push to get something done. With TrueSight, we'll be able to start proactively predicting these events before they happen, and rerouting the customer so they don't notice a slowdown. Our tagline is all about uptime. TrueSight helps us deliver that. It helps us deliver upfront.

The fact that they have a very integrated relationship with Sentry Software, the Knowledge Module, is valuable. We have one Knowledge Module that we're using today, which is the Sentry KM. We're bringing on the operating system Knowledge Module. The richest feature for us is the number of Knowledge Modules that we can load into the product to add breadth of service to the customer. It enables us to move up the operational stack from hardware, to operating system, to application, and to cloud. It's one presentation layer, one path with these Knowledge Modules, which we can add to it to get greater breadth.

That enables Park Place to provide one pane of glass over all those layers - hardware, OS, app, and cloud - which gives us a really good opportunity with the AIOps piece to get root cause analysis. And that's what our customers want: one pane of glass and a detailed root cause. If you've ever been in a data center when something goes wrong, the first thing they ask is, "What happened? What went wrong? Why did it break?"

It's the Knowledge Module which is the biggest feature that benefits us.

Reporting would be an area for improvement in TrueSight. In its purest form, TrueSight is an enterprise product, meaning one company would run it in its internal data centers and internal IT organization. But our company is more of a managed-service provider. We have almost 800 customers today on TrueSight and just under 10,000 assets. We need to be able to give a customer some information. If the customer's product fails, they'll ask us, "Did it have a problem beforehand?" We have all those events and we know all the problems it had beforehand. We have to be able to give them access to that kind of reporting. That's an enhancement that we need.

We white label TrueSight, but it's TrueSight at its core and we've had it installed here for just under three years. Version 10.7 is our production instance and we're using version 11.3 in Azure. We're moving to a cloud platform and we're doing that with 11.3. I was hired about 15 months ago.

The stability of TrueSight, in its natural form, is very good. We had stability issues with it because we were doing things that were outside of that normal boundary. We were bringing in way too much information. We didn't know how to filter it. Once we got the filtering in place, it became very stable.

In our six- to nine-month process of doing the proofs of concept, when we got to that ninth month we were bringing on as many customers as we could and we were getting everything we could possibly get from all of them. It took us about three months to tune that down, with BMC's help. The product was always stable before that. The product itself didn't fail. We just overwhelmed it. If you talk about data lakes, we flooded the lake every day. And it didn't stop. We just kept bringing more stuff in. Once we added the filters, we tuned those valves, it stayed up and has been running really well.

Our focus is to get 16,000 customers in TrueSight. We're walking up that scale every day. Once we figured the filtering out, we started getting the scalability. Prior to that, we were going the wrong way on scalability. But the elasticity seems to be there, the ability scale.

On a scale from one to five, with five being the best, I would give BMC technical support four-and-a-half. It's not a five because the reporting piece is still missing. We need the reporting piece. They can't give us all the help, because that help is just not fully there.

We had our own homegrown system - an email box - that the stuff came into. That's all we had. We did not use a competing product.

We went down an RFP path over three years ago. Our company has grown pretty dramatically. Between 2015 and two weeks ago, we made 14 acquisitions. There was no way we could grow the business mechanically with an 8.2-touch model in place. The support centers would be the biggest expense in the company.

It was a two-pronged approach to looking at resolving the opportunity that our growth created. The first approach was the customer, to give them quality of service: not having to get log files, not having to figure out what's going on at their end, and not having to call us. 

The second approach, for the Park Place support center, was to give them better tools to provide better service to the customer. We wanted our support center to go from trying to figure out what the right part was, to letting the customer know they were about to have a problem. That's a big difference. Both of these approaches have happened.

If you put that around the world with our growth, we now have a global approach with regional focus and local delivery. Because the systems are reporting the information, we don't worry about time zones or language. All that stuff goes away. The machines speak MIB, and the MIB communicates through TrueSight, and we get the information. We don't have to speak the local language until we go out and fix the problem, because the customer is not calling the support center anymore. We have a global footprint with a regional focus. In APAC, they're looking at problems that could be happening overnight in the US and vice-versa, or in EMEA. The problem is resolved, the customer is communicated with, and the person providing that communication speaks the local language.

The machines are literally running this thing, and all we are is the delivery model. TrueSight crosses all those barriers. It crosses time zones, it crosses language; it has all the pieces we need to know about repair, including the part and the location. It knows everything we need to know about the equipment, all the software, the LPARs, etc. It gives that to us in the support center, we contact the customer, and then we speak the local language and we bring the part locally.

It's very straightforward from a setup perspective. We were able to install it and get it running relatively quickly. That's not the hard part. 

The complexity comes in because, instead of it being what I would call an off-the-shelf product, TrueSight is a series of products with an encyclopedia of tools and they all add benefit. But getting those tools to work, that's where the complexity is; knowing exactly which piece to pull and to connect. An example would be putting filters in place. That took us a while. 

If you look at an average installation, it takes three to six months to get up and running. We got up way faster than that, but it has taken us about a year to get the engine to run at the capacity its capable of. It's like gas mileage where you have to drive it properly to get the right gas mileage. That has taken us some time to do. But once we got there, we have certainly been getting everything that's promised.

Park Place was up and running within a month to two months. Our production product was probably nine months out. That's when we started figuring out the filtering. We brought everything in and opened all of the spigots up, and we had all this volume coming in. With BMC's help - they were very helpful in this capacity - we were able to turn the valves to the proper flow, so we weren't flooding the thing every day.

Our implementation strategy was to put it up in a proof of concept first in a DevOps environment because our goal was to bring it out to customers. Once we got it into production, we started bring customers on as PoCs. We did about six months' worth of bringing on the customers, making sure we could bring it out and get its sea legs. Then we started deploying customers as fast as we could. And that's when we went from 10.5 to 10.7, and now we're moving to the new platform with 11.3.

We installed it ourselves, but with BMC's help. We did it ourselves with them looking over our shoulder. 

To get to the 10.7 and 11.3, their services, the Premier Support, created a "cookbook" for us to do that migration. That was extremely helpful. 

And from a consulting perspective, as part of the Premier Support, we were able to get the right consultants in to help us fine-tune that motor. They would come in and look at it and say, "By the way, you can filter this stuff out because you're not actually using it." I liken it to our cell phones when our data plans are out of whack with our use. We pay way more than we need for our minutes and a consultant comes in and says, "You can do this, this, and this, and be more efficient." They've been very helpful there.

As an example I looked at recently, we had a customer that was doing 27,000 emails a month. That would mean that if we spent 30 seconds reading each email, it would total 2,700 hours per year just reading emails. And that's not solving the issues. That works out to 1.3 FTEs just reading the emails for that customer. Suppose all-in, in the US, we're paying FTEs $72,000 to $75,000 just to read emails. Our license fees are certainly less than that for that one customer.

In terms of ROI, we haven't fully gotten there yet. We've reduced those 2,000,000 emails by 42 percent, so far. We haven't gotten them all done yet. But who do you think is on our list to get moved over to this solution? That customer 27,000 emails, we're going to move them over as fast as we can.

Our ROI is to get people off the old, manual system with 8.2 touches and down to two touches. Once we start hitting critical mass, the product will certainly pay for itself in a very reasonable period of time.

We pay license fees of between $150 and $200 per asset.

In terms of the product's pricing, we don't pay per item and it's not crazy. It's cost-effective enough for us to offer it for free on storage, and we've got some 4,000 storage assets using the product every day.

We bought a large block of licenses. Interestingly enough, we provide TrueSight for free for our storage customers. We thought it was that important, to give them the licenses for the Knowledge Module and the policy. We do charge for network and we do charge for servers.

There is an enterprise software license fee, and then you pay a percentage for your maintenance, and then Premier Support. For example, if you buy a two-year license for the product, then the maintenance fee is added to that for two years at X percent a year. Then there's a small fee on top of that for Premier Support, which I would highly recommend to a company. Standard support gives you normal support processes, while Premier Support is 24/7. It's at a much higher level of support. For a production environment, I would strongly recommend it. In comparison to the extra cost, the value of Premier Support is very worthwhile.

We did an RFP and looked at seven products. Although I wasn't here when the company did that, I know they looked at Nagios.

One of the two key reasons for choosing TrueSight was the AI piece, the artificial intelligence; that's the promise of the future for us. We get some of it today. We have the predictive and proactive parts today, but we're going to grow that as we grow up that stack to go to OS, and application, and cloud, to get more AI value.

And the other one was the knowledge module relationship they have with Sentry Software. We're in storage hardware. That's the number one product out in the market. Sentry is a partner with BMC and that has been the lifeblood of our whole "global, regional, local" approach.

The advice I would give is not to make a mistake and think it's an off-the-shelf product like Office 365. Understand that it's a very robust set of tools and procedures. You really should define what you want to do with it before you bring it in the door. If you had asked us before we brought it in, we had an idea, but we didn't know exactly how we wanted to utilize it and that was because we didn't know the capabilities of it. We thought we could do X, and we found out what we really needed to do was Y. It was that gap that we had to fill, and that took us time. So the better you can define your requirements, the quicker you'll gain the true value with your outcome.

Believe me, we're seeing true value. But if we had had a better definition of what we needed up front... We thought we had all the information in the RFP but we probably didn't. I'm not sure you ever can do that, but do a good job of architecting the scope or the spec of what you're trying to do and then get their input. They can give you that information and that's when you get your true value. When those two things meet, you get the value prop.

Working with BMC has been interesting. It's been very helpful. They're part of our team, which is great. They bring their partners to the table. Their partners don't have an agenda. Everything that we get done is literally for us as the end-user and for our customers. I've not had that often before with software companies.

They invest in customer satisfaction to the point that we've asked them to implement some things that are a little bit beyond the normal scope of TrueSight. We're using it for 800 customers in an instance of TrueSight, where it really should be one TrueSight for one customer. And they've helped us make all that work, and arm-in-arm.

With Sentry it has been a team effort. Sometimes we don't know who on the call is not on our team. We're all having the same conversation, and it's not a situation where "BMC said," or "Sentry said," or "we said." It's one common unit. We had a call yesterday about architecture and making that whole piece work. I said to their architect, "Gee, you know I really like that document you put together." He said, "John, you can use any piece of that you possibly want. Go ahead and take it and do anything you need to do with it, make it work your way." That doesn't happen very often, where someone is building their own thing and they come back to you and say, "Yeah, you can use it any way you want. Just make sure it makes for you."

We have 11 people who are installing agents and policies at our customers' sites. Their job is the implementation with our customers.

In terms of people actually running TrueSight within the company and our IT infrastructure, we have parts of a couple of people. It's a part of their job. It's almost like shift work. We have a part of a full-time person on a daily basis engaged with TrueSight care and feeding. Running the product requires less than two people, all-in.

We will be hiring a new person to be a TrueSight architect, because we're bringing on more of those KMs and we need somebody who can help us do the rules management. They're not going to be here running the product, they're going to be adding new features.

Overall, I would give the product a very solid nine. If I had the reporting piece, I would give it a ten. It has provided more value than we expected and it does what it says it's going to do. You can't ask for more from a product than that.

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.

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.

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.

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.