BMC TrueSight Reviews

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is used to monitor the infrastructure, applications, and databases.

It's very good. I like it.  It's a great product, but there are some things that could be improved, such as the dashboards.

The dashboards could be better. The graphs are extremely limited. We don't have a lot of dashboard options. To make reports and dashboards more useful, we usually need to integrate some dashboard solutions.

The initial setup could be simplified.

I have been working with BMC TrueSight Operations Management for approximately 12 years.

We are working with version 11.304.

After you configure everything, it's stable.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is easily scalable.

In our company, we have four people who use this solution.

Technical support used to be better a few years ago. The level was slightly lower than expected. For the time being, it's not great, but occasionally they are good, but that is dependent on the consultant who answers the phone.

They usually respond quickly, but it's not the solution we require, and it's not always effective, but it can be. Technical training would help.

I used Entuity. I also have basic knowledge of PRTG and Nagios. From those three, I have more working knowledge of Entuity.

I started working with Entuity, nine or ten years ago. We stopped using it two years ago. We are not familiar with the current versions.

I am currently working with Helix Operations Management and the ServiceNow ITOM.

In general, it is not easy to install. It's complex. There are too many components, and you must set them up and work with the infrastructure team on permissions and file reports. Because there are so many components, this becomes more complicated and difficult, particularly in terms of infrastructure management. It is not easy to install.

We have a monitoring team. We work alongside them to manage and support the solution.

I'm not familiar with it. They have changed the licensing fees.

You will face some difficulties unless you have someone with advanced knowledge of the solution.

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

BMC TrueSight Operations Management can be used to monitor anything on-premises. This includes the server, applications, log monitoring, event IT monitoring, process monitoring, etc.

I like the event management part.

It would be better if the initial setup and deployment were more straightforward.

I have worked with BMC TrueSight Operations Management for more than eight years.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is a stable solution.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is a scalable solution. We are monitoring a large environment.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup isn't straightforward and is a bit complex to implement. It really depends on the environment. I have implemented several accounts within one or two months if prerequisites are met or already in place. You need more than three people to manage and maintain this solution.

I implement this solution.

I would recommend this solution to potential users. I would tell potential users that we have to focus on the prerequisites and the planning phase. If these two things are taken care of properly, then the implementation will be smooth.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give BMC TrueSight Operations Management an eight.

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 like the deep-dive detail and end-user metrics data. The synthetic monitor is the best one. The best point of the new one is that there's no need for configuration. You can inject the Java script and start to change major developments in the application. This is a good approach, and we received all the data using this.

I would like them to improve the deep-dive details, tracing, and data agents in this product. We have EUEM, an end-user experience monitoring appliance. This one's quicker than the current one, and reporting side and filtration side are very bad. 

There are many details we look at and explain what we receive information in the current one, but we cannot have historical data like we do with EUEM. We cannot have a powerful point to look for specific traffic from a specific application and a specific browser. We don't have it in the new one. The current BMC also needs to add the thing that control versions.

I have been using BMC TrueSight Operations Management for six years.

BMC support is very good, and they always find solutions. They can give you a release back or batch it if somebody needs assistance. This is a good thing for BMC support. BMC support is very good, and you can get the full journey if you have the full solution. 

BMC TrueSight Operations Management has a module covering all the applications and search, the website hardware utilization, and the traffic and storage. You can get all the details, and it will be better if you have different websites. You have the full journey and no need to bother the tool itself.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy to implement quickly. You can receive all the data, and you can have a lot of dashboards covering all the details like how much traffic, the OS, the federal ID, client ID, and location. If all of this is the same, you can create tables, dashboards, server ID, and client ID.

I would advise potential users to try to get TrueSight Infrastructure Monitoring and synthetic when implementing BMC. Then they will have a very powerful solution. The main point is that it's the manager of managers. It would be best if you highlighted this, and BMC can integrate with all monitoring solutions. They will have only one screen to show all. That is the multiple monitoring application.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give BMC TrueSight Operations Management an eight.

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. 

We are using it to monitor open systems and some iSeries systems.

TrueSight has helped to reduce IT operations costs.

The solution has also helped to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect app performance. The solution has application monitoring called Application Performance Management. It's an improvement on the old, traditional TMR. It's integrated within the TrueSight solution. It will notify regarding application performance and report issues with applications.

One of the valuable features is the integration of the monitoring and the Console access.

We manage our open systems. Using the TrueSight platform we can monitor server performance and notify the customers using the integrated ticketing for events. We can let them know if there are any issues with a server, or application, or database.

The solution's event management capabilities are a strong point for TrueSight. They are based on the previous BMC Event Manager which was very stable and pretty powerful. It was an excellent product.

One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy.

In addition, it needs some details such as auditing inside the product - there is no auditing for the policies.

It's pretty stable. TrueSight uses a major BMC product called Patrol, and Patrol has been around for many years. It's one of the best products and it's pretty stable.

In addition to the traditional Patrol Agent, BMC TrueSight added the predictive functionality so we can predict a trend instead of having a static threshold. We can let people know, in addition to what is happening, what is going to happen. We can predict that and have the ability to do a cost analysis.

BMC's technical support is pretty good. They do have ups and downs. In the past, it was very good but there was a certain period of time where they had support from overseas, from India. The quality of support was not as good as the traditional one, but I do see that it is getting better now.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The documentation was pretty good. The deployment was not very buggy, and the Patrol Agent was pretty stable.

We deployed it ourselves.

We did a comparison with a different product on the market. We had a CA product which I believe was called Spectrum. We compared BMC with that and InSoft. We felt that the BMC product was much better than CA's product. We also had an HPE product in the old days, and BMC is a better solution.

We had BMC for a long time. We had multiple products which we compared, and BMC is a better solution, so we removed the CA product. BMC is better in terms of support. It takes fewer people to support, it's easier to configure, and easier to change the configuration. It's also easier to change the special settings. And it's easier to maintain.

BMC products are very good. All products have pros and cons. For example, all the enterprise monitoring solutions are not really set up for multi-tenancy. BMC products are very stable and the support is good, and the configuration, especially, is easier to do. I think it will come down in pricing, although the cost is not something I am not involved in.

We started using TrueSight in the early stages. Like every product, TrueSight, as a new product of BMC, was going to take some until BMC improved it, got all the bugs out, got all the features added. It's not perfect but I do see improvement. When a product is in its infancy, it will always have some issues. I do see BMC trying to improve that. It's getting better now. It's pretty stable. It's a very good tool for traditional open systems and mid-range.

I would rate TrueSight Operations Management at eight out of ten. It's not a ten, because, as I mentioned, it is missing some capabilities in HA solutions. In the past, we had load- balancing HA. Now, it has to rely on an external load balancer to achieve HA. 

But I have to say that my view is limited because we do not have the whole suite of BMC products. There are certain things we do not own, like automation and deployment. If we had the full BMC suite, I would probably give it a ten.

My customers use it to monitor their enterprise and define their services. With a lot of the AIOps features and things like Service Impact Manager, my customers are able to reduce their mean time to repair (MTTR). MTTR is very important for companies who are reliant on their critical IT applications.

Sometimes, a lot of customers, if they're not using the products, don't know that they have an IT issue unless a customer contacts them, and says “I've got a problem.” With TSOM, they are able to be more proactive. The IT department gets alerted more quickly, and sometimes, they can resolve issues before the customer even knows that there is an issue.

This solution helps our customers to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect app performance. It has good monitoring all the way from storage up to the servers. Now, all the things I'm seeing in the cloud are very good, as well.

A lot of the integrations with all the other BMC products are fantastic, because it has a great discovery tool which can model applications and integrate those into TSOM. Then TSOM, once an alert is detected, can automatically create tickets in the ITSM system, which is Helix.

Its event management capabilities are very open and flexible. I haven't seen a use case scenario with a customer that we couldn't actually solve the problem for, so it's really good. There are some interesting things that happen in an enterprise network (things that people don't normally expect), and the event management product is very flexible. You can solve problems as far as your imagination can go with it.

I would like to see a little more out-of-the-box event correlation and expanded AIOps type capabilities. Where you can train your artificial intelligence operations to be able to memorize an issue once you encounter one scenario, so if you encounter that same problem, you can get to the root cause very quickly.

It is very stable.

It's very scalable. It is horizontally scalable. Right now, I'm hearing good things from the product team that they want to do some things as far as vertical scalability, as well.

I really don't have interactions with support myself directly. Some people who work for my company, they do that. 

The technical support does a good job. I used to be a BMC consultant back until 2013, and in those times, the support was very good.

It does help reduce IT operations costs. A lot of times, people are doing things manually. They might have a network operating center where they just monitor screens all the time, so you can reduce labor costs. From a scale perspective, if they have thousands and thousands of servers in their data centers, you can determine which ones are more critical over the other ones and focus on the critical pieces, not the pieces which don't matter.

I have customers who use other products. Sometimes, they ask me to evaluate other products that they're considering.

I am working with one large company right now who is looking at the ServiceNow Event Management product, and it's a little immature right now. Therefore, I told them about that. There are also other products that feed into the ServiceNow product set which are very expensive and very difficult to implement. This is one place where I have made the recommendation of BMC, specifically over ServiceNow.

Understand your use cases. Take a look at the use case to product fit. I don't really recommend many other products. We are sort of committed to the BMC product set because it's good. We have a lot of experience with it, and came from a company who was acquired by BMC Software. The product manager for that company, April Hickel, she's done very well. She is the product manager for TSOM now. I know her, her innovative capabilities, and her whole team. I've been working with them for a long time, so I know not only that the product is good, but the roadmap is good, and the people behind it are very good.

If you have a good imagination you can solve anything, but you need the right tool to be able to apply that to.

My company is a data center service provider. We host and manage IT for all types of different companies, using TrueSight to manage and monitor the health performance availability of all our customers' environments: networks, servers, databases, websites, and all their back-end IT.

Right now, the focus is pushing DevOps and AIOps in our more traditional data center management. We are not using it in the cloud space today. Therefore, the focus is the traditional data center space, but for us, that is a very large space.

One case that we like to use a lot: We have a customer who uses F5 load balancers, and they were managing them with CA products. Those load balancers were generating around 11,000 tickets a month. Just moving them from CA to TrueSight, and replicating the same rules, they went from 11,000 tickets a month to 400 tickets a month. TrueSight did a much better job of doing the same thing. Then from there, we were able to tune it. We got it down to about 40 tickets a month. While this is an extreme example (I don't usually see this type of improvement), it shows the power that is there.

We are able to more quickly identify problems and get an engineer on it to restart services, etc. It is not fixing the customer's bugs. They've got buggy apps, and it goes down all the time. It is just that we can get them back online faster.

• It is breadth. It covers so many different technologies which can roll up into a single console.
• The noise reduction for ticketing works much better than we have seen in a lot of other companies. 
• We're starting to get into the machine learning pieces to further enhance the intelligence of events.

Continue to improve the maturity of the product overall. 

I definitely would like to see more improvement in the self-diagnostics. I need to know when anything is not working or collecting, long before our customer finds it.

I would like to see continued improved integration with some of their partners. We use a lot of Intuity software. While the connections are good, they could be better. We use App Visibility, as part of the TrueSight suite. Previously, we were a big BMC TMRT customer previously. They gave up a lot of features of TMRT to get App Visibility in. Features that our customers used. They still complain about this weekly: When are we going to get this report or view back.

When we took this issue back to BMC, they said, "It wasn't an upgrade from TMRT. It's a brand new product. It just happens to be serving the same market." From my user standpoint, we went from BMC TMRT to BMC App Visibility, giving up all these features. For us, it was an upgrade that we lost features on. I need that stuff back, at the end of the day, as a service provider. The customers need to feel comfortable that the data is there. They need to have accurate SLA type reports. The SLA reports that we get on TrueSight today are unfortunately worthless. They go to the whole integer. So, they all show 100 percent, when we've got contracts which are 99.996 percent and are now rounding to 100. Well, if we were at .9995, that's an SLA miss. Things like this are a problem. We have to do all this manually on the side. We can't roll this back, as the versions that we used to use are long out of support.

The biggest issue is probably the gaps in the reporting that I need for my end customers. That is a very public and embarrassing, I can't give you the report that you need. Also, the reliability of the ISNs needs improving. Having a customer find a machine that stopped collecting before we do, that is not what you want when you're a service provider.

We have been a BMC client since 2001. We've been through many generations of the product.

The stability has a bit more maturing to do. There is still room for improvement. Overall, it's pretty good, depending on which layer you're looking at. At the highest level, which is the presentation server, we find that we have to restart that every two months or so, just because it stops responding. I would like it to be a bit better. We don't have any real understanding of what's causing that. The next layer down is the infrastructure manager level. That's probably about the same, every couple of months it stops responding. As you then go farther down to the data collection layer: the ISN level. Those aren't as stable as they need to be. They will go for six months fine, then fail three times in a row in two weeks. It doesn't give us a good alarm, and unfortunately, we've missed an event. Then, the customers notice something, and that didn't pass its events. So, a little more maturity is needed here.

It's scaling fairly nice, but not as large as we would like. We are not seeing the type of scalability that BMC claims. For example, they say that you can run 900 agents against an ISN. We find the ISN stability goes down when you hit 500 or 600. So, you're only at two-thirds of the capacity. I forget how many millions of things that the TSIM was supposed to be able to handle. We are no where near that capacity. We're spinning up more TSIMs because it's just not scaling as advertised.

Technical support is a mixed bag. Some tickets go in and are handled very quickly and well. However, we have had tickets which go in and have been out there for months, and some of them were fairly complex. They will go up to Tier 2 or Tier 3, then park. I'm assuming that we're running into a software bug, or something, but those tickets that stall out are frustrating.

It was complex. I wish we had put Professional Services into the deal. Being a service provider, we are attached to companies all over the world with very strict auditing and security requirements. Therefore, designing the architecture to work in that environment was fairly complex. I was just talking to a product owner about the problems that we still have.

Once we get the architecture, the deployment went fairly smoothly. The policy creation and management were much more complex than in their previous products. It is probably more powerful, but not as easy to administer.

They have rolled things, which were multiple products separately in the past, into a single product. They've had to do some consolidation, or adjustments, to be able to merge them quickly to get their product to ship. This left some things missing. Some features that used to be there are gone. Features that we used to use. So, there are pain points, as we figure out how to work around the new gaps.

We did it ourselves. 

Globally, I've got six engineers and 12 operators who worked on the deployment. This is a sizable group. However, I'm currently supporting global operations of a couple hundred clients, and they're major clients. 

TrueSight has helped reduce IT operations costs. From a software standpoint, I have been able to eliminate a lot of other tools, saving approximately half a million dollars a year in other maintenance costs. That is easy savings. The more important one is the labor savings: more reliable, simplified tickets. 

The time savings are recognized by the operations teams, not my team. Therefore, it's hard to know the time savings, but if an operations person takes at least 15 minutes to analyze a ticket and their ticket volume is reduced by 10,000 a month, then TrueSight does save time.

We've been reducing ticket noise five to ten percent annually every year, and it has been cumulative. This means less tickets, noise, and operator intervention.

It is a large, complex product. So, there is a commitment of manpower to deploy it, as it is not a cheap product.

We license per named endpoint for most of the products: servers, network devices, databases, etc. You pay for the initial license and maintenance. The way that my company looks at it is we figure out our monthly costs over five years, and right now, we are between five to six dollars. We need to get that down to about four dollars. That's included in the maintenance.

There is a big upfront cost when you buy the license, then there is annual maintenance. We look at, if I bought a license and paid for maintenance for five years, then average it out, what would be my monthly cost. We have had some of the competing tools come in around four dollars. This is coming in as a premium, which is why I don't have it deployed as I would like it. Therefore, we're in negotiations right now. If I can get it down to the four dollar range, I will triple my deployment in a year and a half. If they could could me to the right price point, there are 10,000 to 15,000 servers that I would install it on.

As we've acquired other companies, we've picked up pretty much every other tool set out there: CA, IBM, SolarWinds, etc. We have played with pretty much everything. The BMC TrueSight platform wins probably 80 percent of the time if you look feature by feature. It's a good, strong platform. It's ability to run on all the OSs that I've got is a huge thing. We do a lot with IBM iSeries, and a lot of vendors don't cover that. So, this is a big positive on the platform.

Being able to roll everything up to a single database and single feed out for reporting are all very big positives. The same type of consolidation rules under CA, if you write them in BMC, they just work when they didn't work in CA. Things like that make BMC great.

You really want to plan out your policy and architecture in great detail before you start any deployments. It is a complex product. You don't want to have to go redo it. Pick a small environment, test out your plan, test it out a second time, beat it up, and once you're happy with it, then go nuts by deploying it everywhere. It's great once it's there, you just have to get past that design hurdle, because there are things that aren't necessarily intuitive.

I have a mixed bag impression of the usability. The end user experience is mostly good, as it's a very clean interface. There are some quibbles with it. You have to drill into a lot of layers to get into the data that you want. However, when you hit "Back", it takes you all the way back out of the tree. Then, you have to redrill into all those layers. That is a bit of an annoyance for end users. From an administration side, it is still sort of heavy, and policies are very complex. Therefore, it takes a fairly senior level engineer to build it and get it to work well. But, once it's working well, I can monitor tens of thousands of things.

Definitely get multiple references from each of the clients, since all salesmen lie. They all promise the possible best scenario, and I have found depending on the client that you get very different experiences. So, the claims that the BMC sales guys have made are all achievable in a perfect environment. No one has a perfect environment. 

Claims from CA, I have found to be outright fabrications, such as, "We can do this." Then, we buy the product. "Oh well, you actually need Professional Services, and you're going to need like three years of custom coding." Millions of dollars down the drain with them. 

Other vendors have different levels. They all come in very rosy, and sometimes too much. So, talk to people who have really done it. Take their advice. Don't assume that they didn't know what they were doing. There are a lot of good engineers out there. If the company is struggling, assume you will also struggle.

We're actually hosting the software and providing services to our customers based on all the capabilities that are within TrueSight. We are a very large, global, hardware maintenance provider for data centers. We mostly service the high-end data storage and networking equipment that you would find in data centers and in cloud environments. 

A couple of years ago we started on a journey to really improve our ability to maintain and service our customers. This was all about connectivity, getting connected to those servers and storage platforms. We wanted to get connected to everything that we were maintaining around the world so that we could really implement a "diagnosis before dispatch" approach.

With this solution, we gather all the data from a server that has failed, and we do all the troubleshooting, the problem and root-cause determination - we call that triage - before we ever send a field engineer or anyone to the site. So when we do send a part or do send a field engineer, we know exactly what the root cause of the problem is and what they need to do to fix it. 

We are using this solution to scale our business and to drive greater efficiencies. The other side of it is that it's much better for our end customers because they no longer have to monitor their own environments for hardware failures. We do that for them. They don't have to recognize that a server has failed. They don't have to pick up the phone or send us an email to open a ticket and send us files to help us troubleshoot the problem. We're really reducing a lot of the effort required on the customer's side to manage their IT environment using this tool because we can detect the failure, we can troubleshoot it remotely. And, when we do implement the corrective action, we're pretty certain of the root cause, based on the technology and the capabilities of TrueSight.

It has improved our time to repair. From the time we get the incident logged to the time we get the customer back up and running, it has improved that by 33 percent or greater. It has also improved our ability to fix it right on the first call. It gives us the root cause of the problem, and it automates that whole triage, it gives us the part number of what's failed. We're now at somewhere around a 97 percent first-time fix rate. And that's only going to get better as we get more experienced with the product. And that's important to our customers. When we come out, we're going to fix it right on the first call and not have to come again and again and again. That's really important to the uptime of their IT.

We have a graphical representation of this very thing. It shows the old way of service delivery, in which the customer first had to recognize they had a problem. Once they recognized they had a program, they had to call in or email and open a ticket. Once they opened a ticket, the whole troubleshooting process would begin. We were often calling them as many as eight times per ticket, just to get information about the failure. That was taking a lot of time from the customer. After that, we would have to dispatch someone with the right part or the right solution, and oftentimes we either brought the wrong part, or we had to bring a handful of parts, which was costly for us and would drive up the cost of the service for the customer. And often there would be a repeat call, because we might not have brought the right part or have sent the right level of skill out on that call. That was the old way of doing it.

The new way of doing it for the end-customer is that we call them to let them know we have spotted a problem with their server, for instance, and that we're working on it. We don't have to bother them for log files or diagnostic logs or any of that information anymore because it all comes packaged with the alert from TrueSight. The customer really only hears from us two times now: once, when we open the ticket to let them know we've seen a problem and again after we've resolved it.

Another example is that many of our customers have equipment in co-location centers and offsite data centers, where they don't even have anyone to see that there's a problem. Now, we are driving a lot of efficiency for them. They don't have to send people out to check on problems anymore or pay somebody who is running the co-lo to go out and check on something. We're able to see it all remotely through the monitoring tool. That's another huge benefit that we've heard about from our customers.

The solution provides us with a single pane of glass where we can ingest data and events from many technologies. In terms of our IT ops management, we have a unique deployment. We actually have it running in our own shop. Everything that we deploy to our customers we deploy internally first. But we've really licensed and implemented TrueSight to drive our services business. We're supporting all of our customers' data centers with the product. We're not connected to all of those yet. We just officially launched the solution in January of 2018. We've got about a year-and-a-half in production with the product and we're getting good adoption. The real answer to its effect on our IT ops management is not so much our internal deployment. It's more about the deployment that we're leveraging for all of our 16,000-plus customers globally.

We've had a number of cases where, through the analytics in TrueSight, we've actually been able to predict failures. For instance, we've already had a couple of cases where, if we see a hard drive on a storage array is going to fail, we'll actually send the part out ahead of the failure. That allows us to replace that drive before it fails - and on the customer's planned downtime. In the old model, it fails, it's down. The customer waits for us to come out, swap it out, and bring everything back up. In the predictive model, we know it's going to fail, we send the part out ahead of the failure, and we replace that drive on the customer's scheduled downtime. The more of that we can do - and as we expand beyond hardware into operating system, application, and the other layers of infrastructure - we'll be able to exploit the machine learning and the AIOps to a greater degree than what we're doing today on the hardware side.

The way we talk to our customers about the functionality of the solution across IT ops management to support business innovation is that because we've significantly reduced the amount of time they have to spend managing service tickets, they have more time to focus on their digital strategies. We say, "Hey, we're giving you some time back. You don't have to spend all this time interacting with your service provider. You're just going to hear from us when you have a problem and after we've fixed it. We won't bother you for log files and all those things." We're actually giving them time to allow them to do more value-added work, like working on their strategic initiatives and their digital transformation initiative. I think we'll be able to expand on that as we go forward.

The ability of this platform to monitor the very diverse assets that we maintain around the world is its most valuable feature. We service over 350,000 data center assets. These assets come in the form of servers, storage arrays, networking devices, etc. We've calculated that we service and support over 36,000 data centers around the world.

We're not really tied in with the manufacturers, but we support a vast array of manufacturers' equipment, like HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Hitachi; and I could go down the line. We have a very diverse install base under contract and TrueSight can connect to all of those and monitor all those different platforms. Many of our customers have as many as 20 tools in their IT environments to try to monitor all this stuff. We can do it all with one, and we're hosting it for them. So it really gives us the ability to take some of that burden off the end customer.

The other really important thing to us, and the reason we chose TrueSight, is not only to monitor and to capture failures and alerts when things fail out there, but to do what we call "automated triage." No matter who manufactured the equipment, when we get the message that tells us something has failed, it always looks the same. Whether it's EMC or Dell or IBM, whatever the equipment might be, TrueSight always returns the event in a standard format which gives us the manufacturer, the model, the serial number. It even gives us a list of what has failed, whether it's a hard drive or power supply, for example. It even gives us the part number of that specific device in that specific machine. That really helps automate the troubleshooting and the triage process. That's a big feature for us.

The solution's event management capabilities are proven. We always like to say it performs as advertised. We evaluated over a dozen products before we chose TrueSight, and we found it to be very good at monitoring at the hardware level, which is core to our business. The ability for it to capture those failures, to capture all the events from that very diverse set of equipment which we maintain out there, means we are very impressed with the performance.

In terms of the breadth of the solution's monitoring capabilities, I've already addressed the different types of products, the different manufacturers. The diversity of what we service out there is amazing, and it can really monitor just about everything that we maintain out in the field. But the other aspect of the breadth is the fact that not only does it do hardware really well, but it's really going to help us start to add to our portfolio of services. We're going to be able to use this to monitor operating systems and applications and software and networks, and even all the way to end-user experience. Ultimately, we're going to be able to move into other areas of service, based on the breadth of what it can do in the total IT infrastructure.

In production, we have been using it for about a year-and-a-half.

We're in a very stable environment now but it took a little time for us to get there. That's because of the multi-tenancy, the scalability, and the volume of traffic that we're driving through their platform. They're very different than what they're used to. It's potentially hundreds, potentially thousands of customers, with a lot of equipment in their data centers flowing through. We are now in a very stable place in production. We feel very comfortable going forward, scaling it out, and adding thousands of customers to it. It took us a little bit of time to get there and we needed a lot of support from BMC, but we feel good about it right now.

We have a unique use case because BMC typically sells this solution into enterprises that are deploying it within their IT, versus to a managed services provider like us where we're supporting thousands of customers. Multi-tenancy and the scalability have been challenges along the way, as we've grown. But BMC has really been a great partner helping us address those things.

Building that kind of scale and multi-tenancy into the product would serve companies, the way we're deploying it. It's a little different than what BMC is used to, but that would be one thing I would put out there. If anything could have gone better as we were ramping this up and adding a lot of volume to it, I would say it's the scalability. That would be one thing that could be improved.

BMC's technical support has been great. They've been by our side. They've been working with us. They could have just said, "Look, our product wasn't built to do that. Good luck." But they didn't. They stuck with us and they're still with us today helping us optimize and do things better. They've been a great technology partner for us.

Most of the storage products have a native "call home" feature. It's like email alerting, so when a hard drive fails on the storage array, it will send an email. A lot of the manufacturers did that for the warranties. It would send them an email and they could take care of the warranty claims. What we did was redirect those emails to us, because most of what we do is after the warranties have ended on a product. We were getting all these emails from potentially thousands of things that we were maintaining out there, and every email looked different. Emails from HP looked different than those from EMC which looked different than the ones from IBM or Hitachi. Everything was in a different format. It took a long time to sift through these emails to figure out what was actually wrong, and it was very inefficient. That's how we were doing monitoring.

We also had a little black box that we built internally that was using SNMP and some other technologies. But a lot of customers don't want some rogue hardware in their data center. It's a security concern. So that was very limited in its deployment. Overall, by and large, we really weren't monitoring. We were very crude in our methods and there was a very limited number of things that we were monitoring at the time I came in.

That's when we started thinking, "You know, if we either build or buy a world-class monitoring platform and get it connected to everything, we could really differentiate ourselves in the market." That's what led us to start evaluating some commercial, off-the-shelf things like BMC.

We got it up and running pretty quickly. We had it up within three months because we had to buy hardware and build the whole infrastructure, so it was a little more than just installing the software.

Then we did what I call a controlled deployment. We had about ten to 15 customers in a pilot program. We ran that over about a six-month period before we went live in production.

We had a consulting firm that worked with us, a firm which BMC had brought to the table named Column Technologies. That experience was not good. BMC had said these guys were one of the best partners they had, and they probably are. It could have been Column Technologies, it could have been anybody that they brought in. 

Our implementation was so unique and different compared to what they were used to. They were used to going into an end-user and helping them get this solution deployed within their own IT environment, to manage their own back-office IT. But that's not how we were doing it. We were putting it in as a service platform to manage thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of devices, potentially. So the implementation was very different.

BMC had to work with us pretty extensively on how we were configuring and putting this in to make it work the way we needed it to work. I'm not going to pick on the consultant that much or criticize them too heavily because this installation was very different than what they were used to doing.

We got a lot of support from BMC because it required it. We needed the guys who built the product to help us get this thing implemented in such a way that it would support our business model. Ultimately, we solved those problems and we're in good shape now. But there were some startup issues, that's for sure.

I don't know that I have a number available. When we embarked on this journey we had some business-case assumptions about what our internal savings would be. We've got a little more work to do to come up with those numbers. We need to get more volume deployed before we can say we have a reliable percentage of OpEx reduction.

Pricing is all volume-driven. I think we were paying between $80 and $85 per license. That's per unit, for a perpetual license. You pay it one time and then, every year, you pay 20 percent of that for annual maintenance and support. 

But now that we've grown, we've purchased tens of thousands of licenses and the cost per license has gone down to something like less than $30. 

I wouldn't call it an agent cost because the way they price it is based on the number of things you have connected. You can connect hundreds of things to a single agent but you're paying by the number of things. That's how you use the licenses. So it's really priced by endpoint, not by agent.

When we were just starting the journey, we looked at ScienceLogic, Centerity Monitor, and we looked at CA. We also looked at the Microsoft product. Those represent a handful of the products we evaluated.

If we had to do it all over again, we would have spent a lot more time in the early going on planning the architecture, on how we were going to build this out. That could have saved us some pain, once we got it up and running and started adding customers and expanding it. If we had spent a little more time with BMC, planning architecturally how we were going to design this to support the scale we needed, it would have helped. That was a lesson learned. And that would be some advice I would give. Depending on how you're planning to use the tool, make sure you spend some time looking at the architecture in the systems and the architectural design of how you're going to implement it to make sure it's going to meet your needs. Make sure it's going to scale appropriately and do what you need it to do.

Our goal is to get this solution connected to every single customer that we're maintaining equipment for, because of the efficiencies and the improvement in the end-user experience. When I say we support over 350,000 assets in 36,000 data centers around the world, that is our maintenance business. We're working to connect TrueSight to all of that. We have sold - not quite yet deployed, but we have sold - about 33,000 licenses, which means assets. We've deployed just under 10,000 of those so far. So we're making good headway and we're very pleased with how it's performing so far.

One lesson that we've learned is that we're now in a great position to expand our portfolio of services which we offer to our customers, well beyond hardware. Without this technology, we could never get there. Prior to us putting this in, it was all done manually. Phone calls, emails, people driving to the site to try and diagnose problems. It was very manual and inefficient and not scalable the way we were doing business. And we were growing so fast. There's no way we could have scaled to where we're at today or scale to where we want to go, even in our core business.

The other lesson we're learning now is our that customers are asking us to do more and this technology is going to help us do more for them and expand our business. It will enable us to expand our portfolio of services. That's our biggest lesson. When we started out it was really all about driving operational efficiency in our hardware maintenance business. And now we've learned we're in a very good position to move into other services, based on what the capabilities of this platform bring to us, beyond hardware - into application monitoring and operating system and network and all the other pieces of the infrastructure. We can start to support them going forward.

It has completely changed our way of thinking about our strategy going forward. It's amazing.

At this point in time, I'd rate it a ten out of ten. We've got something really unique here. We built some integrations, some things of our own around it. And we're feeling really good about it.

It helps to minimize downtime of applications by enabling proactive monitoring.

• Wide support for monitoring
• Strong event management
• Service management capability
• Baselining (analytics)
• Easy to integrate other tools with it

Deployment requires lots of resources (servers). It has too many consoles. Pricing is very high.

No stability issues. We can make it stable by allocating enough resources.

No issues with scalability. We can increase resources vertically, according to growth in infrastructure.

Support quality is good.

Have not used any other product.

It’s bit complex.