Clarity SM Reviews

It allows us to integrate all our processes into one. It allowed us to retire several disjointed custom-built solutions. It helps us to fulfill requests and change orders.

Our key requests are being implemented in the next release. There is a knowledge management portion. It is very cumbersome to create a knowledge management document. That’s one area that could be improved.

The Knowledge Management module in Service Desk Manager is cumbersome and hard to use. It’s not so bad for browsing and viewing knowledge documents, but to create content is extremely time consuming.

The main problem we have is, you can’t simply paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, they first have to be uploaded and then, attached to the document. We would love to have the ability to copy/paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, similar to how you can add images to an email.

The only time we ever have stability problems is when our environment is not stable, so it's a perfectly stable product.

It is very scalable.

They typically get back to you quickly regarding the less complicated requests. For more complicated ones, they obviously take longer; but they're always excellent.

I only got involved a few months after it was implemented.

Try not to bite off more than you can chew. Try not to piecemeal.

We emphasize a partnership with the vendor and their ability to understand our business. The more they understand about our business and our goals, the better aligned we are. It is not always just about the technology or whatever the functionality is.

When we selected it, it gave us a framework, a structure in the space of idle, which is real important to our company because understanding how we deliver service in the areas of incident management, request management, and change management in our company are very important. The reason that they're important is because it drives our SLAs for our customers. Service Desk gave us a structure that we sorely needed to be able to deliver reporting and metrics and make sure that we're staying on time and what we promised to our customers.

CA Service Desk benefits come in the fact that it gives you some aspects of automation, which is really key to our operation. We're not a typical help desk like most companies are that use Service Desk, we're a service center. While it is only used internally by our users, it touches our customers. Therefore, it's really important that we had a tool that was going to allow us to do things in a precise manner and do it in a way that gave it the structure and the automation - keeping people on track. Instead of training everybody on thousands of business processes, it's really important that our users be able to walk in, sit down, and know what to do because the tool is driving them to do their job. Versus, the user driving themselves.

One of the biggest things we're talking with CA about is the integration between CA and PAM. PAM is a powerful tool, in fact, CA PAM is the single most important employee in our company because it basically orchestrates well over two hundred thousand operations in a month's time and it has an extremely low failure rate. One of the issues that exists, and I don't know you can really call it an issue, but it's not there yet, it needs to be tighter integration between PAM and Service Desk and they understand that, because the PAM engine for driving business automation and workflows is so critical to our business and keeping us on schedule and doing things.

Very good. Our platform is a Windows based platform. We started off initially on a Linux based platform, but we found that it was best to migrate ourselves over to a Windows based platform. Ever since we have done that our availability, our failover, it's impeccable. It has been running at an average of 99.95 consistently now for the better part of the year.

The tool allows us to adapt to many processes across our company. We have a lot of silos because of our business units. Therefore, the practices or the processes that we use to support our customers or the products differ, they're not all the same. It's very difficult when you have that many type of products to support, to make the business process for one product be the same for another. Fundamentally they might seem like they're the same, but they have all their very distinct differences. Escalation points and so on and so forth and Service Desk has allowed us to do that.

Excellent. I have a wonderful relationship with my account management team. We've had issues just like any other technology company. Nothing unusual, but I can tell you that the people that support me are there every second, every minute that we need them and they make sure that we're doing the things necessary to either get a problem resolved, or if we're doing some type of upgrade to our software, that type of thing, they will go trough every step of the way from a QA, to a dev environment, to our production environment, to make sure we're successful.

First we adopted Idle in our company. The Idle framework. We needed a tool and we chose another company, It was FrontRange. The problem with FrontRange was it didn't have enough structure to it. When you're a young company implementing Idle, and you don't have the right structure in your tracking system, you can go off in fifty million directions and we did. We recognize that, we were having problems reporting. We were having problems telling ourselves how we were doing in delivering our service.

The tool had flexibility, but it gave far too much flexibility for what we needed, so we started to look again. Then, we met with CA, we talked to them about Service Desk and we started to understand what the structure was that CA Service Desk was going to bring to us. Yet give us the flexibility that we need, which is important, but it's not too flexible, it kept you sort of boxed in, and that's not a bad thing when you're doing adopting Idle. Therefore, when we measured CA Service Desk versus the other companies that we looking at and what we already had, we found that it was going to be the best solution.

Actually, no there weren't any other options. When we went through the list, when we were doing all of our due diligence, we measured five other companies against CA and then against what we had with FrontRange and we made the decision that it wasn't even worth the effort of really sitting down and talking negotiations with the other companies.

I give it a 10/10. It's because of the impact that it's had on our business. It now tells us how we should do our work. It now tells us how we can staff. It tells us how we're doing, and it's reliable. That in itself, that's the reason why. If you're truly an adopter of Idle, the reason I would tell you to choose Service Desk is because of the structure that it comes with, and the out of box features that it gives you. Which makes the job easy for implementing Service Desk, because we migrated from FrontRange over to Service Desk.

We looked for, obviously, how does it work within the Idle framework. What kind of information do you get from it? How easy is it to report against? Metrics are key to any IT business. What about the automations, what kind of automations does it have already built in and what automations can you build in. When we were looking at the different companies that were out there, we looked for the company that was going to best meet all those criteria. Price, the cost of it, was important, but it was not the key decision.

We had a very flexible FrontRange system that had lots of data, but we were able to easily migrate all that data into Service Desk and into it's structured environment, which to me was huge. It made the job very, very easy. If you're going to look at a tool and you're going to make a decision, don't make it based upon cost. Make it based upon it's ability to deliver what you need to understanding your business and the service delivery industry.

The ticket incidents and requests management are the most valuable features for us. That's really the primary purpose -- tracking our issues and fulfilling our customer requests. Those are the two main pieces that we use.

It mainly helps to track hardware issues and issues with any of our applications for the whole system. Any of our applications that have a problem get called into our help desk using this tool. It's as good of information as you can get, so as a ticketing system it works pretty well.

We use the CMDB to manage our configuration items, devices or assets. We use that to keep track of all of our assets. I think that usability is fine and the interface is pretty customizable as well.

Support. Support is the biggest thing dragging it down, and the fact that it's not all one integrated package. You have to get different pieces and put them together when buying them separately instead of it being just one whole suite.

But again, the level of support is probably the area that needs the biggest improvement. But as for the product itself, there's nothing else I can think of as it does what we need it to do for the most part.

I think we've had unexpected downtime in the last four years. We have downtimes, but when they schedule it, it's fine. We had just one issue, but since the latest upgrade it's been pretty reliable.

As far as tickets go, we probably have about 1300 a month, across at least 80,000 assets. We've got about 300 analysts, and for end users somewhere around 14-15,000. They're mostly just sales service. They enter their tickets and that's it. They don't go into the system a whole lot. As far as active users, probably about 300.

We had problems several years ago, but we upgraded and fixed some architectural parts of the systems.

I would say that's probably the weak point -- support. They take a while to come up with the resolutions. Trying to differentiate between the PPM and service management, but I would say generally we've had tickets that have taken three months to get results. Our issues don't always seem like they should be that complicated, but even on a good turn around, it usually takes at least a week or two. It just seems like it's slow. It's inconsistent; sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.

No. I was involved in the upgrade, but not before that. It was pretty smooth.

We've looked at quite a few, including ServiceNow and Microsoft Systems Center Service Management. They have a whole suite similar to CA. Citrix as well.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the systems that we implement for our clients.

This solution covers most of the IT lifecycle. The emphasis is mainly on incident management, change management, program management, and request fulfillment. We also have the System Management patch for network monitoring. 

As of late, I really like the BI functions. 

The CA products integrate well together but I would like to see better integration with third-party solutions. An example of this is with AIOps, where I prefer Splunk over CASDM, so I would have like to see it opened up so that the integration is straightforward. We like the customer to be able to choose.

I find that there are many modules that offer similar functionality and I would like to see these consolidated. Perhaps it is because CA was acquired by Broadcom and they are still developing, with the intention to bring everything together but as it is now, the vendor has many products that do the same thing.

I have been using CA Service Desk Manager since version 5.5, starting about 15 years ago.

Speaking of stability, there was one version, 12.5, that gave us a lot of pain. However, I think that it was due to our architecture. Out of the box, I think that this is a stable solution.

If properly deployed, I think that the CA Service Desk Manager is scalable. We had our own lessons to learn from the way we did things in the previous versions but with our latest deployment, it has been quite well and scalable.

Two of our enterprise clients have between 900 and 1,000 users.

In my company, we have both CASDM and BMC Helix ITSM, and I have worked with both of them. I find the BMC solution easier to deploy than CASDM. Some of my colleagues regularly support BMC and it seems that their deployment is much quicker.

Our BMC solution is much smaller and it does not cover all of the areas, especially in the systems management space, the AIOps, reporting, and aggregation. BMC does have this functionality but we didn't acquire everything. I expect that eventually, all of our clients will be using CASDM. 

Because there are so many different modules, the initial setup is not that straightforward. There are a lot of things that you need to do to get things to work together, although I'm used to that sort of iterative process. Sometimes, when I look at how other solutions such as BMC are deployed, I find them much easier.

CASDM can take months to deploy, especially if you have data that you've got to take from your previous versions. You may have a lot to do.

We are currently two versions behind but we are in a project to upgrade to the latest version, 17.2. It is appealing to me because I will have access to the AIOps modules. I am also interested in moving to the cloud-based solution because it is easier to deploy. There are better technologies available in the cloud, it is easier to manage, and there is a high availability aspect. I think that it would be much better but we are often restricted by the customer, who cannot always have data on the cloud. For example, two of our customers are state-owned enterprises and their data cannot be on the cloud for any reason.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to use the cloud-based deployment, rather than host it on-premises.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• SLA escalations: The SLA escalation feature is accurate and helps the service management team to manage the services delivered, as well as to monitor the performance of the analysts working on the tickets.
• Multitenancy: This feature allowed multiple logically separated entities to work on the same ticketing system. There was complete data isolation.
• Ease of editing code: The code behind the UI and the functionality is quite easy to edit and does not require much learning time.

Multitenancy has helped to use a single solution for multiple departments. This way, there was a single ticketing system for many departments, which saved a lot of cost and helped the departments with organizing their requests.

There are later versions available that we are not using yet. Many desired improvements have already been included in those versions.

Nonetheless, here are a couple of ways they could improve the product:
- Better reporting: Data specifying which ticket spent how much time in which status should be easily available/stored somewhere.
- Readily available plugins: Plugins should be made available for integration with third-party tools that are commonly used (e.g., Nagios). Such integration needs to be developed externally. This improvement can make the tool really popular.

I have been using it for four years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

No issues with stability. This depends on the level of customization done.

Technical support is 8/10.

I did not previously use a different solution. We have been using this product from the beginning. It was chosen because of the features available at the given cost.

Initial setup was straightforward.

One-time setup was done by a vendor team and later, other implementations were done in-house. The documentation is sufficient to help with the implementation and scalability should be kept in mind when implementing.

For organizations that are beyond the startup phase but are still not very huge, this is the ticketing system to choose.

We already have a service catalog in our IT department and one of the problems that we had was that we had several interfaces to users. The user had to know when to go our catalog to ask for something from IT and when they had a problem, they had to go to another interface to report an incident. One of the things that we're trying to do with the service catalog is to have it so people don't need to know in advance if they have a problem if they're asking for something new. Our idea was to remove that decision from the customer so customers can put in whatever they want and we decide if it's an incident or new requests. That's the way we're transforming our catalog to work that way.

In the background we have Service Desk where we fulfill the requests from customers whether they are incidents or new requests. It's a big transformation and I think that the customers quite like it.

I don't know if it's uniquely good, if it had to be CA. It's just that since we had some problems with our previous service desk platform because we made a lot of changes to it. It was very difficult to upgrade to the new versions because we had a lot of development put on top. This was one of the things that we did when we adopted Service Desk is that it had to be configurable and it would work out of the box and only with the configuration. We don't want to develop anything on top. That has been very good with the decision that we made because we've been able to upgrade the software versions in one month which is amazing. It's nice that they have a video interface.

Customers don't have to decide where to go to report something and they don't get those answers that we sometimes do, the technical people do. If you report an incident then they decide it's not an incident they'll tell you this isn't an incident so go to the other screen and just put in your request.

It's technical aspects. In fact, there was some technical issues in the way the product was built that in the long run could get us into trouble. We didn't actually have any problems but the new releases have redesigned the way things are and so I think it's much better now.

Most of these products are bits and pieces and when you bring them all together you bring them as bits and pieces. If you want something to be robust there are some aspects that you have to redesign some of the parts so that they can glue together.

Sometimes we would like things to be a bit easier. I think the reporting could be something that would help and I think this happens with most of this sort of product is that you need a lot of reporting on these sort of solutions. It's not as agile as we would like it to be.

I think reporting is always something that I think we feel that these products are short on. The problem with reporting is that you need to know the data model that's behind it so that you know what objects you need.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable for us. 

It's scaled just fine.

Right now we actually have a contract with them for Service Desk support. They're the ones that are bringing in people to get support to the Service Desk.

They are helping us evolve our Service Desk. It's a long-term contract for that, sort of a professional services thing.

I was not part of the selection process. I know that HP was one of the vendors. I don't recall if IBM was in there as well. We previously had BMC.

First and foremost, when we talk with our customers about the CA brand, they immediately feel comfortable. That's an incredibly valuable thing.

From a technical perspective, we work and integrate with PMO offices, and they've all integrated Service Desk Manager, so it's something that's widely used and known.

We've improved as an organization very quickly because of it, especially when it comes to self-service capabilities for our customers. It's been a fast, easy, and reliable tool to use, so much so that we've even had auditors who credited us with the quality of the implementation.

We need financial solutions for all projects we undertake, and Service Desk currently doesn't offer this. It would be of great benefit if it did.

I think that we need financial solutions for all projects, currently we do not have this and it would be of great benefit.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's a very stable product.

It's scaled just fine.

I am very happy with our partnership with CA. Technical support is very good. Since the very beginning of our relationship with them, they've provided us with great support and information.

We chose CA because we had previously used CA Spectrum.

The initial setup was very easy. We're quite happy about that.

It’s very simple, fast, and has great support for the tools.

The most valuable feature to me seems to be that the system is fully customizable and the service types with events and macros, that allows you to define not only SLAs, but actions and notifications in time, during the ticket processing. Also, the unified self-service portal with mobile interface, the knowledge base, Web Screen Painter, and the fact that you don’t need to provide any new password when you are changing the role - you just select the role you want to apply and push the button).

There are some improvement that can be done. First of all, the interface is pretty old (although it looks ok). There some improvements needed in the support and security offered for mail servers. Also, the system should allow to add new action macros at the interface level, and not through workaround, and some more easy way manage the language support (an easier way to generate the translated interfaces, fewer files to be translated). The Web Screen Painter tool can be improved, since this is a very powerful tool.

I’m relatively new to CA Service Desk Manager, having started using it at the beginning of this year.

The product, once you have implemented in the right way is very stable. You can leave it there to do its job, and only perform administration tasks like creating users and changing minor things. You don’t need to restart it or perform other administrative tasks.

It is a very scalable product and multi-tenancy feature allows you to give secure access in a multi-organizational environment, or provide services with it.

I had no problems, so 10/10.

Technical support is good, and you have also a strong community. You can even consider some advice from the older product, Unicenter, so 9/10.

The initial setup is complex. CA Service Desk Manager has a complex architecture, and depending upon the features you choose to install, you need more than four machines, which is the minimum number recommended by CA. So, it is an effort, and the same for the business rules. A complex model means a bigger implementation effort, process automatization, means some other extra effort too.

Service Desk Manager price is not very high and the benefits are considerable. If you compare with other products, for the same money, you'll get a more flexible system, with a very nice licensing model (it is licensed per analyst that's processing the ticket, not per ticket or per user).

Yes, we have evaluated more products like IBM, Landesk, Microsoft, and Manage Engine.

You won’t regret implementing it. If you have a medium or a large amount of ticketing activity, you will see the true benefits this system is giving to your business. But, keep in mind that you will need a dedicated resource to maintain the flows as they are changing in your activity, the policies, and the system itself. This is because when you customize it, and things are changing, you need someone to implement these changes, and since the system is so flexible, also there are a lot of possibilities.