Clarity SM Reviews

Incident Management module: Tracking events or incidents is one of the most challenging work phenomena in the workplace. Convincing your clients to report issues is another different isolated task that, when done right, tremendously improves TAT.

The IT team becomes more effective and efficient because there is workload sharing. Where a Service Desk administrator would have had to log a call, Users can now do it themselves to get a service.

Automated email logging: The tradition in the workplace for communication will always be email. If emails can be used to automatically trigger calls, that is the best thing that can ever happen in the incident management or service desk process. This would save a lot of time, plainly speaking.

There should be a way for emails sent to a particular address to trigger an alert to create an incident or request, similar to SIEM automation mechanisms. If this is already available, my apologies, but I currently don’t have it.

I have used it for over three years.

The product is quite stable and highly scalable. No issues yet.

Technical support is 7/10.

I’ve used SCSM (System Center Service Manager), quite a good product from Microsoft. The difference is in scalability; there was a need to use a web application compared to an in-house product solution.

I wasn’t directly involved in the initial setup of the product.

Solution was implemented through a vendor. It is a good product to implement; quite feasible.

It really has a good cost-benefit analysis for any business with a large employee base.

It is a good solution for service desks.

The tool itself is valuable as a result of all its features combined. Therefore, I have found that there is no feature more valuable than another.

The scalability of a product this size has provided us with the most improvement. Being able to use one product globally throughout our company to capture and report on all IT work being done has provided the most benefit.

Ease of support and upgrades need much improvement. We don't have a dedicated team to support this system, and we still need to rely to much on services to perform upgrades and major patches due to the complexity of the system. Also, their mobile application does not allow us to configure it the same way as the system is configured, so we cannot use it at all.

We've been using it for four and a half years.

We had many issues, especially in the first release we implemented (12.5). In later releases, the overall system stability has improved greatly, but there have been other stability issues with specific parts of the system functionality. They do seem to provide test patches that help with stability of those areas, but with each new release there are new specific functionality stability issues that need to be addressed.

We have had no issues scaling it globally throughout our company.

Support is great. The engineers should probably work a little closer with the support and services teams on new releases to better understand the overall issues. They need to understand the issues that older versions had to ensure they they willnot re-occur in the new release, as well to ensure that any new functionality does not create similar issues that will need to be addressed. I think that too many 'test' patches are provided specifically to one customer that aren't carried over to the new release which causes that customer to have to address that issue again with support in the new release, and again receive another 'test' patch. Introducing more configuration options for these would give customers the flexibility that is needed for these areas.

We also looked at BMC Remedy and GWI.

It's complex. Customers aren't really able to implement this system themselves, unless they are going to use everything out-of-the-box.

I don't see anyone other than large companies being able to afford this system.

We previously used a system that wasn't scalable to use globally, which is why we switched.

Most vendors will tell you that you don't need a full time dedicated person or team to support and administer their system, but you really do, especially if you are going to utilize everything it has to offer. This person should understand the code, since some supported changes are made at the form level by changing or adding to the code.

Most of all is the end-user experience. In your company you have IT experienced people and non-IT experienced end-users. They need the ability to reach out, report an issue, or request something that they need to do their job. They need the ability to get that done quickly, utilize different technology other than calling a help desk, and get it done quickly, and get the metrics behind the scenes that we can report on what's going on in the environment.

Service management includes incident problem change and request. From an end-user perspective, it's more around the incident and request area where an end-user can request a service such as needing hardware, software, or accessories that they need to do their job. From an incident perspective, they might need to report an issue, if something's broken and they need it fixed, that could be with something on their workstation, and that could also include something with an application that they use to get their job done. They need the ability to report those issues and get them resolved quickly.

We did have some outages in the beginning when we were deploying the tools into our environment. A lot of it was due to perhaps not having the right hardware that was required, or the memory. You need to get the specific requirements involved to run a good solution. I think it can absolutely grow with our company. We need to look into broadening the services that we have in place today, just keep advancing and improving on those services, adding additional services to the users to make their experience good.

We've had some really good experiences with technical support, and we've had some not so great experiences with technical support, but our direct contact team at CA has been very, very helpful in getting us to the right people that can help resolve our problems quickly.

We have a lot of end-user feedback that can contribute to improvements with the tools. The way that it's designed, we have a lot of recommendations based on end-user experience that can really contribute to improving the tool for an end-user experience. The tools are very IT focused, and we just need to incorporate more of the end-user experience when designing the tool. That input could be very valuable to CA.

I don't think anything is a 10/10, I would give it an 8/10. Best practices would be absolutely involving all of your processes before implementing the tool. You have to design the tool around your processes, and then from an end-user experience you want to make sure that you have viable how-to documents that you can distribute to those customers' end-users on how to use the tools, training, if you're able to provide training to those folks, communication about what's coming, and make sure that they know how to use the tool and be successful using the tool.

Before Service Desk, we were kind of flying a bit blind internally. With it, we're still in the honeymoon phase, but it's provided us many, if not all, of the tools that we're looking to use and implement in our system. And the online community has been excellent as well.

I'd like to see a Quick Request function. I think the reporting has been a little bit lacking as there are some basic dashboards, metrics and reports that we'd like to see that we've struggled to get out of their out-of-the-box system. So I'd say the reporting hasn't been quite as robust as we'd like it to be.

I think many of the good features are outweighed by some of the services and support issues we've had, and so again, we're still in the honeymoon phase, and we've got some struggles that we're trying to resolve. I think we're probably going through some growing pains.

We went live in August, but our implementation lasted longer than the norm, so we had probably almost a two-year implementation.

It's had a lot of weird behavior. It's been stable, but almost a little schizophrenic. A perfect example: We have a solution center that our level-1 analysts are primarily using. If there is a Quick Incident, they perform a Quick Request, but not together, and not consistently one or the other. We've brought this up with CA, saying, "We really need both, because these are people that are putting in 50 and 60 tickets a day, and the steps that they need to go through outside of Quick Request or Incident just take too long. Our metrics are really tanking because of this." And the response was, "Oh, well, you shouldn't have performed Quick Request." "Okay, well, we did, so now we want both." So we've had that discussion with them in development because we've found this inefficiency in the system.

We're not at that stage yet.

The community groups that we've joined have been excellent. We've gotten a lot of information from those.

We came from HP, and it was well past end-of-life to the point where we were pretty much holding our breath on a daily basis as to whether it would stay up all day or not. So we waited, probably, well past the useful life of the HP system, and that's what prompted us to start looking at not only a service desk solution, but we also wanted a more robust solution.

The CA suite has a larger availability of th ose modules that we could work together to get the whole package. We are using monitoring a bit, so we use UIM, and we just went live with SDM. And we, of course, use Service Desk. So the expectation is to implement as much of the suite as we possibly can in a step-wise fashion.

It was not straightforward. We essentially pulled out a legacy system that worked our team to the hilt as we were bringing in not only a new product, we were also bringing in a new process. We were looking at how we could follow a certain methodology, so it was a double whammy for our staff to develop that, so our implementation took a little longer.

We did. We did an analysis that came down to two different vendors, CA and another, and we ended up going with CA for a couple of reasons. We have several people in the organization who had experience with CA. Also, we felt there was less risk because CA was established in the market.

We use it for our incident request processes and also our change-over processes as well as our problem processes. It's our main CMDB.

It's a very flexible platform. 

You can customize your own things and your own processes. You can easily extend the natural processes and you can customize what you need to. 

It's easy and it's not affected by upgrades. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The user interface is a little bit old and not so mainstream. Nowadays every person is used to an interface that is more user-friendly and this one is not so user-friendly maybe due to the fact that, if you need to let people customize everything, sometimes you lose out on a clean user experience. When you can configure the interface, including all the buttons, all the things, it's hard to keep things streamlined. From my point of view, if you gain a lot of flexibility, you lose a little bit of the overall user experience.

We'd like to have a better overall user experience. 

The workflow design could be better. They have another product with better workflow designs and I would like to see them merge these products together. 

The costs associated with the product are a bit high.

The first level of customer service isn't very knowledgeable. 

They could use a better service portal. 

I've used the solution for more than ten years at this point. 

The stability is quite good. That said, when you start doing so much customization and so much code on your own, you could degrade a little bit of the performance. However, we don't have any performance issues. We have maybe 100 persons using it daily and we don't have any issues.

There might be 20 people who use the solution directly. We have 100 people who use it daily.

The solution is scalable as you can add more front-end servers or more back-end servers. It's an easy process and it's not a complex thing to do it.

Sometimes when we have some problems we have to open a ticket and escalate to the vendor, and also sometimes we use the partner and describe the issue to the partner.

The first lines of support are sometimes not so good. We need to take time to escalate the problem to the second-line or third-line of support. In the 10 years we've used the product, we haven't really had a big problem. That said, sometimes when I open a ticket for small things, sometimes the first line of support is just not great and handling the issue. They could be a bit better and more knowledgeable. 

The initial setup is simple and not so complex. Of course, you have a lot of configurations as all the processes themselves are complex, however, if you use the out-of-the-box features like the SLA and workflows it's more or less easy to implement. 

Sometimes the partner provides maintenance services and sometimes we handle the maintenance ourselves. Usually, we do the maintenance by ourselves. For example, if we need to do an upgrade to a new version, if we have the knowledge, we do it by ourselves, however, most of the time, we prefer to use a partner when it's something big or at least when it's something that we don't know for sure how best to handle things.

Usually, we use some people who help us. Most of the time it's not the vendor itself. Usually, it is the partner as we are a public company and we have some restrictions when we are buying things. Therefore, we sometimes cannot buy directly from the vendor and we buy the product or service through a partner. The partner is one that is in our country and close to us. They would have the same resources the vendor has in order to do the best implementation.

Nowadays, the solution is not so cheap, If can be a bit expensive. When we did some research last year, we noted the pricing was near the top and on the more expensive side. 

We're just customers and end-users.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. Usually, every year we upgrade. However, not the latest one. Still, it's not so far from the latest version.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for incident and change management.

The newest customer portal is an improvement on the old one. However, we don't have the possibility to use it as we're on an older version.

The new portal for analysts is supposed to be very good as well.

The in-service catalog is quite useful.

The lack of parameters is limited. It's not possible to customize the solution.

We have issues with adding attachments and screenshots. Copy and paste is not possible on the solution.

Although there are some good features on the latest version, my company decided in the past month to switch solutions and we're moving over to Jira.

The cost of this solution is too high, which is why we're leaving.

I've been working with the solution for ten years, or maybe longer.

The solution is highly stable. We're using the high availability product for our application server and the program server is enough for our organization. We are using the application in over 70 countries because we have many branches abroad. It works well for us.

We have more than 10,000 users using the system across 70 countries. It's quite scalable.

We have a partner in Poland, so we've never contacted technical support directly. If we have issues, we contact the partner, not CA.

We have experience with Jira and have decided to move over to Jira in the coming months.

About 15 years ago, I also worked with an HP product called HP Service Desk. At the time, CA was more flexible and we could create customizations ourselves. On HP this was not possible without external support.

The initial installation was not complicated. It was pretty easy because I had previous experience. Occasionally, however, we did have problems with the environment and the application server would be on standby for a long time. I didn't find this too be too much of an issue though.

The pricing is quite expensive. It's so cost-prohibitive we've decided to move away from it.

We're using an older version of the solution. It's my understanding that in the 17.2 version there is a completely different customer portal.

I would recommend the solution, even though we are leaving it behind. I know another big company in Poland, which is an insurance company. They use this product and they've upgraded to the latest version. They have good knowledge and good experience with this product and they are using also the CMDB and the knowledge database, which is more of the product than we use. They are quite satisfied with the results they get from it.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

I've stood it up and I've configured it and got it working.

What I like about it are the features that allow me to integrate with Service Desk Manager and Process Automation, and to build creative solutions based on the integration with other CA products.

Although we've implemented Catalog, we haven't used it in production yet. We built a prototype and what we want to use it for is to take over our request management system, because right now we do requests in Service Desk. I think Catalog is going to provide us more of a cart-type system.

Catalog gives us that cart view if you want to submit a request for service. Right now we are using Service Desk, but we would like to put the request management system in Catalog. It gives us a better buy and it gives us a more friendly view of ordering requests.

I can't think of any areas for improvement with the product itself, though when I stood it up, the documentation was not as straightforward as it could have been. But I figured it out without much issue.

No issues with deployment.

There's really nothing for me to talk about in terms of stability as it's not yet in production even though I've stood it up and configured it.

We haven't tried to scale it yet, but I don't anticipate any issues.

I've never opened an issue with regard to Catalog.

We're using Service Desk as our request management system, but we'll be moving away from it to Catalog.

I don't think I needed anybody's help to stand it up. I think the documentation walked me through what I needed to do.

I stood it up myself.

My involvement with Service Desk Manager is on the administration side as I have a partner who does all the form design and that sort of thing. What I get out of it personally is that it can go beyond out-of-the-box.

In other words, if I need SDM to do something that it doesn't do out-of-the-box, it gives us the tools to expand it, like the events and macros. It empowers me to be a lot more creative in doing things beyond the out-of-the-box scope of SDM.

Right now, we are using it for change management, incident management and service requests. It provides all users with a scoreboard where they can track all the incidents, requests, or change orders that they're responsible for. It provides the user with a tracking of anything they may have submitted.

With the simple notification when somethings being worked on, your Service Desk allows you to be creative with the notifications. Who gets what, when they get it, and it keeps dialogue open between service provisioner and the service requester.

There's always behind-the-scenes notification and tracking of what's going on through the Service Desk incident record or through the change record.

I submitted an enhancement request and I think it actually made it into the product. It was basically enhancements to how it integrates with Process Automation -- if Process Automation is down and Service Desk happened to call Process Automation for external activity type of thing, I want SDM to be more resilient to the interface being down to that component.

Also, instead of throwing an error to the user, I'd suggest maybe a spinning hourglass or something. A message that says, hold on, we're trying to talk to Process Automation or something along those lines.

It's not in a production environment yet, but were moving in there. The environment where we're currently stood up on in production is version 12. I think it's holding up pretty good. I think that version 12.9 will allow us to build on a a more advanced configuration, which means that it will sustain an outage better than version 12.5 because you have multiple user interface servers stood up. If one goes down, it still provides user interface connectivity.

I think 12.9 is going to be a lot better in terms of availability, but I think that SDM does a nice job and isn't buggy. Where it does get bogged down, or it does encounter an error, is that lot of times we're unable to track the error through the error log mechanism, and we then have to figure it out for ourselves.

The scale that we currently use it at is more than sufficient. We have single server with a single database and it holds up very well for over two hundred users. I think it's doing pretty good.

v12.9 does allow us to be more scalable if we have to build it for a greater audience of users, but we haven't got that far yet.

I've had to call them on occasion because I've had integration problems with Process Automation. I might've had an SSL certificate-type issue. The people whom I've dealt with were very knowledgeable about the product and oftentimes resolution comes with in a day or so that I open up an issue. I can't say that I open an issue up every week. It's probably more like once a month.

I think it's pretty easy. The documentation was good for somebody who has a background on it. I can stand it up with my eyes closed. I don't know if someone coming to it for the first time could look through the documentation and make sense of it, though.

Really, really learn the admin functions.