Clarity SM Valuable Features
The solution's back-end architecture is very good for end users.
View full review »Clarity is flexible to implement and integrate. It gives the developer or consultant a broad space to work and customize based on what the customers want. It adopts native languages as well.
View full review »The solution's most valuable feature is customization. It provides different components to customize the service desk manager whenever needed.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
IT Service Management (ITSM)
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, ServiceNow, Atlassian and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
The core SDM component (the ticketing system) is the most valuable to me. It is reliable and covers the basic ITSM process stack very well (I,R,P,C). I am an IT consultant specializing in ITSM tools. The CA system has proven to be reliable and trustworthy. It can be scaled to meet the ITSM needs of the largest global enterprises. The change module is particularly robust. It provides controls, visualization, and auditability.
View full review »AI
Ahmed Issawi
System Architect ITSM application at Michigan State University
Some of the features that we really like about the solution is that certain parts of it are pretty expandable and customizable. The support that we get from CA has been pretty good. We haven't had major issues with them, and they're really responsive as well.
The tool itself is an enterprise tool. It fits our needs and we can actually expand it out to the further campus, instead of just having one area of focus or one group using it.
View full review »The most valuable fractures of Clarity SM are its ease of use and security. I have been highly satisfied. We've been able to integrate it with email and an SMS gateway for the purposes of notifications. That works very well.
View full review »- Functions related to the ITIL process sets for change management
- Request fulfillment
- Incident management
- Knowledge management database
These elements are the most valuable to the organization because they are the areas that have at least rudimentary corresponding business processes and accountable business owners.
The features that are most valuable to me as an SDM administrator are:
- Extensibility of the interface to allow for schema changes
- Form-level modifications to support the aforementioned business processes
The knowledge.
View full review »Right now, we are starting to be dependent on the CMDB a lot. It's increasingly important but, of course, as with many other customers, it's the ticket system that actually helps us a lot. For incidents, of course, that's the biggest use right now.
DF
reviewer977340
Project Manager at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable features are the requests and incident tracking.
View full review »The following modules are the most valuable:
- Incident
- Request
- Knowledge
- Change Order
The customer service portal allows customers to put in their ticket themselves, especially on the application side because sometimes you don't interpret it right when you're on the phone. So it's helpful to be able to to provide and collected that information from the user side.
We do a lot of applications, so we support a lot of applications. When a client or end user calls in, we have to consistently maintain the case number, the information, the client. It's a lot of details on different applications, so to be able to get that into their own terms is a lot easier for as we help troubleshoot the ticket.
View full review »JV
Jeff Vielle
Regional IT Coordinator at Novus International
The ability to keep track. The work is tracked.
Provides ease of customer interaction. Gives the customer a general sense that they're being helped. Email works, telephone calls work too. But having something that's tracked in this way just makes things easier.
It also allows us to assign different areas, maybe it's a multifaceted problem. Whether it's a problem we have to work on, or another part that needs to be worked on with infrastructure; sometimes they're meshed together. This really lets the IT group and our group shine.
View full review »There is a lot of flexibility in the system. There has not yet been a case where we've had people come to us and say, "Hey, can you guys do this?" and we can't. Some of it is obviously a little bit more complicated at times, but the flexibility in the system provides a lot.
Giving our end users what they need to perform their jobs better is highly valuable.
View full review »We use everything in service desk and each one of them are adding benefit to the company and users. We really benefit from all of the features but if I have to single some features out, it will be:
Major incident tracking: We are able to differentiate between a normal and a major incident and do comprehensive reporting on this to key stakeholders.
SLA management: Each category has it’s own unique SLA linked and this gives us the ability to manage the expectations of end users more effectively.
View full review »The most valuable features for me are the scalability of it, its ability to bring in everyone at one time, and all the data-related functionalities. It works with products that were not easy to pull in, whether it be the CIs or contact data. So that's really been helpful when we've had to make a lot of bulk changes, bulk uploads, and import/exports of data.
View full review »JS
Joaquim Santos
Senior Engineer at Banco Portugal
The UI is very user-friendly.
View full review »MM
Makhosonke-Matshoba
ESM Specialist at Gijima
I like the self-service interface and the fact that people can raise and check their own tickets without necessarily having to call the service desk. They can check progress on their tickets and also have input in the life cycle of the tickets. That's one feature that I think I like most.
We are running a high availability deployment now and I like the architecture because it makes it easy from a maintenance point of view. You hardly have any downtime because of high availability. You just move your servers across to a secondary or primary environment, do your maintenance and bring it back without users even noticing. The nice thing is the feed into the inventory and discovery solutions that work so well. You keep your discovery data somewhere and you verify it before you bring it over to CA SDM.
View full review »KD
Kris Dunn
Manager Software Engineer at Appriss
The flexibility. It allows us to do things, expand it, and integrate with our other solutions. Also, it's pretty easy to use.
It is simple for me. Simple, and it is robust. It works very well.
View full review »GG
Gurinder Giran
Senior Consultant
Ability to write macros, which can in turn trigger some condition or could be conditioned to basically trigger notifications, the workflow desk, or web calls. It is huge benefit to customize it.
View full review »From our perspective, and taking into account that we have a lot of CA products for IT service delivery, the most valuable feature is interconnectivity with other products such as CA Clarity, CA IT Asset Manager, CA Spectrum, CA UIM, CA APM, etc.
View full review »The completeness of information on each ticket is one of the most valuable feature of this solution. We are able to gather information either directly from the product interface or from data extraction. Any reports that our analyst users request are available in some fashion.
View full review »The most valuable feature is the usability of the search when you want to find other tickets that relate to the incident you're working on.
We have all of our different ticket types in one area. There are incidents, requests, and change requests all tied into one application, so you don't need to go to different tools. It makes it easier to find all the data in one spot.
View full review »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.
View full review »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.
View full review »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.
MM
Makhosonke-Matshoba
ESM Specialist at Gijima
As of late, I really like the BI functions.
View full review »- 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.
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.
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.
View full review »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).
View full review »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.
View full review »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.
View full review »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.
View full review »PC
Consult298936
Senior Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »TS
Tomasz Szczesny
IT Administrator / Help Desk Platform at Inter Cars SA
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.
View full review »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.
View full review »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.
View full review »TG
Reviewer2892
Vice President of Infrastructure Management at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees
- Logging every action in Service Desk Manager (SDM).
- Unique ticket number for every case (incident, request, problem, change, etc.) and tracking cases with ticket numbers.
- Out-of-the-box functions
- ITIL compatibility
The most valuable features for us was the ability to calculate service levels for different time periods as well as the ability to store and archive contracts. BSI has templates for calculating key services levels as well as the capability to allowing coding for more complicated, unique measurements. Data for key metrics in individual contracts can be used to creat
View full review »For me, personally, the ease of interface is the most valuable feature. It's easy to look up tickets, requiring less clicks compared to CSM. The functionality is more robust than CSM.
View full review »FB
Fernando Bruno Videla
Security Architect at Netnix
We can search open cases and closed cases to find what we have done in other incidents. We use the cases as a knowledge base to find what we did last time this incident occurred.
Also, prioritization is valuable and managing work queues.
View full review »- The TWA option for CA CMDB along with the simulation of CI and relationship data in GRLoader.
- The MDR button on the CI page, which directly takes you to the integrated MDR Source.
- The Visualizer, which automatically affects the map based on relationships.
- Personal Response, which is helpful in following a standard format across teams.
Compared to others, I like the ease of Service Desk. It's easy to maneuver around in. It's very user friendly. Things make sense where some other products we looked at, they were very confusing.
We found that there's plenty of things that this tool does that we frankly aren't utilizing. Other tools looked neat, but when we got to really looking at it we just have it. We're not using it to it's potential to be honest with you. We do have the CMDB, but we're not utilizing a lot of the integrations to the potential like the IT workflow. A lot of the automated processes we're just not using and I'm sitting here looking at this stuff going, "We are barley using this tool."
We could be doing a better job, but unfortunately out hands are tied because it takes our system administrators time and effort to implement these things for us. Whether we want them or not, it's whether their team has time.
Being able to specify event rules and SLAs that can help to automate some of the processes that people are doing manually is valuable.
I could pick a dozen and say, "That's useful, and that's useful, and that's useful." The fact that it aligns very well with ITIL. I think that's probably one of my favorite things about it, because it's following up a general best practice for service management. That's important.
The most important part is the user experience. CA Service Desk Manager provides a great and helpful experience. It's a tool with constant updates and always thinking about and looking out for the user.
It's a powerful tool that is able to do everything. Anything you need, CA SDM can help.
CA Technologies have been improving the customer experience when we're talking about UI, probally it's comming soon a great UI about usability.
It's comming with v17 a great functionality about upgrade - it's easier than ever.
View full review »This product has so many adjustment possibilities for many different clients.
One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constantly increasing needs of the customers experience, we always have to make changes in the way we are working to provide satisfaction to our clients. Thus, this application has many thousands of ways to do that.
View full review »Advanced Availability architecture is hands down the key feature. We can make sweeping changes, to the application or database, with a minimal impact on our user base. Most of the time, the users see no downtime at all.
View full review »I handle primarily the back end of the tool. A lot of the benefits that we've seen have been the ease of use, the implementation of it, the actual transition because we had an existing product prior too and we're moving from our vendor product to ITSM. At the time, we were very concerned about how long it was going to take us to actually do the upgrade and it actually turned out to be not a long and arduous process as we thought it was going to be.
View full review »I think the incident chain and Problem Management modules are key to IT being able to effect change within the organization, and manage that change effectively through ticketing systems and approvals, etc.
LM
Lucas Mesquita
Information Technology Analyst at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees
Ticket management and the knowledge base are the most valuable features of this solution.
View full review »One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constant needs of the experienced customers, we always have to make changes with the way we are working so as to achieve satisfaction for our clients; this application has many ways to do that.
View full review »The process automation component is incredibly valuable. It cuts down on the workload of teams, organizational and clerical work, and allows employees to be more efficient.
View full review »Non-Functional
- Highly configurable, scalable and extendable
- Customizable with almost Hot Deploy except for business logic
- Quick and has awesome architecture
- It's robust
Functional
- Fully fledged Support on Request, Incident, Problem and Change on various scales along with CA PAM and CA SC as well as supporting the classic workflow. It supports Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Single Sign-On through Active Directory and other supported LDAP systems
- Effective SOA layer supporting both SOAP and REST
- Good SLA management along with Response measurement. It supports boht a single SLA or multiple SLAs
- Strong logging mechanism with configurable event, activity notification, email eater. The email eater allows for ticket creation and updates via email without having to log into the application. Also, the Normal survey, and for change management, Risk Survey.
- From 12.5 onward, it comes with a combined CMDB and visualizer along with Remote Support for taking remote control of end users while working on a ticket.
The important part for me is not related to any of the features the product offers as such as it doesn't offer anything some other product wouldn't offer. What I find comforting is that CA has been around for decades and therefore it is seen as a reliable partner, so companies buy their software even when there would be possibly better alternatives available. If I'd have to name one feature that makes it a viable option for some, I'd say it is the on-site installation instead of having your possibly sensitive data in the cloud.
View full review »The most valuable features that we're finding right now are the customer service portal and the ability to have a one stop shop experience, and that's what we're using the tool for. Been a lot of upgrades in the last year or so that have let us be much more customer friendly and create a portal that's easier for our citizens and state employees to use.
View full review »- Incident management
- Problem management
- Exchange management
- Conflict resolution management, defining two configurations items across the board
XFlow (Temperature) and Service Point together provided an extremely user-friendly and collaborative experience to the point of making it easy for all users of the product, whether end-users or analysts.
In these resources, knowledge management gains strength and favors the dynamics of use and service, ensuring agility in operations.
View full review »PC
Consult298936
Senior Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
It has all our configurations. All our infrastructure configurations are on a single pane of glass to view, allowing for one single point of information.
View full review »I would say change management and request management, as well as CMDB.
View full review »- The auditing
- The view it provides into who's doing the work
- How long it's taking to do the work, where the black holes are in terms of the work
Provides effective management of service calls and work assignments. It includes good APIs to extend functionality.
View full review »Incident management
View full review »OM
Olnika Mogakane
Assistant Director at Department of Trade and Industry
The most valuable features of this solution are reporting, configuration monitoring, and the Request and Incidents workflow.
View full review »It enables our coordinators to connect to our customers, and our customers are number one.
It adds tons of value. It gives us one central location to know, not only who is contacting us, but what they're contacting us for, what application they're contacting us for.
View full review »The ticketing aspect. Knowing that there is a ticket there. Something that we can justify what our users have done for our end users.
View full review »The database. The front-end is a little dated. They are working on it, but it is a little dated. So, the database and the power that is driven behind the database.
View full review »The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate many processes – like change management, incident management, problem management, CMDB, all of them – in the same tool.
View full review »The most valuable features of this product are security, scalability and the possibilities for customization.
We can’t compete with the price against small local vendors. Demanding customers are our market.
I would say the integration to our monitoring products and to other products that we use, that's really key for us. Ease of use, it’s very easy to train. We don't have any issues with people getting in or having access problems. That's been the greatest part - it's easy to administer. Our stability has been really great. We are currently in the process of upgrading to a newer version. We have not run into any issues. We've had a great work with CA.
View full review »The biggest strength of Service Catalog is that it's integrated with other solutions on the CA platform. They're all designed to work together.
It is, however, pretty generic. It's very similar to other service desk modules I've seen and used in the past such as ServiceNow, Remedy, and others like those.
View full review »
The ability to add external databases.
View full review »
MA
Manuela Arriaga
Project Manager at Mutualidad de la Abogacía
The most valuable feature are the time sheets, it's a very powerful tool.
Extraction, the reporting tool that I tied into it. It's real-time reporting that's easy to use.
It has a lot of information, the way we have it set up, that you can use. We can attach documents and do screen prints.
We use it for incident, problem, release, change, knowledge, and configuration management.
View full review »1. Ease of customization
2. Modules of integrated ITIL managers
3. Integrated remote access to tickets
View full review »It brings a maturity of collaboration and support, facilitating the work of analysts, and benefits end users in service.
View full review »Customizability. You can easily make your own tables and add fields. Each customer is different and over time, things change. This product is flexible.
View full review »We love the CMDB, it's a very good functionality. The whole ITO process is very well-defined. Problem management and SDF management are great features and really improve our day-to-day functions.
View full review »Probably the support end of it. You can track where the ticket status is all the way from the beginning to the end, and the whole company has access to it.
View full review »It's a part of of a tool that other people use, and the big part of the problem with CMDB is getting a high rate of adoption. CMDB is not something that people see as a necessity, especially technical people. They don't want to deal with auditing, they don't want to deal with a lot of that stuff. So the fact that it's something they're already familiar with is a big deal. For a lot of companies, it's not built into their service desk, to my understanding. So that's a good thing about it.
It's fairly easy to use, from a UI standpoint. Those are the main things that I would say are good about it.
View full review »The new xFlow interface that was introduced for Level 1 analysts really helps the them to achieve the best and fastest result for their users/customers.
First, based on certain ticket attributes, the heat of tickets is calculated and the list is sorted so the analyst can always continue to work on the ticket with the highest priority.
Then, ticket data is analyzed by the system to give analysts hints on experts or similar tickets/solutions.
Last but not least, the research tool is great to search the internet for solutions and get information back to the ticket.
View full review »SDM provides out-of-the-box integration with other CA Service Management modules. For example, it integrated with CA CMDB, CA Business Intelligence (for reporting and dashboard), CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self Service.
View full review »With CA SDM, my entire service management business is ITIL aligned with better productivity across all IT processes. From incident management to release management, CA SDM empowers and energizes ABS and their clients.
View full review »The most valuable feature is its integrated nature. Compared to other service catalog and business process management suites, which are highly flexible, what you give up in those is the integration with other feature-set functionalities, platforms, and modules that would make up the rest of your IT organization. Hands down, the premier feature of the CA platform is the integrated nature of that platform. It's designed to work together.
View full review »The value for the clients is that you can save information in the application and get reports with that information.
We are also installing xFlow in our QA environment at the moment.
View full review »We have integrated Service Desk Manager fully from servicing the customer, right down to the network configuration. It's fully integrated. That provides many customer benefits, and enhances our customer experience as well.
View full review »
One of it's kind.
Delivers all flavors of SLM reports
View full review »
As far as the integration with using all the CA products, all the components integrate well together and are very easy to use.
Previously, we did not have a help desk at all. So, it has made a difference.
- The remote connection part (Support Automation): CA Service Desk has a Support Automation feature which primarily does remote connection. This is an important customer support tool used in connecting to a user’s/customer’s device or machine to help them resolve whatever problems they have. The remote connection also has a chat functionality that you can also use.
- Robust knowledge search via its knowledge base: For knowledge search, CA Service Desk has a robust knowledge base tool where documentation, articles and notes around known incidents and problems are documented for users/administrators or analysts to use. They basically act as a self-service tool where users can go to, search for documents and resolve problems themselves instead of having to always call the IT people. This way the IT people have time to do other productive tasks.
- The simplicity of the tool
- Incidents
- Request management
- Change management
- Asset management
These are the core processes for organization, as we are more focused on them.
View full review »Creating tickets is a frequent part of our job. The scoreboard allows me to check for high-priority tickets, check status of tickets I created and search for tickets with keyword searches among other plusses.
View full review »Service Catalog is one place where you can do things for the entire organization. Whenever a new employee joins, you can put in requests. Now, we're using the old version, though it’s not great. We're trying to customize it to our requirements as a healthcare company.
View full review »Incident/Request/Problem/Change Management, CMDB, and Business Intelligence.
View full review »Ease of integration with CA Service Desk Manager Account setup
View full review »Change Management, Incident Management, and CMDB are the most valuable features.
View full review »The Service Catalog integration for service delivery is a feature that we find very useful and we're getting great benefit from it.
View full review »The most valuable features are the service catalog and process automation; in deployment, the ICT automation and self-service.
View full review »The flexible envelope provides an infinite number of ways to customize it.
View full review »For me, the best feature is the powerful tool to integrate all processes for IT to monitor. I can integrate process management, release, and change into our programs.
View full review »- Service Desk
- Knowledgebase
- CMDB
- Change Calendar
Great flexibility for every environment and many features are available. This product is great for the customer, starting with just Request Management or the full Service Management suite.
View full review »
- Multitenancy does not require a standalone implementation per customer.
- Reporting and Dashboards are components which allow you to measure customer contracts.
Unique tool that can get data from any other tool, correlate, make complex formulas to calculate SLAs/KPIs, calculate penalty/bonus, alerts, dashboards, automatic reporting, unbeatable for SLM.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
IT Service Management (ITSM)
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, ServiceNow, Atlassian and others in IT Service Management (ITSM). Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.