DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

This product helps our organization by providing a shared model to the customer which reduces the cost for humans and infrastructure via the multi-tenancy feature.

• Storage monitoring

• Bi-directional Integration with ticketing tools like ServiceNow, BMC Remedy etc.
• Application code level monitoring for the entire workflow on different platforms like Java, .NET, etc.
• Server certificate monitoring
• Bi-directional integration with other monitoring tools like IBM Tivoli, SCOM, ScienceLogic, SolarWinds etc.

• Only EMC Clarion, IBM, Hitachi and NetApp is possible
• No exhaustive viewable dashboard on the health of storages
• Capacity forecasting not available
• Doesn’t support SMS alerting via GSM modem, but works with cloud SMS web application which in-turn requires lot of manual effort to configure
• Enterprise alarm console view lacks event correlation even from the base level
• No run book automation feature in place to enable
• Reporting customization for needs is a complex mechanism
• Less capability on individual device dash boards and service health dashboards
• Huge customizations for creating each dashboard as there are no OOB dashboards available
• Network Discovery is less than excellent on the devices categories, discovery modes (SNMP, WMI).
• Doesn't have the intelligence to group devices automatically based on the device type
• Network topology is not automatic as it requires lot of manual interventions to define
• Web portal views for different categories of infrastructure components is not in OOB feature, needs a lot of manual intervention
• Web portal is not available for OOB like the application HA
• HTTPS enabling for web application doesn't work as expected due to certificate issues
• Multi-tenancy feature lacks in segregation of devices in the database which has the same IP in multiple customer environment

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Support SLA for response and resolution is pathetic, even the quality of resolution is not up to the level of expectations. Take enterprise support subscription as the basic support will not be effective during critical incidents.

• Multi-tenancy
• Ability to set thresholds per system
• Wide variety of probes

As a data center, we provide monitoring of client systems. Automatic alarm generation, client notifications, and managing SLAs are paramount to our success.

The scalability of the web-based portal needs improvement. Users will need to quickly become proficient in scripting to take full advantage of its capabilities.

I've used it for three years.

There have been no issues with deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

Scalability for redundant data centers is challenging.

Customer Service is great 10/10.

Technical support is a bit behind 8/10.

We started out with HP, then added Nagios, looked at EMC, and finally selected CA UIM.

We have a complex infrastructure, with multiple sites, which the systems handles beautifully.

We have over 10,000 client systems monitored and negotiated a package deal.

We used a consultant and utilized the training after we set the systems up. In hindsight we should have taken the training, then set up the system.

Decide upfront about monitoring thresholds and use templates.

• Easy GUI administration
• Unified alarm console
• Support for multi-tenancy
• Intelligent high availability
• Alarms suppression
• De-duplication
• Easy dashboard creation with several data sources such such as SQL, Oracle, and MS SQL databases

UIM has given us a platform to pro-actively monitor infrastructure and applications as a unified solution. We can have access to reports on applications and of the servers on which the applications are hosted from the same dashboard which can be exported as a PDF for historical data as well as a predictive data. Apart from which, it gives us many out of the box probes classified as -

• Databases - DB2, Informix, MS SQL, Oracle, Sybase and JDBC
• Applications - Cisco packs, Cloud monitoring packs, End To End application monitoring, Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, AD, Lotus Notes and many more
• Gateway probes - For integration with key market products such as BMC Remedy, HP OVO, HP SM, Service Now, and SNMP traps based integration

• Multi-tenancy for ICMP profiles of servers is not there
• Availability reports in percentage is not calculated by the tool out of the box
• Rest of the things can be achieved by tweaking the script in Lua

I have been using this solution since 2011, almost five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

7/10

7/10

It's very simple and straightforward. The steps for implementation should be prepared keeping in mind that the pre-requisites are met.

I have implemented this product in five or six environments and do have a strong knowledge and troubleshooting approach.

The ROI, based on a rough calculation for a five year project, would be 50% for sure.

Pricing is one of the lowest for such a product in the market. If you have an experienced tools administrator you may want to go with this product over any other market product considering the cost efficiency.

I evaluated BMC Patrol and HP OVO. We chose CA as the license cost was much cheaper and almost all the functionality/requirements could be achieved via this product as well.

What's most valuable to me is the fact that it is very customizable, allowing me to play around with the configuration and thresholds. Also, I enjoy the simple GUI which makes it easy to use.

It has allowed us to monitor the crucial parts of our network, minimizing downtime and issues. Also, it alerts the relevant teams as soon as we have breaks in network connectivity, high load on hardware, etc.

There are a few areas for improvement, but I would have to say some of the Java content is a little buggy and would definitely like to see continued upgrades and improvements in the GUI. I know some of the stuff is preferred to be set on the controllers, however accessing the console from GUI is a more efficient way as you can control your user accounts there and it makes it safer than giving someone access to the controllers. The problem is sometimes you have to access the controllers in order to do certain tasks.

I've used it for one year.

There were no issues with deploying it.

There were a few instances when Nimsoft agents would crash on hosts. However, this was not too serious and it boiled down to some minor external factors that were solved quickly with customer support.

There have been no issues scaling it out.

We had meetings with CA's customer quality once a week and, overall, the communication was pretty good and reliable.

No other solution was used.

The setup was fairly simple and straightforward, and we had some decent training initially that made it smooth sailing.

Implementation was done in-house. As long as you take the training and follow the instructions, you can't go wrong, but if you do, customer support is very helpful.

As a simple solution for monitoring it's pretty handy, simple to use, very customizable, and integrates with Salesforce.

The decrease in time to resolution on problems, also a reduction on finger pointing of teams, "It's the network, or it's the application." Things like that, the ability to pinpoint those problems very, very quickly.

We use it to monitor all of our infrastructure, so servers, telecom devices, all our applications, to try and get a true End 2 End experience, and understand the user's experience.

We primarily chose CA UIM because we had a bunch of disparate systems. We had some network monitoring, we had infrastructure monitoring, it was siloed off into our different environments. We needed to pull it into a single tool, and we needed the flexibility to gain some more insight into the end user experience through synthetic transactions.

The ability to be able to pull data out of multiple data sources and surface it all into a single tool. Some of the other tools that we had were very limited, with UIM you can scrape virtually any data source. The synthetic transactions were a big deal because we really are having this shift to trying to understand the users' experience from their point of view, being able to dashboard and visualize the products and the information on the alarms that we have. Our previous tools didn't give us much of that capability.

Continuing to mature the SNP collector and the network side of the tools they're still not as strong as they need to be. If you're moving from a different product like Spectrum, or something like that, it's a little bit stronger in the networking area, continuing the development of that area.

It was to unify things and bring more visibility into the monitoring space. We've really tried to move from being reactive to proactive. With the tools that we had, we had lots of alarms, and lots of things that we could react on, bet we didn't have the ability to start getting proactive, so we needed to be able to do that as well.

Stability is very good, we've not really had any major issues at all with it, honestly. In developing a product and moving very quickly with the development, so you're going to have bumps on the road. There are some issues but they're quick to respond to those, they're quick to work through them, so it's okay.

We actually have a close relationship with the tech support team, as well as the development team as well, working through issues and problems as they arise. We have a pretty large infrastructure that we monitor, and we get some of the scalability issues or some other issues that they may not have seen and they're very quick to respond. Tech support has been really great.

I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but we've reduced our outages by about 15%. We've reduced time to resolution by about 40%. Lower overhead as far as man hours.

When we initially went through and purchased the product, we started out with a proof of concept and we went in to the proof of concept with the end state of actually turning it into production. We had pre-sales come in and help us work through the problems, getting it all set up and it was very quick to bring online and have collection of data and show value, many times on certain products and certain pieces of products within hours. You've got good data collection, so it was pretty straight forward to set up and configure. We didn't have any issues at all.

It's been a couple of years since we bought them, and I don't remember off the top of my head. We had some other ones we looked through, and the tool just really fit the needs.

The fact that they're still doing a lot of development in the networking space, they're still trying to mature that side of the product to get where it needs to be. That's really the reason, beyond that it's a great product. We really like using the tools, we like all of the things that we've gotten out of the tool set, the ability to visualize, the ability to help our troubleshooting, the in depth analysis for our infrastructure teams and things like that. It's been really great.

Do your research and really compare them side by side, but give CA a chance to put their product against any because it's really one of the best in.

The most valuable feature for me particularly within the enterprise space and what CA does is that they provide an integrated central approach to monitoring. No matter what tool we're using whether it's a phone system or whether it's a storage system, whether it's Unix or Windows, whether it's an access point or a firewall, it can all be seen in a common pane of glass where you can see everything. All of our staff can all be trained on the same tool and then other people can see all the dependent infrastructure within the same tool.

It allows our communication to happen much more effectively. The primary benefit for us at this stage in our approach is that we've been able to cut outages by about 300%. For us in terms of an integrated management approach, it's an interesting question because the benefit that we get, it's two-fold. One we're monitoring everything so we're able to proactively see things that are going on but we also end up really driving the charge on technical debt. Because once we put everything in infrastructure monitoring, we have systems that maybe haven't been updated that now come front and center. If you have a storage array that you have been meaning to upgrade or you've been meaning to optimize, once you put it in monitoring, before we even start alarming and cutting outages, people tend to clean up those systems.

3 years.

You end up pairing off a lot of technical debts so most of that 300% improvement, I mean reduction in outages actually didn't come because of our monitoring, it's because we put the monitoring in place. That's the hard work that's done by our infrastructure teams in order to support it. The solution is very stable. When you're in the outage management business, the last thing that you want is your own solution to be going down. It doesn't speak well for the whole solution but we get a tremendous amount of stability from the system. We have redundant nodes and all that stuff all in place. The last thing we usually think about is the system itself going down just because, to be honest, in the five years that we've been running it, we haven't had any issues.

It scales fairly well. I mean the key with scalability and I think this is true with anything, you have to be able to configure it. The challenges, I think some people will take on an enterprise piece of software and not bring on the people to get it tuned and configured right and then it consumes a whole bunch of data. Then there's this fear of like, "This product isn't scalable." It's like, "Well, you have to tune it to takeout all the default data that you don't want and things that aren't helpful. A lot of enterprise solutions are going to give you the whole kit and caboodle right when you install it and you have to know when to turn it off. I think people end up thinking that something isn't scalable only because when they take it to the enterprise level without tuning it, it doesn't.

We had, to be honest, some of those pains ourselves, we were generating way too much data in our reports, we were generating a ton of network traffic. Once we tuned it and figured how to get just what we wanted and get just the right amount of metrics, our storage numbers and all that came down very reasonably. Serious technical support gets the job done. I wouldn't consider it to be the strength of the product. I think there's a lot of really smart people who run CA. Their product is in other solutions, their products are being implemented by an army of consultants. CA is largely implemented, well from my own experience, not by the consulting team but by hands on guys who work there which means they know the product. I don't think there's as much dependence on the support.

You start with the product. I will look at the product, how you it’s managed, how it’s run, how it’s designed. I’m an architect by trade so and that’s what I did my graduate work in. I'll look and see whether they have an architecture that’s scalable and supportable that they’re modernizing, they are making investments to make sure that it stays current whether it’s with programming languages or new tools or new modules. I look for a strong community base so I want to see something where people are working together outside of their confines of the company to develop either solutions, plug-ins or modules or to share information.

We've had some problems, some challenges with silos of support in situations where we would spend weeks working on something and then I'd finally escalate it and a senior technical person would solve in 10 minutes. The weakest part of the products we use is in the mobile space. We can't seem to get the products to work at all and we can't seem to find the mobile team to even talk to about it. Their mobile app is Circuit 2003 you know kind of very crude. It doesn't have any interface, it doesn't actually connect to our devices. I would say the strongest area for them is going to be in mobile. When you're running like we are in operation sweep, sometimes my guys are only one deep and they got to use the restroom and I send them in there with a mobile app in case something goes down but I can't do it if the mobile app doesn't work.

Generally when a company becomes serious about operations, older companies have been around, they understand the value of operations. Younger companies or some people might say more entrepreneurial companies don't have that strong operational focus. I think one of the cornerstones for that is when you get your house in order in terms of operations and infrastructure so that you're not your own worst enemy. You're not designing solutions that don't work whether it's in the application space, you're not buying infrastructure that isn't performing or you're not able to be accountable with the people that work for you to get them on the phone or addressing issues because they simply don’t know about them.

Today’s enterprise software can’t just be about the product. It has to be about the kind of ecosystem that that goes into it and companies need. If they don’t make a choice to invest in that ecosystem, they miss out on some of the best resources in terms of staff and technical development. I’m looking for a company that’s going to be straight forward. If they can make money because they have a good product people will pay for it. If they have to trick their customers into buying the product by selling them one thing and then forcing them to buy another because they don’t want to lose the investment they already made, that’s not somebody I want to partner with long term. I have personally worked with IBM’s product, HP’s product and CA’s product. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses. I wasn’t actually a part of this decision to make the investment in CA but CA has stood up against all of those vendors.

Say, they as were strong when you got down into it, they have some areas they are stronger other areas, they aren’t as strong. We’re a university so we’re not really in the making money business. Our decision was really about just ensuring that our students and our faculty and our staff had the best experience they can when they interact with technology and that means it’s up. That means that it’s working, that it’s fast when it should be fast, it’s stable and that really drove our decision. It’s that universities are very unique environments. The original campus, in the network sense, was a college campus. A lot of the technology that’s used in enterprise was developed on college campuses. There’s a lot of driving factors in there that come on the operational side to try and keep it stable. We realized that in order to be effective, we need to be able to see everything.

There can’t be a fog and it says, “We know how the servers are running or We know how the servers in storage are running." We don’t know what’s happening with the network or we know what’s happening with the network but we don’t know what’s happening with the VOIP or the phone systems. All of this technology is dependent on each other when things are down. Ends up resulting in a lot of finger pointing. When you have a centralized integrated approach and everybody can see everybody else’s stuff, you cut through all of that. If you have tuned the products and you can pinpoint exactly to the problem, then everyone can be working together on a resolution as opposed to spending all their time finger pointing, “I think it’s your network. No, it’s your storage array. No. It’s your server.” That all goes away.

I think the more complicated space is the ones where you have a mature monitoring solution but it’s not a central integrated monitoring solution and you have to figure out how to trade, things you’re going to have to give up for that silo in order to move it into an integrated approach. That’s always harder that just taking something that’s had no monitoring and bringing it up from scratch. I would put them in the top of the eight, solid nine category. I think they still have some work to do integrating some of their acquisitions. Like I said, the mobile and support space I think. My team has been very effective. These are a lot of people that I don’t interact with on a daily basis.

I think most of the time when people are looking at these other low cost solutions, they are not thinking about what they’re really going to spend. They’re not thinking about whether it’s sustainable, the solution that they’re putting in and they’re really going to see their return on investment. We had very specific needs in higher education that drove us towards CA. I don’t know if those needs would have been similar for instance when I was working in a marketing space. We’re watching a lot of websites and a lot of that kind of traffic. You need to look and see which product meets your particular space the best.

For me, the most valuable feature is multi-tenancy as it can monitor networks and applications simultaneously. That's a big help for me.

The centralized dashboards and many monitoring tools have made our organization a lot easier to manage.

It needs to be more stable and have improved reporting. This would make it better out-of-the-box.

No issues with deployment.

Once in a while it lags, but it hasn’t become a big issue.

It has adapted well over the years. No issues here.

I would give them a 7/10. They are quite knowledgeable and have helped us on the few occasions we have needed them.

We could combine many tools, so this was extremely useful and saves us a lot of time. That's why we switched.

The initial setup was straightforward.

You shouldn't implement it in Windows, and do it in a different database, preferably an Oracle one.

What's most valuable to us is the breadth of technologies for which it provides monitoring. We have a large catalogue and different types of systems and apps we need to monitor.

It's allowed us to get better coverage with our monitoring and to consolidate all monitoring into one solution.

It needs even correlation. We are looking to consolidate into UIM over time, but one of the biggest discrepancies is that UIM does not have even correlation amongst its features.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We have had very few issues even without anyone dedicated to managing it.

The scalability has been good. We take extreme advantage of polling and monitoring in multiple data centers as our footprint has gotten bigger. The only concern is with the database, but they have improved controlling data retention.

Technical support is OK. It varies depending on issues. Config support is good, but getting bugs fixed from support case through completion has sometimes been difficult.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We had done a comparison and narrowed it down to UIM. For the types of tech we wanted to support, it was a better fit.

It comes down to identifying what you need out of the system. Make sure it's good out of the box and try to align your software selection and the priorities of your business.