DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Base set of probes cdm, ntservices, and ntevl processes
• NAS feature which handles all alarm processing
• Hub which handles all the inner message traffic of the product
• UMP which provides ability to visually see what we are monitoring.

It gives a good baseline as to how we go about monitoring our clients, as each one is different but can fall into a specific category of infrastructure monitoring. Our organization knows how to get started with each and every client.

The company has used it for five years, and I've used it for one and a half years.

Certain sites have very secure environments, and you must then setup rules so that the product can still communicate and function in the customized environment.

Certain probes require heavy knowledge on a specific technology before it can start working.

Every product has issues.`

No issues encountered.

I've never had to deal with customer service.

The UIM support team is excellent.

We were using a previous CA solution but it was EOL’d and UIM is the new strategic CA IM product, so we switched.

UIM does have a large initial learning curve for new users, and you must learn the basic architecture. Once understood, the initial setup is then pretty straightforward if you understand the overall big picture.

Initially we attempted to use a vendor, but in the end we did full implementation in house. The vendor was very experienced, but our environment was very tricky and after three attempts we decided to rollout ourselves.

• Scalability
• High availability
• Distributed architecture
• Supported platforms

It has simplified our architecture when compared to our previous solution. We now have less servers, and just one solution to monitor all environments (LAN, DMZ).

Administration interface, in particular the infrastructure manager. The event console could also use a make-over.

I've been using it for two years, including Nimsoft v7.

There are no issues if you are well prepared.

No issues were encountered.

No issues were encountered.

It's very good.

It's very good.

We previously used CA Unicenter NSM, but we switched to UIM because NSM was an end of life product and CA no longer supported some common platforms (like RH64bit agents).

It's relatively straightforward, as we spent lots of time on the assessment and architecture analysis.

We implemented it in-house.

• SCOM
• Spectrum
• Tivoli

If you have a highly heterogeneous environment, CA UIM has the best chance of supporting all of your platforms (including probes for more exotic ones). The ease of scaling out your initial setup, the distributed architecture (Nimsoft has its roots in the service provider world) as well as the high availability are all differentiators.

UIM is easy to use and configure and easy to implement and to get up and running “out of the box”. It is also open with its SDK and services.

• UIM helps us go from visions and ideas to concepts and services.
• UIM helps us automate monitoring and implement customers faster.

The SLA module could be improve to be more robust and configurable the same goes for the HUB tunneling.

We’ve been using the solution for 4-5 years. Personally I’ve been using the product for almost 9 years.

No issues installing the product.

Some versions of the UIM HUB probe are unstable and causes the HUB tunneling to stop responding.

There are limitations on how many queues you can use inside the HUB probe. This limitation causes you to add frontend HUBs as a solution.

The customer service is good.

The technical support has improved over the last years and are we are getting better and faster support.

We’ve only used UIM but looked at other tools.

The initial setup is straight forward and easy.

We implement UIM ourselves.

We free up hours for our staff by automating the monitoring and we can provide services to our customers.

The setup cost was quite low because we started with few customers and then we’ve built our services and customer base from that.

Yes, we looked at other products.

We’ve looked at HP, Halcyon and OP5 in the initial phase.

Just look into the prereqs before installing so you’ve got the HW for building your environment. Other than that it is straight forward and by the book.

We consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (using UIM and Spectrum) integrated with dashboards and reports, to give the business a real-time vision of the company’s health and position in the market.

Besides the technical benefits described, CA UIM and CA Spectrum were the key factors in increasing the SLA from the IT environment to 99.99%, from the 99.5% achieved without CA solutions. This achievement completely changed the way how LoBs see and recognize IT as their partners, avoiding the blame game and finger-pointing. After improving the SLA metrics, the next step was to get closer to the LoBs and provide relevant dashboards, punting together business views and emphasizing how it is related to IT, and vice versa.

After several weeks, this partnership and closer communication between IT and LoBs resulted in some dependency of LoB on UIM dashboards (i.e., every hour executive and tactical dashboards are sent to the senior executives). It is impressive how important it is to be connected with LoBs using simple, visual and intuitive dashboards that remove the roadblocks between IT and the entire organization.

I would like to see them improve integrations with other CA products to use the data on dashboards and more widgets on UIM dashboards.

I have used it for four years.

I’m a CA beta tester and found all issues that need to be solved in this program. I have no stability issues in my production environment.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

UIM is a very scalable product. It includes agents for a lot of technologies and new technologies that help the IT team to detect problems proactively with visibility of the IT environment and the business using dashboards and reports. It provides a unique vision when using UIM and Spectrum together, including a unique alarm console.

Centralization and distribution are the most valuable features for us. Those two things are pretty key for our organization.

• Centralization is important because we can manage and view everything from one point.
• Distribution is important because we can manage everything from one point and do it on a mass scale.

We started with nothing, so getting anything was better. But through the years, it's improved stability-wise and is our bread and butter for monitoring. The openness of it means it can accept alarms from anywhere, which is pretty key because we have other systems that that are not CA.

It's too modular in the sense that there is not an awareness of things. If you set up an alarm for 10 different things but the actual host is down, then, in theory, you could get 10 alarms. Going forward, it would be nice if there was some kind of awareness of not just the host, but it knows what a service is and you can define it, it can suppress those kinds of alarms. Thay way, you only really get one alarm that is important instead of getting flooded with 10 or 15.

I would say, too, that I have seen some of their roadmap features and I think they are working towards that, but it is just a little more difficult because of the way they designed the software.

We've used it for about seven years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There's nothing out of the ordinary with deployment because you're going to have some issues with all products depending on how it fits into your environment. Product iterations get better and better over the years. We've worked with UIM for seven years now, and we've seen a lot of different versions, and they get more and more stable.

I wouldn't say that there has been anything out of the ordinary.

I'd give them 7-8/10 as they're really responsive. CA's acquisition of Nimsoft has not resulted in lower quality support. We have twice-a-month meetings with them to talk about issues. They've helped us out a lot.

When I first started, we used Groundwork, an open-source tool.

It's pretty straightforward and intuitive.

I implemented it in-house, which, as I later found out at a conference, that I had set it up better than most others.

I did the evaluation before we decided to go with Nimsoft.

Look for three main things -- scalability, because you want a platform that will grow; ease of management, because you may have thousands of devices to manage; and single-point data presentation, because you could have hundreds of hosts with all their data.

CA UIM meets all of these at a less expensive price than the other large vendors.

Unified Management Portal (UMP) is the most valuable feature, as it did a lot of health monitoring for our environment to prevent some issues from happening. It has many features that are helpful, although I was not able to explore them all.

It has helped us to monitor the health of our network. It monitors the CPU, memory, disk/storage usage, and connectivity which were the vital parts of our environment.

NSD and NMS support need to be improved. Usually, what I encountered was that if we had an issue, the suggestion was always to upgrade to the current version, but sometimes when they upgraded some features would stop working.

I used it for less than a year.

There were some issues.

There were some issues.

There were some issues.

2/5.

Most of the support during my shift was in India, who are only 2/5, but if I got to speak to someone in Australia, Europe or the US, it's 4/5.

I can say it is straightforward if they can provide correct procedures and steps.

Make sure you have good support and what SLA is included.

Make sure you can get good quality support.

The stability and flexibility of customizing the dashboard and monitoring.

The solution allow us to perform monitoring based on base line monitoring of trends instead of the traditional monitoring based on hard thresholds which is rigid when it comes to flagging alerts.

Its integration to CA's SOI (manager of manager), the out of the box connector release by CA is disappointing.

3 years.

Yes we did but its part and parcel of monitoring products but by far its the most stable one i have come across.

Same answer as deployment.

No. This is one of the best designed products for stability due to its message bus concept design which makes its hub lite in processing.

It depends but definitely the L2 support onwards know their stuff.

Yes, we have used SMARTS and TIVOLI. We switched due to the CA full suit of solution which include netqos, APM and CEM. Nimsoft is part of the suite to allow use to complete the integration with CA SOI.

It is very complex, because this was the first time CA tried to sell the full suite with SOI, netqos, APM, CEM and tried to integrate into a full impact analysis solution.

It was from a vendor team, and to be honest I was not very convinced of their skill set, only the Nimsoft team was up to par with our expectations.

We really don't have a quantitative measurement on this.

No.

• Weblocker service
• Perimetral antivirus
• Firewall security
• VPN service
• MultiWAN and Balance service

These features are very valuable as they allow productivity to be supported by blocking and monitoring websites accessed by collaborators, as well as controlling the levels of access to the various services we have in our operation, in addition to functionalities such as Load Balancing and Multiple WAN connections to help us in business continuity.

I think it has helped in different ways:

• It has provided greater security for our most important asset which is the handling of information.
• It has given us greater control and management of the flow of information that transits our data network.
• It has generated confidence in our customers and suppliers, so that they know that their information and ours has a higher level of security.
• It has improved the productivity of our employees.
• It has supported us in the process of safeguarding confidentiality and the correct handling of information.
• It has provided us with help in offering IT service to users.
• It has helped us to make the IT department more productive and efficient.
• When in charge of the infrastructure department it gives me certainty about what is happening in the company network.

• I think it can be improved by a greater provision of specialized technical support, as there are very few trained personnel there.
• Improvement in the technical documentation of the system.

We have used this solution for four years.

I did not find problems with stability. I think the advice we got at the beginning helped us to get the correct dimensioning of the equipment and the functionalities of the product. Once it came into operation, the product always performed the expected functionality.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support as 9/10, since the support provider always showed knowledge and was able to solve the problems. The only negative point is the availability as they are usually late in responding.

We did not previously use a different solution.

The installation process was simple, especially because the installer was guided by an expert and her way of communicating was always clear and concise. From the first day, the solution came into operation and the tuning process was given progressively.

I think the price of licensing is very accessible, considering the functionalities of the product. The product-price ratio is better than other brands such as Fortinet or SonicWall.

We performed an evaluation on Fortinet, SonicWall, Juniper and Microtik.

The advice I can give you is to first make an assessment of the needs that your company has. Once they have identified the products that offer solutions to their problems, then don't only consider the price but consider also the costs of licensing, support agreements, product functionalities, product positioning etc.

Consider reviewing evaluations made by other technology vendors and if possible ask for a demo to your local IT providers. They will be happy to show you the products and their different advantages.