DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Open framework provides the ability to go outside the GUI and automate tasks and functions for reliability without being in the GUI all the time.
• It gives us the flexibility to create our own modules.

• From a business perspective, it reduces head count by automating tasks, whether its deployment, maintenance, recovery.
• We have the flexibility to be able to have a customized solution for an end customer that it wasn’t necessarily designed for, and the ability to turn it around quickly.
• For example, one of our clients had the ability to do per-message routing to various groups. We took the message stream and automated tickets generations, notices, and recoveries

The biggest concern stability wise falls under UMP, the management protocol. We’ve had a hard time bringing it up and keeping it stable. It runs, but it keeps losing components. We opened several tickets, but we’ve not had things refresh (charts don’t update) and have had lost data (such as some reporting that we can’t get to). Unified Reporter went offline altogether on v.8.31. It was OK on 8.2.

No problems with scalability right now, but I have a fundamental design concern—everything comes back to a central point, and while I haven’t seen it become a major problem yet, I can see that once you get over around 20,000 devices, it can become a problem, or if you increase your data too much, data just backs up and the system slows.

Right now, both processes of Linux-to-Oracle and Windows-to-SQL backend are similar at 2700 messages/minute, which is OK, and they go up to 4500, but I can see where that will eventually get to a point where the central point can’t handle.

NAS, single point – it allows for a lot of customization, but there are limitations in terms of scalability. You can distribute the NAS, but it adds a lot more complexity.

Good tech support. Like every tech support, you can get new techies, and there are veterans, but I don’t have any fundamental complaints. They’re fairly good and quick. Follow up is a little slow, but not bad enough that it’s a huge problem.

I was not involved, but I rebuilt it, and that was fairly easy and straightforward. I don’t see it as being challenging, but what is lacking from my perspective is an overall flow. They do good a job of explaining the details and specifics, but they lack the general overall architecture mentality of how things work together.

I’ve actually pointed people to UIM because it can be simple. It can be as simple or complicated as you want. The simplicity helps a lot of places get up and running. The ability to drop a module on a server and click a couple things helps and is a lot easier. Pretty straightforward to set up and can be basic if you want. It allows you to get far more complicated as well.

From a managed service provider standpoint, the product truly understands managed service provider architecture. It’s multi-tenant, which for us is huge. We’ve had other products in the past, including CA Unicenter, which weren’t multi-tenant aware.

The reporting flexibility is another key item for us.

It also gives us the ability to monitor many different platforms and applications.

Not only do we use it to monitor our customers' environments on a 24/7 basis, we monitor our own internal infrastructure. It gives us the visibility into our own environment, and likewise for customers it gives us that visibility and confidence to be able to raise alarms and issues for both ourselves and our customers. Ultimately, that keeps us running.

Since we’re in the technology space, I’d really like to see quicker adoption or certification process for new product or platforms that come out. A faster time-to-certify in other words.

With the SNMP collector probe they have a catch-all general solution; if there’s no probe for a specific service or application, it’s for general use. There is a certification process by way of their list, but it does take some time. For us, streamlining that process would be key.

I think it’s a very stable product. The portal and application have been stable, so no issues.

It does seem that it is flexible; as we grow with our service offering it does have the flexibility to scale the architecture. No problems so far.

Overall, I’d say they’re fairly good. I think when compared to a couple of years ago, support has gone down a bit rather than up. A lack of product knowledge is probably one of the key reasons as to why it’s not excellent.

I was in a position where I was managing the NOC, and I was getting multiple complaints from our customers that they weren’t being notified of issues in their environments. So I started a reveal of the product in place and found some major deficiencies. At that point I approached our CEO and told him of the issues we were having and that we were losing customers, and we put together a plan to find a new product.

We did use CA to help with the implementation, and overall with the help of CA professional services, it went very well with zero downtime. We had a former version and we decided to build out a new version, and we had to move our existing customers from the old to new environment, and it had a very minimal impact to loss of visibility. In that respect it was very good.

We looked at SMARTS, and we also looked at Spectrum (at the time it wasn’t CA). From a solution standpoint, UIM really fit the bill. We’ve been for the most part very happy customers. First and foremost we looked at the toolsets. Then the product knowledge of the vendor, and the knowledge of our space. Also, the size of the company and costs are the other factors.

It’s been very stable, it’s flexible, and it really fits our business needs and business model. Integration with some other CA products has been a little challenging, but I can’t blame it on this toolset alone.

You would probably want to have, at least in the beginning, an understanding of what you’re looking for. Before you start evaluating any products, have at least a short list of what you want to get out of a product. When we didn’t have that setup at times, when you’re dealing with different vendors, they tend to steer you rather than you directing them. Identifying key items is extremely important. Make sure that you have staffing, because like any solution, it’s not a one or two person job.

The most valuable features are the alerts that go to the service desk and the application-level monitoring.

Having a monitoring tool allows us to preempt disasters. When it hits thresholds, then an alert is triggered and we can act, reducing user impact. That reduces service interruption.

It seems clunky, not as user friendly as Spectrum, for example. When setting up monitoring you can have Nimsoft agents installed on some servers but not others, so maybe it’s a bit more complex than it needs to be. It’s not as straightforward or easy to implement as Spectrum was.

It serves its purpose. We only seem to be able to have one threshold per server at this stage instead of multiple; it’s not clear whether that’s a limitation of the software. They have a whole bunch of different groups – for example one group has a threshold of a certain value, and another group with another threshold. So many groups can quickly get out of hand; managing that many different groups can be difficult.

We just have to watch the group sprawl.

Our networks team have, so I can’t comment on what that support is like. We’ve had the support, but I think it’s a combination – they’ve advised on best practices and how we should do things so they’ve done their job to a certain extent. But we haven’t had a CA resource for implementing those best practices.

It was already in production when I joined.

The most valuable feature are the data gathering capabilities, metrics, and being able to publish those.

Out of the box, you’ve got reports ready to go which are all useful, especially for an infrastructure group. Server reports cover the basics – CPU, memory, disks – but you can drag and drop servers or whatever you want, ad hoc, and you can get quick and dirty.

We’re getting down to one tool to monitor all of our servers. Right now we’ve got two or three, so we’re trying to reduce the footprint – that allows us to have one skill set rather than multiple. It’s easier to support the business with one toolset.

The UI to me is huge. I really think they ought to step back and redesign it. Look at other tools out there and see how well the UI is working for those. I don’t think they can fix it with the technology they’re using.

The GUI for the infrastructure, to me, is antiquated. We have products that we’re moving away from that have a better GUI and they’re 15 years old. That’s one of my biggest disappointments – I don’t find myself being as productive because the GUI is so sluggish and not user-friendly. Needs a lot of work.

It’s not as stable as I would hope -- we see probes losing contact with the hub, doing a failover. We see failovers and I wouldn’t expect that in this type of product – it just shouldn’t happen.

I would say it’s OK. We’ve got our environment on it, and it seems to be OK, other than the failovers, dropping of probes, and connectivity issues that seems to happen.

With the UI problems, we don’t know if that’s a scalability issue, but as we’ve added more servers, we’re having a harder time seeing all of our alarms.

Tech support is fair. I haven’t dealt with them a lot, but our team has. We’ve opened a number of issues. They respond in a fair amount of time.

One thing that jump to mind is the UIM console as we’ve had an issue with not seeing all of our alarms. It just freezes. That ticket has been open for well over a month and they haven’t come back with an answer which is hampering our progress.

I wouldn’t say it’s easy or complex – it’s pretty average. I think it’s a challenge in getting probes deployed, but some of that is part of our environment. I’ve seen other products that can deploy easier than UIM does.

What really brings it down is the whole user interface, and deploying robots in our environment – it could have gone better. They could have a better solution. They don’t handle custom monitoring well, where you need to customize something – whether it’s an action or needing to correlate alarms easily to take an action. We really had to jump through hoops to fit our environment in that way.

I would suggest you look at what customizations you have. I would do POCs with several different tools as it’s not a one-size-fits-all, especially when it comes to scale. Most tools can do stuff out-of-the-box basically OK. It’s when you’ve got your custom situations that you need to develop, that’s where you run into a lot of time and effort depending on the tool and how well it handles that.

We have it integrated with Salesforce, so it’s great for auto creating, sending data to Salesforce and creating cases, proactively monitoring our customers' systems.

Deploying and setting up are pretty straightforward; the only issue I’ve seen is slowness of the infrastructure manager GUI because of the size of our install.

It allows us to maintain our SLAs with customers by alerting us when there are or about to be issues – drive space alerts, service status, ping alerts, performance alerts.

The UI seems sluggish at times. When you go to maneuver or browse through, it takes a while to update. When you set up new systems, it takes a while for them to show up. Patience is key. I’d be curious to see if there are any plans to have command-line management capabilities to deal with the sluggishness of the GUI.

Deployment was straightforward.

I see performance issues when I’m in UIM and it’s due to the amount of hubs we’re monitoring.

I’ve used other products in much smaller implementations, but I like the way you can preconfigure things; you can drop the packages and probes on the servers you’re using. It gets done.

We deploy to customer sites so I spend a lot of time dealing with firewall administrators, so if you’re going to be using it in this type of environment where you’re sending alerts back to your central office, you’d want to make sure the ports are open. Make sure you configure antivirus exclusions as well.

Flexibility – in the sense that it allows me to monitor our IT infrastructure and application in a very holistic manner. It checks everything, there’s a lot of probes -over 150- to handle various monitoring needs. If it's not already there, you can build a probe.

Single solution between Windows, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and Linux servers, and there are many. The logmon (log monitoring) probe is especially useful, particularly because it offers such flexibility. It also allows for a number of customizations – in terms of both infrastructure and application monitoring.

Very specifically, we want HTML 5 web administration instead of Flash for UMP. HTML 5 web admin is essential for a lightweight web-client administration solution.

Additionally, an HTML 5 web-based alarm console would be a must-have feature as it would allow me to manage it from anywhere.

It still needs a lot of work. An HTML 5 web admin solution is needed badly. Also, the thick client administration tool is archaic, slow, and cumbersome.

It's been around a year since we started as a proof of concept, with implementation in March.

It's pretty stable. Haven't had any problems.

We're monitoring our entire server environment using UIM, so that’s 5000+ servers, and over 300 applications, across the world.

We couldn’t have survived without them. They’ve helped with technical problems. They don’t help with feature requests because they’re tech support; however, they've directed us to the right people. We haven't had a lot of issues though.

We were using IBM Tivoli solutions that did not meet monitoring requirements for numerous reasons, like the lack of scalability and technology.

It’s straightforward. We followed the documentation closely and that helped. Also, we had the help of CA services for implementation. The only issues we had were related to our Oracle database, but it was resolved.

We looked for two things: meeting monitoring requirements and meeting support requirements. We also looked at solutions from BMC and IBM, and although the tools are fairly similar, CA's support and partnership made a difference.

You should nail down your requirements and understand that input from outside teams is important because your monitoring the whole environment. Also, ask CA for help as they’ve done this before.

The most valuable feature is the very large probe number, over 180, for different technologies, that all comunicate their metrics through one product.

When you are implementing it, I think the most valuable tool is the Infrastructure Manager (a Windows client for probes management and configuration). Of course, there is also a web-based tool, but you cannot do it all from the web interface.

When you are using the product, I think the most valuable feature is UMP, with its dashboards, and alarm view. You can see the alarm state of your system, and pinpoint the most critical elements and metics in dashboards. This allows you to rapidly view and acces the alarm console for that specific element. It is fast and easy to use.

Not for my organization, but for our customers, they managed to monitor their infrastructure in a unified manner, more easily, and at different levels (management, operational etc.).

Although the products is easy to deploy, the implementation effort is still inconsistent. This is because you have a lot of different technologies and vendors.

I started with this product a year ago, and am still working with it.

None, but of course you need basic knowledge about the infrastructure elemets that you want to monitor, and for which ones you want to deploy probes.

CA UIM is a mature and stable product.

No issues encountered.

10/10

9/10

I have used and implemented the old product, CA Infrastructure Management, but CA UIM is the new strategic product in this line.

You can try it, or you can try the Snap (CA UIM Snap), unlimited in time, but only for 30 devices and with fewer features, by registering on the vendor site.

If you have a strong IT department, or some special request for monitoring, that is hard to shared with others, you can try to implement it yourself. Otherwise, it is better to have services (from CA or other companies). You just have to remember that it is harder to take on an implementation on the fly and correct what is already done, than have one done from scratch.

• 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.