DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Ease of deployment
• Number of platforms you are able to monitor
• Collection of both long term reporting data and immediate alert data
• Depth of configuration of the alarm processor

UIM supports AS400, but it is somewhat limited.

I've used it for 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues with the recent versions, and v8.2 is very stable.

Only in database configuration. It needs a lot of planning before the initial install, and our database is over 2TB in size, and was not installed correctly, although this was my fault, and not that of CA.

10/10.

5/10.

We used Nagios in our early years, and we switched because of the power.

It was very simple.

It was done in-house.

I don’t love UIM, but it is the best selection for a multi-tenant infrastructure where SLA’s are a must. The original deployment was very successful, but this is not plug & play. At least one full time administrator is needed. With acquired experience, the product can do almost everything a monitoring product should do, but it is not all “out of the box”

Their concept of probes, where you have a lot of predefined items that you collect. Also, their baseline thresholds that speed up a lot the implementation, and the evolution of the monitoring system.

For example, once you have applied the SQL Server Probe, it collects all sorts of data -- from the log size to the time that each query is taken to execute on the database -- with the same click.

In terms of features, it is easy to use and implement, and CA provide solid support.

In the past we would spend months in meetings with a new customer, defining what they wanted to monitor, and most of the time we would come back home to see if that was possible to do. However, with CA UIM, we can provide our clients with a predefined menu of items to collect, and we can select those faster and more efficiently.

We have been able to automate the Active Directory user provisioning integrated with the HR systems. This means that was can provide users with a self-service password reset tool. Also, it has given us Log Management for our daily routines.

They need to improve in their mobile interface to enable access to the dashboards through that channel. Their application requires a lot of servers to run, so that architecture is also something that requires attention.

A module for keyboard and mouse actions would be very interesting, for actions that cannot be performed differently. Also, it would be interesting for them to enable SAP integration in the future.

We have been using UIM/Nimsoft for about two years now.

It requires a very skilled team to be able to deploy that application, and if you don’t invest in training and don’t go over a long training period, you might find it difficult to deploy.

The application requires a lot of capacity to run and grow, so it’s important that you be aware of the impact of the growth of your IT infrastructure on the monitoring system.

Capacity management must be done on a regular basis if your IT environment grows too quickly.

6/10.

7/10.

We used to use a Nagios-based solution that was cheaper, but the problem was that we didn’t have the proper support, especially for application management such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix, Amazon, etc. With CA UIM we were able to start monitoring those applications out of the box.

The initial setup was complex due to the training hours, as the technical team had to go through it to be able to use the application to its full potential.

We did it in-house.

I think that’s always something harder to measure, but I would say that we were able to gain some clients due to this change to CA UIM.

Since we provide services using the CA UIM platform, I would say that for a partner they have a very strong pricing approach.

We evaluated SolarWinds and Nagios.

First of all design do a analysis of what kind of process you can automate in your company, that way will be easier for you to capture value from a solution like this. It's important to pay attention to the infrastructure requirements.

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 nimbus architecture
• Scalability
• Modular design
• Product coverage
• Ease of deployment

• Documentation
• Product releases
• Testing
• Transparency regarding bugs and closed support cases
• Honesty from the vendor on what is and what isn’t important from their portfolio of products

I've used it for five years.

It depends on the version.

The probes (basic components that can, amongst other things, monitor particular systems) can be buggy. More often than not new releases are to fix issues rather than add new functionality. The core components are fairly robust for the environments I have worked on. CA support are quick to act when issues arise however and the community has excellent contributors which can provide key insights into problems as well as identifying them before they arise.

I think the product is quite strong in this regard, but maybe not so much the underlying database. If the deployment is going to be extremely large than a clued up DBA is a must.

It's very good, they give us regular product updates. We also have calls with our account manager, and attend biannual conferences.

They are generally very good but occasionally I feel like I’m being purposefully stalled so that their SLAs aren’t breached. However, I can appreciate that all of the basics must be ticked off in case something basic was missed and so that a clear picture of the problem can be built up. There is always the opportunity to escalate to the account manager who returns with a swift and clear response.

No, but I have evaluated other solutions and deemed them unsuitable to switch to. Some solutions do, though, have novel ideas which could be more appealing to organisations with different needs.

This really depends on the environment in question, whether it is a single subnet on a Windows lenient group policy, security policy, short data retention periods, basic reporting to internal staff and a small amount of industry standard hardware/software is fairly easy to set up. Thousands of distributed, diverse servers and devices in a multi-tenant environment that needs years of data to be at the fingers tips of people with different access privileges across the world would not be so easy.

The sizing of the environment is very important, and the deployment needs to be carried out by someone with a bit of experience.

We implemented it in-house.

• ScienceLogic
• SolarWinds
• System Center
• Nagios

Get an expert to guide you through it. Don’t expect miracles, you get out what you put in, no solution is the holy grail. You should become a developer to really see the benefits of the product and get involved with the community to share your thoughts and ideas, CA listens to their customers feedback.

• 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.

Almost all the features are interesting, but the most valuable ones are:

• Infrastructure monitoring (agent/agentless) covering networks, servers, databases, applications, virtual platforms, and a cloud environment
• Alarm management capabilities
• Hub queues configuration (SSL, post alarms and metrics, etc.)
• Powerful UMP portal (especially for dashboards and reporting)
• Extensible architecture

It has provided insight on almost all our information system components/layers using a single unified solution.

Product stability and performance, especially in Linux environments needs to be improved.

I've used it for six months, mainly through testing it in a big bank context with a clustered architect.

No issues encountered.

There were some issues in displaying metrics in a large environment.

No issues encountered.

Excellent.

We already used v7, but we upgraded to the latest version because of the new enhancement described in the product release notes.

It's a complex setup based on clustering and failover. We defined a primary and secondary NMS and hubs.

The implementation has been done through a third-party team including product experts (neither the vendor or an in-house team).

We did evaluate other products,

In our organisation we use this product mainly for server monitoring. OS, Database, URL, schedules, hub configuration and the dashboard and performance reports.

Management of servers, network and different types of probes and customisation of probes.

This is one of the main products for monitoring in our organisation,.e.g. our network monitoring sometimes doesn't capture interface traffic, during that time we use Nimsoft's interface traffic probe to check the interface utilization.

When ever there is an IP address change to the server and even changing the IP inside the robot.*.cfg file it won't update on IM automatically, and we have manually validated the probes. This should be improved.

I've used it for the past few years.

During deployment, not many issues.

The robots are a bit unstable sometimes, we often encounter robot inactive alerts even though the service is running. We have to restart to fix this issue.

Scalability in terms of how vast you can monitor, Nimsoft is a very useful product.

Customer service is quite okay, however whenever we face issue with probes, they only suggest to upgrade the probe to latest version and check if the issue reoccurs, and if it reoccurs then they troubleshoot, this should be improved.

Technical support provided by CA is quite good an they have a very useful knowledge base. Most of the solutions we find are on the website.

Nimsoft setup is quite straight forward, however, later stage usage and customisation depends on the requirements. A few probes are a bit complex, but the basic monitoring probes are easy to configure.

As mentioned, the initial setup was done by vendor and their level of expertise is good.

This product is very useful compared to other products i worked on like MS-SCOM, CA NSM, an IBM Tivoli.

As i have worked on this product for quite some time I personally think this product is the best in terms of overall infrastructure monitoring.

Extensibility - ability to centrally manage large enterprises.

Consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (Nimsoft). Reduced staff required to support the enterprise.

Reporting.

Approximately five years.

Minimal, if any.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

6/10.

We previously used Solarwinds Orion (NPM), and IBM Netcool. The main issues with them were scalability, features, and cost.

It was complex due to the size and requirements of our company. Most deployments are typically not as complex.

Primarily our in-house team.

• BMC Patrol
• IBM Netcool
• HP Operations

Ensure that you have a competent and experienced person doing the initial architecture.