DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Monitoring the level of services
• Trend charts
• Management dashboards

This product has helped all my clients have a managed view of the data center and be proactive in preventing the most common problems.

Integration with other tools.

I've used UIM for five years.

No. There was not too much trouble during deployment. The solution is segregated into three layers: application, web portal, and database.

The stability is totally proportional to the defined architecture.

No issues but the architecture must be well designed.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is fine.

No previous solution. CA Nimsoft meets all of mine and my customers needs.

It's a simple set-up however it depends on architectural planning for good performance.

I implement it for customers as an expert consultant.

The ROI is very quick. The information is extremely valuable for businesses.

I did not see the need to evaluate other solutions. To date I do not know of any product that has the intelligence and functionality when compared to Nimsoft.

Search for an expert to get the deployment right.

The scalability of the product and heterogeneous OS coverage is really what sets this product apart from others. Other features like synthetic (e2e) transaction monitoring, OOTB application support as well as the UMP (Unified Monitoring Portal) are the icing on the cake.

CA UIM is really built for the MSP and multi-tenant environments, although companies of all sizes are able to benefit from it. My company is a managed service provider and there are really no other products that allow us to manage multiple customer environments like UIM.

I’ve heard that there is now a free tool (CA UIM Snap) for up to 30 devices, but I haven’t used it yet.

There really is no perfect monitoring tool, CA UIM is really the best of breed if you need monitoring for all Operating Systems and a large list of diverse applications. Some areas of improvement would include enhanced management for the UMP where the MSP is concerned. Additional configuration auditing and reporting.

Six years.

I’ve been working with the product for a long time and have a lot of experience with deployment, so I didn’t have any issues. I do recommend that Professional Services be engaged in all but the smallest deployments. I’ve heard of many environments not being designed for scalability and deployed by the customer that had to be completely rebuilt due to a lack of knowledge on the product. Aspire Technical Professionals has a solid track record of successful large CA UIM deployments.

In a large environment using tunnels, occasionally there were stability issues. I found most them were self-inflicted though early on due to my inexperience with the product.

There were no issues with scalability after re-designing. After years of experience and PS we found the tiered design works best for scalability.

Customer service is helpful and knowledgeable.

8 out of 10

We tried several Open Source tools like Nagios and Zenoss, but as the environment grew we found that those tools wouldn’t scale the way we wanted. There was also a lack of Synthetic Transaction monitoring tools that would require large internal development effort. We chose Nimsoft because it covered Windows and Linux and most of the applications we wanted to monitor out of the box. Another large factor for us was the ability to customize the product, since we were used to using Open Source tools.

Initial setup was difficult because we didn’t know what we were doing and had to re-design and re-deploy. I would definitely recommend professional services for all but the smallest environments, as it would’ve paid for itself in man hours.

Initially, we deployed internally which was a mistake. We were directed to Aspire Technical Professionals and they were able to help re-design our implementation to be scalable and highly available.

I’m not sure the total ROI at this point, but as a service provider we generate revenue with the product so I’m sure it has paid for itself time after time.

I don’t handle the contract negotiation, but expect this isn’t Open Source so expect to pay for an Enterprise Monitoring solution. I’m a firm believer of “you get what you pay for” with almost everything. I’m a fan of Open Source tools for specific solutions, but a large multi-tenant environment needs an Enterprise solution.

Yes. SolarWinds, Tivoli, ManageEngine, and Accelops.

Reporting and the ability to customize threshold.

The dashboards and reporting features help users have a close eye on the servers; the ability to notify users that something might go wrong if you do not pay attention to this alert helps us to avoid incidents.

Dashboards

2+ Years.

The deployment is very user friendly over updates.

Yes, we did encounter on some stability issues earlier.

4 on a scale of 5

4 on a scale of 5

No, we did not use another solution.

The initial set up is pretty straightforward here.

We implemented ourselves (My team member and I were the ones who implemented).

If you are looking for something on a mid range budge with effective solutions, CA Nimsoft is something that you just consider first.

Probes and customization.

With some scripting we are able to integrate much better with our ticketing system.

Communication between hubs collector needs major improvments

10 years

No deployment issues.

Hub tunnels

No scalability issues.

OK

OK

Straightforward

Self.

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.

Easy to setup, easy to maintain, lots of different probes out-of-the box. Well-documented API for custom scenarios.

This product serves as our eyes. Once it's broken - we're blind.

Web GUI (WASP) should be further developed as in some cases it has issues and instabilities. Some functions are being duplicated in Web and console, I wish they were in one place to avoid overwriting the configuration.

Been using it for 5 years already.

Most of the time all goes well. Sometimes (very rare) in a complex network with lots of firewalls a communication issue with robots can occur and it's not always easy to diagnose the cause.

Stability issues I faced were caused by wrong planning and extremely high load on the DB. Once this is sorted out, the core is stable. Web GUI sometimes had stability issues, but 98% of the time it's stable.

No issues with scalability, the product can be used in a large enterprise. Different admins can manage their scope of devices and their hubs without interfering with main servers.

Can't say anything bad about CA's customer service.

Support is good. Though, colleagues say that pre-CA it was better.

I haven't used such enterprise-grade tools before Nimsoft. Only specific ones, like Wireshark & PRTG.

Initial setup was straightforward. Though, of course, it has to be planned in advance in case of complex system.

First one was an in-house one. Now I am working for the integrator and we're implementing these systems for our customers.

Yes, we did evaluate other products, but I don't remember which ones. We liked Nimsoft's ease of use and inner design.

If you need an all-in-one solution that's easy to maintain, to scale and that you can rely on - Nimsoft Monitor is a good solution.

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.

Long-term, database backed logging of data and the customisation features.

Nimsoft allows for long term data storage / trend analysis compared to preset SLA objects that allow for capacity planning to remove risks of downtime due to lack of resource provisioning.

User interface / speed of deploying monitoring based on templates.

Approximately 4 years

Documentation is lacking and Nimsoft's support (before being bought by CA) was lacking.

No.

No.

Excellent service from customer services.

Very few people at Nimsoft seemed to have level of infrastructure experience to really help out in a meaningful way.

No.

Very complex, little documentation and NMS is more of a middleware to build you own monitoring on top of, rather than an end-to-end system.

In-house.

No idea.

No idea.

Decision to use Nimsoft was taken before I joined the company.

Allocate a lot of time to learn the product and be prepared to get your hands dirty with the configuration files and also LUA scripting.