DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

OOB probes

We're able to respond quicker to incidents.

Dashboards +++ and correlation creation tool (instead of NAS)

4 years

Not really

Yes, Q issues at very slow dashboards (flash!!!)

No

4 out of 5

6 out of 5

Many (10+). We switched to centralize on one tool.

Easy

Both in-house and with a vendor team

1200K €/

day2day 200k/Y

Yes, IBM, BMC

Have a good integrator

CA UIM (AKA Nimsoft Monitor) - I give the monitoring application a 5 compared to other products such as HP SIM, Nagios,spiceworks, SolarWinds and WhatsUpGold

+

CA CSM (AKA Nimsoft Service Desk) - Initially I thought the ticket product was a 2-3 star product. After working with it for the past 6 months though I would have to give it a 5. I have used other systems like Remedy and Footprints and this is far superior to those products. With CSM you are given a blank canvas and can use the system and its modules for everything from a ticketing system or a workflow and process automation tool.

The discovery tools and the ease of initial setup are very good and the way that probes are deployed makes the setup and day to day functions very simple to use.

The application allows our NOC operators a very fast response time for issues on our clients systems. By utilizing the alarm and ticketing system we are able to validate the alarm and begin working on the issue sometime before the client even knows there is a situation.

The automated discovery tools have come a long way in the past few years, but it would be nice if that same tool could also pull systems configuration information as well.

I have worked with NMS and ticketing solutions for approximately 10 years now, utilizing the CA Nimsoft products for the past 5+ years.

I have deployed the product in multiple environments and across multiple OS types without issue. The deployment can be as small as one or two servers, or can scale up very well for large distributed deployments.

Issues seen with stability of the product were wiped out years ago, the product has been rock solid since then.

As I said above, scalability is one of the key parts to my deployments. I have had no issues in the past, but you must have an understanding of the systems bus and response metrics to really scale the product up to its full potential.

Customer service and technical support have been great and I feel like they actually listen when a bug or improvement is brought to their attention.

A+ support for both products

Yes I have used multiple products in the past. The switch to Nimsoft was due to a executive level decision for cost savings. If setup properly this solution is not as expensive as some of its competitors.

I have never had CA professional services involved. I was able to do my first deployment without issues out of the box. About a year into working with the product I went to official CA training for certification as a Nimsoft Engineer in their level 101, 201 and 301 courses at their MA campus just outside of Boston.

The documentation is great and so are the forums. The included documentation and wiki gives you more than enough data to get through the day to day monitoring. The forums and support are there if you have something more complex.

Full featured, non-java, agent based technology that allowed the user to install as many probes as needed on each server rather than trying to monitoring everything initially like other products do. Not being written in java allowed far greater stability as well as a smaller footprint when running on each server.

Agent and probe maintenance via the console was a vast improvement from other products that required software distribution systems or admin access on each server to maintain and keep probe and robot versions up-to-date.

We went from having fully 1/3 of all incoming alarms being about dead monitoring agents to less than 1%. You never want to be your own best customers when it comes to monitoring tools.

The VMware monitoring had quite a bit of room to improve. In very large environments, the VMware probe could not keep up with data collection and would often times fall behind – thus scaling was an issue. In addition, the ability to filter in or out which VMs you wanted to monitor or not to monitor was severely limited. The suggested configuration is to monitor everything using the rule templates that applied to every live VM managed by the VC. While this was simple to setup, we ended up alerting on VMs that were not in use.

Secondly, the lack of a robust out-of-box maintenance mode functionality might be a detractor to some new users. I had to build my own maintenance mode functionality using the enrichment probe in addition to some CGI scripts and SQL triggers to allow me to place monitoring profiles into maintenance. The default setting only allow users to place entire servers into maintenance. This was a problem for URL, DB, ping, and VMware monitors.

3 years

I rate it 4.5 stars – one of the best server infrastructure monitoring tools I’ve used in the market.

The deployment was extremely smooth. Installation was fast and simple. Configuration was mostly straight-forward with some hiccups where the documentation did not match the current release of probes.

Stability is exceptional. However, if you have unusual server configurations, Nimsoft may not behave so well – MS clustering. There also seems to be a bug where the entire Nimsoft Server config gets corrupted during a reboot. Support has yet to be able to track down the root cause of this issue. Recovery is annoying but simple is you’ve made a backup copy of your NMS config files.

This tool scales very well in our environment of over 2K hosts and thousands of other profiles being monitored. As I said previously, only the VMware probe has scaling issues.

When they were still Nimsoft, customer service was outstanding. After CA’s purchase, support quality dropped as they lost qualified engineers.

Technical support is currently average. You have some support folks who really don’t understand the tool due to lack of experience and training and others who are veterans of the tool and pretty much can fix anything. It used to be stellar before the acquisition by CA. Attrition of good talent is to blame again.

We previously used BMC ProactiveNet. Nimsoft shines like the sun compared to ProactiveNet with night and day differences in stability, scalability, functionality, features, and quality of support. Nimsoft was also considerable less expensive to monitor the same component infrastructure.

Base install was very simple and took place in under 8 hrs. Configuration was more complex since we were replacing an existing monitoring tool with Nimsoft. For a green-field environment, configuration would be a breeze for the core probes. Config can be done via GUI of directly editing the config files by hand or via custom scripts to do bulk adds.

We used a Nimsoft PS vendor working on conjunction with our in-house ESM engineers.

With the very low costs for Nimsoft along with the greatly reduced maintenance cost, ROI was realized in just under 2.5 years. This is not to mention the unquantifiable benefits of a better scaling and more stable and highly functional tool replacing one that was not consistently delivering monitoring reliably.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring

HP SiteScope

Open Source

SolarWinds APM in conjunction with NPM (we ended up buying NPM for all network monitoring)

Make a conditional contract such that Nimsoft develops a fully functional maintenance mode UI that allows not only servers be placed into maintenance, but also different monitoring profiles and components like URL, Ping, individual VMware guests, SQL instances, etc.

Also consider using something else to monitor VMware.

The ability to scale a single monitoring ecosystem across the world with relative ease, and the wide range of monitoring probes available.

Provides a single ecosystem for monitoring globally across PaaS, IaaS, legacy and hybrid infrastructure.

Customer support. Not up to the usual standard I am used to with CA. There is a huge amount of value support could add if they would give me more access to the right people, which is a relationship I am used to having with CA SMEs.

Three years

Various low level issues with scaling. Not a topic that CA offer much assistance or real-world experience on.

Yes but mostly related to the chosen architecture, rather than the application itself.

Yes, we addressed them internally, again due to lack of vendor support.

Poor when compared to other CA groups I have worked with.

First line - excellent. Getting beyond first line - a battle.

Personally yes, but in this case it is the only solution capable of meeting the business needs - massive scalability, highly distributed architecture.

Relatively simple, similar to other enterprise monitoring products. Most of the challenges are in matching your architecture to suit your monitoring needs.

In house. I have had a single experience with a Nimsoft developer and they were clearly an expert in their field.

If you have a highly disparate estate across old and new technologies, Nimsoft is the only realistic in-house answer, prior to considering the customisation of open source alternatives.

UMP Portal.

We are able to configure alert by client requirements and can see those alert in with a lot of detail.

Infrastructure manager and the user interface.

For the last 2.5 years I have been working with this product.

Communication errors with most of the servers.

No.

No.

None.

Very straightforward.

UMP.

We did not.

I primarily use DX UIM to capture performance data and faults.

DX UIM's reporting and customization need to be improved. There are also issues with its stability, and it requires a lot of effort to execute and implement something.

I've been using DX UIM for two years.

There are issues with DX UIM's stability.

DX UIM is scalable.

DX UIM's technical support team are good, but there's a shortage of resources, which means they can be slow to respond.

Positive

The initial setup was difficult compared to other tools available in the marketplace. Deployment took three to six months for us as we were working on complex architecture, but on a simpler one, it would take around two to three weeks.

I wouldn't recommend DX UIM to other users because of its issues with reporting and stability - SolarWinds would be a better choice. I would give DX UIM a rating of seven out of ten.

We use this solution for monitoring our infrastructure environment; servers, storage, database, and applications. This is an infrastructure monitoring tool. I'm a solutions consultant and we are customers of DX. 

The value of UIM is that we are not only monitoring the infrastructure asset but also monitoring it as an IT service. 

I would like to have the option to monitor via mobile phone so it would be helpful if DX would develop a mobile application. I'd like to see a single dashboard and automation implemented as part of the solution.

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The environment around UIM is sometimes complex and can cause some instability. We have good support to resolve issues when this happens. 

In terms of the knowledge base of the technical staff, they are average. 

Positive

SolarWinds and ManageEngine are both good tools with good technology in this sphere but for our purposes they are unlikely to be able to scale and provide the information we need in our environment. It might work for other companies that have a different environment from ours. It's difficult to compare these solutions head to head because it all depends on an environment's requirements.

The initial setup is easy. Deployment time depends on the number of devices to be monitored and the metrics that are going to be collected. We have 15 users and the solution is used on a daily basis. 

Licensing costs are reasonable and affordable. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10.