DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

We mainly use the solution for infrastructure monitoring on our customers' in-house systems. 

This solution allows us to have an overview of the infrastructure and identify areas where the performance isn't optimal, or where upgrades could be carried out.

We would like the navigation of this solution to be more user-friendly for our system administrators.

Also, the solution is quite complicated, so we would like there to be better documentation on the processes, in order to ensure we know exactly how it works.

We have been working with this solution for around 10 years.

We have found this to be a stable solution.

It is an easily scalable product.

The technical support for this solution could be improved. 

Neutral

The initial setup of the solution was straightforward.

We have found that the ROI with this solution, is that the features available allow for us to spot potential issues, before they occur and cause problems for our customers.

We would advise any organization implementing this product, to ensure that there are good training materials available for their users, as it is a complicated solution and requires some specific knowledge prior to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We deploy these solutions to customers like big banks, here in Nigeria, as well as in some government agencies. We liaise with the OEM of the product to deploy the solution for the customer. We do infrastructure management projects, all with CA products.

We use it for infrastructure monitoring across the board. We monitor our clients' infrastructure from a central location: their servers, applications, etc., from end-to-end.

It used to take longer to identify issues and to resolve them. But with this solution, we are able to know exactly where an issue is coming from and to tackle it. It helps us to reduce the time and cost involved and the number of employees involved. That's where it gives us added value.

It gives us visibility inside applications. It helps us to dig down and find the root cause of any issue within the network. It flags issues and sends an alert or SMS so we can dive down and know exactly where an issue is coming from, and resolve it as quickly as possible.

One issue I'm having with CA now is the complexity of the solution. They have APM now, Application Performance Manager, as part of it. I think they are still trying to understand how the application works. In terms of deployment, it's not straightforward. We are having issues with that. APM is not really user-friendly, in terms of the dashboard. People want to see a dashboard on the screen, to understand in real-time what is happening.

Also, there is something a customer requested from us. They wanted to know if we could manipulate the script to do the following. If an alarm is sent by the product they want to see it scrolling on the NOC monitor, instead of them having to click it.

There is also room for improvement in the reporting. It is not really good enough, according to our customers. So what we now usually do is use Power BI to get them the kinds of reports they want.

Sometimes we contact CA itself. They log in and help us to resolve some of the issues. I would give them 8.5 out of ten.

We did not have a previous solution. I have tried other solutions, such as Microsoft SSCM and SolarWinds. I've played around with them, but I have not really used them.

First of all, we get the stakeholders together and gather their requirements, exactly what they want to do. We can then provide them with the tech for the solution. We engage their different units to understand their processes. So, by the time we present the concept for approval, they will sign off and we can commence implementation.

We use an in-house consultant to gather the information. There is also a company called Feedware, a foreign company we partner with. They are quite good, but in terms of response time they do respond on time. In all other ways they are okay.

CA is a very nice solution. Before you make a final decision though, make sure all the stakeholders understand the solution and how it works. If they don't understand how it works they might not be able to appreciate it. It's a powerful solution, but give them some visibility into it, its capabilities and what they can do with it, before implementing it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It's not a ten because of the reporting aspect. Apart from that, the solution is okay. It's the reporting that users complain about.

Server and database availability as well as performance monitoring in my environment. We also monitor URLs using UIM.

We now use only one console to monitor all servers, the database and the network. It has allowed us to consolidate four previous tools (BMC, HP, SolarWinds, Nagios).

It is easy to implement but requires good planning. If you don't plan the number of probes it can lead to an event flood. It is also reliable when it comes to monitoring.

Reporting capability can be improved especially when it comes to availability. Additionally, automatic baselines can help reduce the count of alerts.

The benefit is easy installation. Thus, the model approach of the product and out-of-the-box probes, which deliver direct value.

You can integrate clouds, hybrid infrastructure, and on-premise infrastructure into one product. You have also a big range of application probes, which is needed on our side.

We want to see more investment in the UI and the dashboard (from what we have seen here at CA World, that is the case). We want to see this because usability and ease of use of the product is becoming more important for our customers. 

The stability is really great, because it works on the big scale. We do not have fails.

It is one of the only products, which you can do multiple tiers or multiple proxies. No other product can do this. You can monitor it on a high scale of devices. 

We use a lot of solutions. However, we found out that UIM is the best selection for the customer, which is why we selected to use UIM, also coming from the public sector, an insurance sector, and so on. 

Having all of our information within one tool set; our alerts, our monitors, and the things that our operations team needs to function. 

We are coming from an environment where an individual had to login to whatever server, or whatever niche tool, that they implemented. Now, they will be able to go to one place to get everything they need. 

It is the foundation for our monitoring solution. We are coming from a very old NSM solution, and some of the features will allow us to do more monitoring to meet our needs for the next five to 10 years. 

It is going to be about looking at the technologies we choose to implement over the next couple of years, and how we can get more native information from those solutions. Everyone is talking about cloud and having Office 365 availability. I understand that it was just released. We are looking forward to enhancements in that area. 

Since we have gone live, it has been extremely stable. 

There has been a couple of minor issues that we have had to work through. Quite frankly, it has exceeded my expectations. 

Our scalability will meet our needs. We did some performance and load testing getting towards implementation, where we pushed more than 250,000 messages in 15 minutes. So, expectations are pretty high.

My experience with technical support has gone fairly well. We had some challenges with a particular plugin getting towards implementation. It required an enhancement in order for us to enable the features we needed to go-live. Within the scope of 45 days, they were able to enhance the plugin, roll it into a GA fixed release for the code, and you will see it again in the next full release of the product.

We were a previous user of CA NSM. From a supportability perspective, we did not want to continue using something that CA would not support. It was a logical step. It allowed us to go and migrate from NSM to UIM. So far, it has worked well. 

I would give it a nine out of 10 at this point. There are a couple of things we are still working on. If we get those implemented correctly, then I could give it a higher rating.

Currently, we are building a visibility dashboard which allows our level-1 and level-2 engineering teams to actually look at the events, and be able to designate which ones are critical, which are important. It alerts them. They are able to simply look at a dashboard to be able to predict and resolve issues.

The CA tools allow to me to get into detailed transactions for custom ranking, and be able to make predictions. It also gathers data. Some other tools may be good at one area, but not good overall, including the mainframe.

CA has been very famous for the mainframe. I think that's actually the edge, by the way, for CA products, as there are many, many dotcom products that don't touch mainframes. I think that CA should still keep that. 

The area where CA is changing is, I'll give you an example. The fresh technology should have been out a long time ago. But it appears to be we're catching up on the UIM, because Microsoft basically says they are not going to support the fresh, starting next year. That means they are a little bit behind on the waves in the architecture, etc. I think that can be improved.

Another thinking is, if the developer can get to the level-1 engineer level, they will develop a better product. I suggest the developers at CA really work as a level-1 engineer, because then you have a different sort.

It reduced cycles for a lot of quick out-of-the-box functionality. 

It also allowed us to get away from being stuck in SNMP, VTP V2, based off of agent deployment.

Easy admin functionality. You can quickly do all the admin functionality without reducing the cycles. 

Continue to advance the filter capabilities, and more input fields.

It's very great, it's always up, it's available; don't have any outages.

Great. It's easy to push out across numerous servers. Very scalable. 

Resolution of problems happens quickly. If not, it gets advanced to product support and they do an exceptional job working with us.

We used eHealth, which was owned by CA. It was getting close to end of life, and it was also stuck on SNMP version 2. Moving to UIM allowed us to remove ourselves from the REST registry, and start doing agent deployment.

I give it an eight out of 10, for dependability, reduced cycles, and functionality.

The ability to monitor any platform. We have Windows, Linux, AIX, and mainframe all being monitored with the same UIM infrastructure.

The number of probes available. Out of the box, I believe about 200 probes are available. And, if there's a probe that is not available, you can write one. You can also go to the communities and suggest, and based on demand, CA will write one for you.

I would like to see auditability. We've built our own audit functionality to ensure that every CI has the desired model configuration applied to it. And we run that on a daily basis. If that became part of the product, I think it might be a little bit less intensive in terms of resource, because we're doing it with scripts.

Very stable.

Scalability's gotten better. When we first were using it, there were some challenges with that, but we were able to work with CA and scale it up to an enterprise class.

We were using CA Nimsoft Monitor, and we knew we had to invest in UIM because NISM was a few years past sunset. We realized that we needed to embrace the latest technology being offered by CA.

I would give it an eight out of 10. Business class, I would give it a 10. Enterprise, eight. And there are just a few more things to make it more enterprise-class friendly.