DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

Infrastructure monitoring.

It preforms well, I mean it scales well. Handles about 17,000 servers. So it does pretty well. 

• Basic infrastructure
• Moving into cloud monitoring in UIM
• Resilient
• Pretty stable

Also, I think it's the architecture, the way the hubs are designed, the way that it scales, that it can be grown. That's valuable, in a large enterprise.

The large library of functionality; not having to go to multiple products to monitor different things.

Being able to report on the monitoring configurations and find out where you differentiate from standards. If I've deployed 500 probes to monitor Oracle, and I want to know that they're all monitored the same, I have no way to do that now.

Stability's been good.

The biggest problem is certain what they call "hubs." Different releases of different probes can be problematic, to get the right versions to work together. Or to find out if they scale or if they don't. So you've got to do some testing.

Scalability is dependent on the probe that you're using. Some probes scale really well, some things don't scale really well. So monitoring VMware may not scale as well as monitoring a cloud architecture. You have to test what you're doing.

I haven't used tech support for UIM recently but I have used CA's technical support in general. I would say they're responsive but can take a little time, if it has to go back to development for a review.

It's pretty straightforward.

When investing in a vendor, what's important to me are 

• software quality
• responsiveness
• communication.

I rate it an eight out of 10 and that's only because I think it can be better. I think as a competitive products in the market, UIM is really solid. A few changes could make it better.

Make sure there are staff to administrate it, after it gets deployed. And ensure that after CA delivers, that you have the ability to follow through with the rest of the implementation.

Primary use case is we deployed a unified infrastructure manager, globally, for monitoring. By globally, I mean here in the US and in Europe. Now we are expanding to South America: Mexico and Brasil.

Scalability has been really good. It has been more than we expected, much better than what we were using before.

• The ease of deployment
• The ease in configuration, like alarm notifications
• Administration is easy, so the learning curve is not huge. It's something you could get comfortable with in a couple of months.

It's making the environment more visible. 

It's helping our management have really good visibility into what is happening in the environment. Things that were hidden are now visible. We're able to do this deployment on a mainframe environment, and they can actually see the day-to-day performance of the environment, get real data, and make modifications based on that.

We've talked to our vendor about the specific parts of UIM, specific probes, that we'd like to see improvements in. This would give us greater functionality. An example is logmon. We'd like to see some more functionality there. Maybe something that can capture an XML tag, data, things like that.

Overall we'd like to see a better console for the alarm view. Right now it's great, but there's some functionality that was lost from the previous migration. They are trying to integrate some of the functionality from the previous versions, which was lost when they migrated to a new format for showing that.
Since that's the most visible part of our tool, to our users, that would have immediate benefits, I would say.

Stability is fairly good. It's getting better every day.

There are some challenges with it as far as having a lot of users logging in at the same time. What they do is they log in to see what's happening in the environment, respond, and contact whoever they need to, to attack whatever issue came up. Sometimes the stability is not what we expected, but it's really good still.

There is a bit of lag that we're seeing. We just completed a migration to a higher version. It is better, but we are still seeing some unexpected downtime in the course of the day. The frequency of those incidents is going down every day. So, we expect that the stability will pretty much go up.

Scalability is great. It doesn't take a lot to do a deployment to a bunch servers, and you have multiple ways that you can do that. You can use native deployment method. You can use what the infrastructure team uses for deploying software. You can do a manual method. You have different options and that's awesome.

Support is great. We have a great partnership with our vendor, and they're very responsive to our needs. And they have escalation paths. So when they hit a snag, they always escalate to the back end and we get really good results from them.

Our previous tool, Microsoft SCOM, was not meeting expectations. The cost, the return on investment for it, was not there at all. With UIM, the ROI is way up there. With the other tool, the admin time versus the value you were getting was just not there.

I hear they've made improvements to SCOM now. But we went a different direction. And we're happy that we did.

it was fairly straightforward.

Our first deployment happened about six years ago. Once you get the hang of it, it gets much easier. But overall, approaching it as a new customer, I would say, it's not hard at all.

We did three or four different proofs of concept, and we ended up going with CA.

We considered an open source tool, it's called SNAG-View. We considered SCOM. There were two others we considered that are not coming to mind.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to us are 

• relationships
• response. 

Those two are the biggest things. We want them to be there when we're doing a major deployment. When things break down, that 3:00am call, they're there. That is the biggest thing for us: to have a close relationship with our vendor. 

And of course, knowledge that the vendor has of the actual product. That they have that technical talent within their team, that they can give that first-tier, third-tier, or whatever, support.

I would say you will probably see a lot of positive returns right out of the gate in the quality of monitoring that you are seeing; the type of monitoring data that you're getting from whatever it is that you're monitoring. I would encourage you to take a look at it.

We do E2E monitoring for service level availability of all of our applications. 

For our service level managers, it's performed a lot better than they expected. It's given them a lot more information than our old tool, which went end-of-life. We brought everything over to UIM. We gave them a tool that can give them everything they wanted, that they never had before.

From what I've seen so far, and what we're using, it's

• the data it collects and 
• the reporting capabilities.

For me, it keeps the service level managers off my back. 

It gives the service level managers, because they work directly with the application owners and the business owners, the ability to provide the metrics and the service level of the applications to the business owners. It's a win for both of us.

Because we have a lot of critical applications and we need to make sure that they're always available, I do scripting and make sure that the Synthetics stay up and are running all the time. It gives the business owners the knowledge that, "Hey, my application is up," and we don't have to wait for the customers to call in saying it's down.

Without deep diving into the infrastructure side, I really can't say because I only work with the Synthetics, end-to-end side of it. Right now there are just minor, little glitches, things that I see, but it's things I'm working with support on.

With the Synthetics it's more or less what a user sees in an application. There are some things that UIM can do and some things that UIM can't do. What it can do is great, and it's done a lot, and I've done a lot with the product that supports what we do. That's why I say it's a 10 across the board. 

The little things are, for example, maybe Windows.frames can't be seen within UIM, or within the side I'm working with. They say, "Oh, we're going to get that fixed in the next feature." Great, so we're in the process of upgrading right now. We're on 8.4.7 and we're getting reading to go to 8.5.1, which is the most current release.

Stability? Works great.

So far scalability is wonderful. We're looking towards broadening the scope of UIM within our company. We're staying with the E2E right now, but I think not too far in the future we're going to broaden it and go with more in-depth features. From what I've heard here at the CA World conference, it seems I'm the only one doing E2E. So we're going to get into the infrastructure side of it, which we're not currently doing.

Technical support is great. They've been wonderful.

The communication has been great. It also helps that, being a support person in my career in the past, I know what to fill out in the ticket and to help them. So we jive on what's needed and what's not. Putting things in the ticket that help them, up front, shortens the life of the ticket.

We were using a different vendor, different product and it went end-of-life. I call it "TM-ART" some people call it TMART, it is from BMC. 

We had to find another product.

It was straightforward, but we implemented about two weeks prior to CA World last year, when we got here and they asked, "How do you like it?" "Um, we just implemented, so we don't know." 

But for the past year it's worked great. We're still learning because we didn't fully implement UIM. The architect came in and said, "Hey, this is how you do it, this is what you need," and we took over. So, we're learning still.

We did a lot of research but UIM had everything that we needed. 

When selecting a vendor what's most important to us is:

• Does it do what we need? 
• Does it do what we want? 
• Do we have to do a lot of out-of-the-box modifications?

I give it a 10 out of 10 because it's doing everything we expected and looked for. Like I said, we haven't gotten into infrastructure, so I can't really rate it that way yet. But what I've seen in the pre-conference classes, it's going to work just as well. So, I would probably give it a 10 across the board.

Definitely PoC UIM. It is worth it. 

Our main use case is obviously doing base monitoring with the product, and also going beyond that doing URL monitoring. We are actually exploring more than what the UIM can perform with the current solution that we have in place. So, we are migrating everything over to the UIM. So far, it works well, even though we have not migrated everything over.

Obviously, the base monitoring and how we can essentially set up alerts to go to the board through Spectrum. However, that is pretty much our main use case for it. 

The alerts and thresholds that we set up within the tool, that's important for the business. If it were to meet that threshold, it goes to the board, which in turn, we can notify the application's owners swiftly to minimize the impact of a SEP-1. So, it is critical.

Just to have that overall picture when it comes to monitoring throughout the whole environment and be able to act on it.

The main complaint with the tool is we are attempting to migrate off of SCOM and the management packs that SCOM has for exchange (ED and SharePoint) it does not look like UIM and can't necessarily compete with those. Maybe, if that could be improved.

I would have to look up some actual use cases, but when we initially set up the 6-risk environment within UIM, it did not meet the needs for the application owners who actually manage the Citrix environment. They decided to actually go back to SCOM. That was the one main concern, and that is something that we will have to readdress with CA.  

It seems pretty stable. I have not had any cyclic concerns. There was an issue when we migrated to the latest version, but we had support that day to get it resolved and it was resolved within 24 hours, so that was a plus. 

When we upgraded to the latest version, the admin lost access to the management console. That was the issue and it got resolved really quickly. 

I do not know if I can speak to it.

The individual that manages the product itself used tech support. She received a response/resolved within 24 hours. She found them to be knowledgeable.

We moved from the HPE product suite two or three years ago. I was not a part of that, but the main complaint with HPE was the support was locking. That is really about it. 

We did migrate from a different solution, which had a similar functionality. I would not say that it necessarily added to it, but I received feedback from the admin who administers the tool itself that it is a lot easier to use and very user friendly for the teams.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, I have not heard anything bad about it either.

Splunk, AppDynamics, and CA were on our shortlist.

I started just a few months ago, but the company has been using it for about two years now. I have been surprised by the foothold CA has on the marketplace and how many products they actually manage.

I would definitely recommend the concept if it is something you are looking for.Just make sure that it integrates with the rest of the tools in your environment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Functionality of the product
• Ease of use.

What I like about CA compared to other vendors is they are not pushy. They are actually more supportive if we have any issues they will get the appropriate rep to assist. Our rep does not feel like he is a sales rep, even though he is. To have that good relationship with the people that you are responsible for is a big deal, because I have dealt with other vendors where they are kind of the sleazy, salesman type.

We are using it for the monitoring of our hardware infrastructure, and also for our applications' response times. So far, it has performed well. 

• The integration with Spectrum
• The ability to create an integrated console based upon the services which we are offering.

We have had previous experience with CA products, so it is another progression in our use and deployment of the CA suite.

• Ease of use
• Integration with the other CA products

We are working on the process improvement. We have a large deployment across multiple applications, so working with the applications team and obtaining velocity is a difficult thing. 

If there was a way to better harvest information from other sources to configure the components, it would make it easier to do.

For the past year, the tool has been quite stable in our environment, so I enjoy working with it. 

The scalability is good, because of our diverse locations and the large number of applications. However, getting the right components in the right area, we just have to think through it and engineer it.

It is difficult to get their time to instrument their applications. So, it is not the product that is difficult to work with, it is getting the people's time to work with us.

For technical support, we sourced knowledge from one of our in-house partners, which is a contract resource type of thing.  

This was our first implementation of this type of solution. We had done an internal proof of concept or proof of value. That is where we came up with using the tool. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Because of our previous experience with CA, we did not really look elsewhere.

Plan well. Because of what the tool does, some companies do not really have a good service catalog, and without a good service catalog, taking the leap into the UIM space is going to be an interesting challenge. That has been one of our challenges, we did not have a good service catalog.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• The partnership with the team
• The quality of the products
• The reputation of the vendor.

We install and configure UIM to replace other products like OmniVision, InfoVista, and open source products like Nagios and Cacti with a standardized product, with the new capabilities for the market, like virtualization technology, topology, analysis. It's too difficult for non-technical users, non-software developers, to develop their own monitoring tools.

Scalability and flexibility. The product can grow with your infrastructure so you don't have to install other products. Just add components. It's very simple.

The second major feature is the user-friendly interface. It's the best feature for our customers, because we are the implementers of the software. It's easy for us to install and configure the product, but our customers want a simple interface with only the options they need to run and monitor their environment. 

Recently, important features introduced were the Discovery capability, Auto-Deploy profile manager, and alarms.

Another feature is reporting. We discovered new ways to generate new reports.

This is a very complex question, because it depends on the customer's needs. Some customers need more network capabilities, but UIM is all about IT monitoring. It's an all-inclusive software. 

It's difficult to become the best in monitoring all of the parameters in technology. Some customers want extended capability in the network, or the system overall. But it's difficult to ask the vendor to integrate all of capabilities in one product. We prefer to capitalize on the synergy of products, and not to add features, and features. 

Three or four years in the future, there will be a product with a lot of capabilities, but if one of our customers wants a simple product, not expensive, we can't provide them a product with thousands of capabilities when he will only use ten.

We prefer to follow the market standards, and use a product with a simple and user-friendly interface. That's what we want.

The major problem we have when we sell CA UIM is that we need to sell additional products because it doesn't cover cover all the features. The problem comes down to price. That's the major problem for us. When you have to sell many products, the customer will say, "Oh, it's too expensive," and he won't purchase all the products. So, we think when you have to sell many, many products, they have to do better on pricing.

We would also like to see automatic network topology.

With the new release, the new version, it is more stable. The last releases were less stable than the new one. We think version 8.3 wasn't that stable. But with the 8.5.2, it's alright. It's really stable now.

We make ourselves available on call to our clients and it's now maybe one or two nights per month that there is downtime.

The scalability of the product has not evolved because it has been very good from the start. It's a very important point. CA UIM has a history of a lot of customers with successful ventures, so scalability is important for its customers. 

When a customer starts with a new product, they want to know it has scalability. They won't use all of the capabilities but scalability has to be there.

Even ten years ago, if a large bank or transport or trading company used UIM, they knew the product was scalable, flexible.

Scalability is good.

I had to call them one time at 4am, and I think they saved my life, because they called me back about five minutes after I opened the case. It was a high-impact incident, and they resolved it after about 10 or 15 minutes. So I'm really happy with the technical support. They are nice guys and technically good.

We are partners for CA but we also partner with other providers, like small French providers for the local market, not the worldwide market. we can use UIM for the best monitoring and use features from other products as well. CA lets partners work with other products. We are honest about the futures of the CA products. Most of the time, it is stronger than the other products.

We have implemented it for three or four customers in the last two years, a bank, an insurance company, among other smaller companies only known in France.

For us, the implementation is really easy.

With version 9 of CA UIM arriving soon, we think we will rate it even better, at nine out of 10. With the current version of the product it's a seven. CA UIM has a long history, but as a result, it's difficult for CA to follow market standards. The new version will arrive on the market with beautiful capabilities and very nice interfaces. The new version will enable CA to catch up to market standards. It's a great choice.

Be sure to correctly plan what you need, it's very important. In a lot of cases, the customer asks for a monitoring product with some needs. When we arrive for the workshop, we discover they have other needs. It's important for the customers to not only ask partners to make a proposal, but they should go to the market, got to the forums and community, and see what exists on the market. Ask partners detailed questions. Not, "I need system monitoring," but why. What more do you need? That's important.

Secondly, don't forget that proprietary products like CA have a price. This price is justified by the capabilities. Don't compare open source products with a proprietary product. It's not the same. We look very expensive because they compare us with Aegis or Centurion, but it's not the same product. It's not the same team. It's not the same methodology of work or technical support.

We use it for monitoring our infrastructure. 

I think it's a great product. It really brings it into the 21st century of Web UI. This latest version, version 9, that is supposed to be announced here at CA World, brings more of that HTML5 interface in and really steps it up to be a great UI. Easy to use, quick.

It's the probes. They have probes for all different types of technology. Whether it's WebSphere, JBoss, or you want to do JVM monitoring, you want to monitor just CPU usage, even Docker, they have probes for that. If you have a technology out there, there's a probe. And if there's not a probe somebody's creating a probe already. The probe library it pretty extensive.

The improvement is because we can deploy agents (they call them "robots," most people know them as "agents"). As most people know, agents are bloated, they can do whatever you want. With UIM, you put that robot out there and you place the probes you need, only the probes you need. So you have a base agent and here, for example, I only want to monitor server CPU, memory, storage, and maybe I want to monitor JBoss on this box. I just put the CDM probe out there, I put the JBoss probe out, and that's all you need. You don't need the load and probes for Docker or something else that you don't need to use.

More HTML5, more flexibility, and reducing the number of screens, fewer mouse clicks, fewer mouse movements. They should really take advantage of the features that the newer web technologies allow for. We're administrators, we're doing thousands of things every day, lots of clicks. Automation, automation, automation is what we want.

It's been a great product compared to some previous monitoring tools we had in place. Every time there were software updates for the server for security, from Microsoft or any other vendors, that would require reboots. A lot of the times we would have crashes or we'd have to do some recovery to bring them back up. With UIM, we've been running it for about nine or 10 months now and I think I've had to go and reboot the servers once.

Scalability seems great because they use hubs, so if your hub is hitting capacity on a number of servers, devices it's talking to, you can just add another hub. And it's a message-based system.

They've been great. Actually the guys that are doing the UIM product really know their stuff.

We have SolarWinds and we had some older Spectrum products that CA had, as well. But, the user interface was not as modernized as UIM.

The product we had was just nearing it's end of lifecycle for us, and we needed to move on to something else that the users would be more comfortable with using.

I think it was pretty straightforward. We did have, just as a disclaimer, a CA person on site helping, one of their sales engineers, just in case anything came up. The process went smoothly. Honestly, we probably didn't even need him there.

Our criteria when looking to switch to a different product include the user's ability, their willingness, to use it. And another main consideration, you can get data in but can you get data out in the formats you need? If you can only get data in, but you can't get data out, it's of no use.

I give it an eight out of 10 because, as I said, I think it needs a little bit more improvement around the UX, but it's getting there. And they're making a concerted effort to make that happen.

I would tell a colleague who is researching this type of solution to really look at your feature functionality. What do you need? Does it meed your needs?

The most valuable features are, I would say, the flexibility and the performance. It's easier to use and to configure.

It enables us to use multiple solutions in one software package.

It needs more report capabilities; things that make it easier to find them. It needs a central, global, point of view for inventory. Currently we have to get it piece by piece.

The stability is good. Many releases every year. It's something which is quite stable and pro-rating well.

It's very scalable. We need scalability. We are pro-rating and putting it in multiple sites.

I think we use it about once a month. I think they are responsive, although I don't use it directly.

We were using OmniVision. We switched because CA Unified Infrastructure Management integrated multiple features.

When selecting a vendor I would say the most important criteria are a history in infrastructure domain and credibility.

I would advise to start from a blank slate and not to try to make it from another solution.