I really value the underlying Java framework for development of custom probes.
The product has an API that allows heavy customization. This has allowed me to add functionality by designing my own metric gathering routines.

This product has one foot in the past and another foot in the future. As a result, the approaches to managing components are not unified; leading to added complexity to management.

Open source and acquired components are often bolted on and integrated poorly.

Out of the box, there were no scalability issues. However, this product has poor integration with ServiceNow; introducing unacceptable bottlenecks.

I would give technical support a score of 6/10.

We did not use a previous solution but we are architecting an alternative presently.

Licensing has a lot of wiggle-room.

Please investigate other solutions so you can make an informed choice. CA adds technical debt to your organization.

The product is easy to configure. Simplicity is the most valuable asset of CA UIM.

Monitoring has been easy and streamlined. Its ability to integrate with CA SDM and its capability to receive SNMP traps from other tools, makes it simple to integrate.

Improvements could be made to the reporting and analytics features. The OOB report templates and analytics can be improved.

I have used it for 3 years.

There were no stability issues. It is a very stable product with agents not failing that often.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support has been good.

Initial setup was straightforward. For someone with experience of any monitoring tool, read the manual once and implementation is pretty easy.

I found the product to be cost effective and licensing is not complex.

Go ahead and implement it. Keep it simple in a phased manner. Set expectations correctly. (This is not a synthetic or real user monitoring tool.)

• Ease of setup - install is quick and easy. For small environments, all components can be installed on a single server. Even larger, more-distributed environments are easy to install, given all required network ports are open.
• Automated robot deployment makes it easy to select targets for performance management.
• Justifiably, local and remote options are available for agent-based and touchless monitoring.
• Most probe configurations are OOTB best practices. The probe GUI is easy to navigate.
• A new feature, MCS, allows for monitoring policies to be created for groups of devices. You can monitor just about anything.

We are a managed services organization. Knowing about performance issues before our customers is key. To have reports ready at the beginning of the day is even better. Report scheduling is priceless.

I would like to see enhancements to core probes for bulk uploads. Some probes have the capability to monitor multiple targets. You either must enter them one by one or use scripting to bulk load the targets. I would like to see that functionality built into the probes.

We have been using this product for about seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent. 24 x 7 support is awesome, not to mention that their support staff really knows the product. What makes it better is that support and development work close together so that turnaround on bug fixes is expedient.

We previously used Solarwinds NPM but it wasn't as scalable.

Setup was easy.

Buy what you need. The product is worth every bit of its cost.

We did not evaluate any other products beforehand.

Plan and commit people and processes. Build a service, don't just implement a tool.

One of the most valuable features would be the out-of-the-box capability. It's extremely capable from day one. Not a lot of customization is required in order to implement it within your environment. I think that's just a huge resource win, from a time-measurement perspective. We're a small shop in a very large company. The quicker we can roll things out, the bigger wins, the quick wins, are obviously going to be beneficial to our environment.

We're utilizing the E2E probes as well as the URL probes in the infrastructure in which it's being run on. We're running about 100 VDI desktops and about 300 different applications.

It's provided us an opportunity to have visualization and insight into some applications that we haven't had before. A lot of the applications in the past did not have Citrix monitoring capability, which this has, or VDI monitoring capability. In the healthcare industry, that's really a big component of what we do. A lot of our critical applications run on the Citrix platform and, in the past, we just haven't had any visibility into how those applications were performing.

One of the biggest areas to improve would be the training aspect. There's a little bit of training out there available right now. I know it's a newer CA product. I think the training is a little rudimentary at this point. I think there needs to be some more advanced-level training available.

We've had it installed in our environment about a year now.

Stability has been spot on. We haven't had any problems. We actually performed an upgrade mid-cycle, and the upgrade went flawlessly with literally no issues. Correlation has been fantastic. We've integrated with several different applications, as well, for monitoring, alerting, things of that nature. No problems at all.

Scalability is huge. It’s not overly expensive, so I'm able to build upon it relatively cheap, which is a huge win for anybody, any company. As I’ve mentioned, we're running about 100 desktops right now in our VDI environment. We've scaled back. Even though that sounds like a big footprint, due to its advanced scalability within the actual environment, we were able to reduce the number of actual physical robots that we were utilizing from 400 to 100.

We haven't needed to use tech support. We do have some direct sales guys that we utilize, and those have been our primary functionality. I have used tech support for other applications within CA and I've never had any problems.

One of the primary triggers for investing in a new solution was the fact that our current system didn't meet the requirements and the needs as our company began to grow and take on new applications. Additionally, the election to sunset the previous product that we were utilizing made for a big push to look for something new.

Personally, when I’m selecting a vendor, I want somebody who feels like they've got something to lose. Obviously, if I go with your tool set, and you don't seem to really care about the upgrade or my pain points, and you don't feel like, "Hey. I've bought it and I walked away from it. You're stuck with it.", that makes the relationship difficult. CA is extremely committed. I think that would be one of the things: commitment to success. They're extremely committed to our success and I can't be more thankful.

Setup is extremely straightforward; very easy to implement. We set up our test environment in about 2-3 days, and then our prod environment took about 3-4. It's a little bit larger, a little bit more robust.

It's as next, next, next as you could make, I think, an implementation.

We actually vetted several other applications. We looked at Dynatrace. We looked at Login VSI. We looked at BMC's new tool. We did the gambit of running around, looking at different monitoring solutions. AppDynamics was included in that. I think on scalability, functionality, and ease of implementation, UIM won out.

There's always going to be room for improvement. Why I rate it this high is the ease of implementation, ease of use. I brought in several guys that never had any development experience. In 1-2 days of training, they were able to get some stuff knocked out for us; help us with the implementation process and the transitioning of it. Ease of use is huge. You don't have to be super-techy in order to utilize the product. Of course, to utilize it to its full functionality, sure, but day-one, out-of-the-box stuff is just phenomenal.

Basically, the most valuable feature is the ability to scale and quickly allow us to deploy an infrastructure management solution to our clients in a very timely manner, across the board, using many different technologies; so, storage, databases, OSs, and synthetic monitoring, things like that.

It allows us to create a baseline template for each of the different technologies. That allows to quickly deploy our solution set for that particular technology base to each different client. So, across the board, we have a baseline of measurable, simple deployment mechanisms.

I would probably like to see more out-of-the-box solutions that I don't have to individually go into, configure and set up myself.

With every new probe that is released, we have to come up with a good monitoring template to accurately identify the key metrics for that specific technology to monitor it correctly. We have to find SME’s for that technology, sit down with them, show them all the metrics that we can collect then ask what are the key important metrics that if this breaches a threshold, should we alert. This is very time consuming for all parties.

I've been using it for two and a half years.

It is very stable, I would say. Maybe, we had issues during upgrades, but it's been relatively very stable.

It's very scalable. We have no issue adding on additional clients because of just the way the product has been designed, it allows us to scale very heavily.

Technical support is excellent. I've been working with them for 10+ years. I have a good relationship with the support company. I know every support individual there and it is run in a very professional, friendly manner.

Upgrades are very straightforward. You have the wiki site, which tells you step by step. I do run through the upgrade in a test environment first before actually implementing in production.

I was able to quickly learn it and use it, deploy it, modify it to our specific needs, and it's been very reliable since.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the history of the company, how long it's been in business, what offerings in terms of support it offers, and really other customer feedback based on their personal experiences.

The most valuable feature for us are the way it brings silo products together that we've invested in over the years, and it allows us to consolidate our views for our customers.

We started off with standard infrastructure – networks, switches, routers, firewalls – but as we've grown, our proposition has been able to expand to the cloud, internet of things, and big data. Although we don't use all of those capabilities from it today, the key thing for us is, we know it's flexible enough to do that.

The key things for us are: help bring people together, break down the silo teams, and then be able to see the customers' problem, the pain points, in a single place. It helps us make more-effective decisions and also the response time to fix.

I would like to see further consolidation of the tools from a deployment point of view. Make it more modular; drag and drop; being able to have a commercial model that also lends itself well with what we're trying to achieve for our customers.

It's not only about features and gimmicks. It's about making sure the features and products align to our customers’ outcomes.

I have been using UIM for about seven years now.

Stability is an interesting one. From a design point of view, if you understand the type of demand you're putting on it and you plan forward, which we've worked to learned to do, it becomes more stable. If you don’t know what you're doing and you try to do something with it which it's not really designed for, of course you have performance issues with many products.

So, it's really about knowing what you want to get out of the product and how you want to architect the product to meet your objectives.

I would say it is scalable. We use it in a multi-context environment. What I mean by that is, as a service provider, naturally we have customers who scale horizontally. So, for us, we've got a template-driven approach now. With the advent of virtualization and cloud, that's also allowed us to scale out much quicker.

Technical support is interesting. Initially, in the UK, we had challenges having to engage the standard process. But, with the advent of the online forums and the communities, that's allowed more open questioning and learning from others out there and the peers, not necessarily just from our own industry; from areas that are adjacent to our market but are also trying to achieve the same outcome. I think CAhave now created more of a flexible platform to do that.

I think there are areas where initial setup has become more simpler now, but in the early days, it was really trying to understand what we want out of the product because, without knowing what the requirement was, we were kind of grappling with lots of the features. But then, once we understood what we're trying to deliver and then we worked with CA; I think once we engaged with CA, they did really come through. They came forward and supported us along the journey.

I think organically we tried putting it in for various products and services. Over time, when we realized that we can harness more out of it, we made a decision to put more energy for our enterprise customers into tools that really give them more value. Rather than trying to invest in too many tools, we decided to actually work on fewer tools; we'll get more out of them.

Without being biased, I feel that the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is about the people and whilst there's always a tradition in an organization when you're working with a vendor, it's really important that you have engagement from all levels of your business, from product marketing, engineering, architecture, as well as from a commercial relationship.

If you have a transactional relationship, you will only get suboptimal results. What we've learned is to broaden the discussion with different areas of our partner-vendor and work with them at different levels to bring the best out. That collaboration is really important. That's, I think, changed a lot over the last few years and we're now starting to get the value out of the relationship.

I’d never give anybody a perfect rating. If you asked me about two years ago, my rating would have been lower. As I’ve mentioned, the collaboration has definitely improved things.

I definitely enjoy the interface and how easy it is to deploy monitoring rules and probes.

It has provided us with faster triage. It is easier to upgrade and work with. It makes my job easier. If I can do my job better, then the organization should benefit.

I would really like to see HTML5. I spoke with a couple of developers about it. I'd also like to see additional monitoring so we can push rules a little bit easier.

I haven't had too many opportunities to expand. We set it up such that I can expand in parallel quite easily. We haven't had the need to do so yet, but I imagine it would work out.

I have used technical support. They are great. I usually interact with them by the web portal, submit a ticket, and then I get a call back. My issues are almost always resolved by them.

We used eHealth, which was another CA product. We noticed that UIM was getting a lot more development than eHealth. UIM was kind of a future product. We spoke with our account representative, and we did a one-to-one swap for licenses.

I was absolutely involved in the setup. I had prior experience with a product similar to UIM, so I was very familiar with the architecture. From that aspect, it was easy.

It is definitely a different architecture than other CA products that we are using. I can see where somebody without this experience would find the setup a little bit complex. For me, I grasped the concepts easier.

I enjoy the product. It has done everything that we expected it to do.

When selecting a vendor, the most important aspect is that their goals are aligned with our goals. I look for a relationship that is symbiotic. I want them to understand that when we do well, they do well.