DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

We mainly monitor services around the database applications, and things like that. The most valuable features of UIM are that it's scalable and it's relatively easy to set up monitoring on the servers.

The reporting part could be improved. We’re using other tools for that. Maybe we’ll continue to do that, but that is one thing we are missing; and the SLA, and what you can do there.

As I cannot compare it with others, it's a bit difficult to say.

It's very stable.

It is scalable. In production, we have about 600-700 servers.

It's mainly my colleague who is in contact with CA technical support. Things take time.

I think you should set it up the way that CA says you should set it up.

I believe that the fundamentals and the logic of how UIM is set up is very stable. We like that the fundamentals support providing metrics and alarms.

I feel it provides the essentials. That is, to extract data from an environment and present it through a front-end, using graphs and charts. It also allows for analysis on the collected data, which is crucial to most companies. I believe that UIM does a good job, of being able to manage all the steps along the way.

I haven’t been in my current position for too long. I definitely noticed that UIM provides a level of reliability in our operating center for the people who actually implement the alarms. When an alarm comes in, they're responsible for making sure the alarm validation is raised. It allows reliability and it gives us assurance that we have an accurate picture about what really is going on in our monitoring environment. That's reassuring to know. We know that when we get an alarm, it is because something is actually happening.

We're just hoping to see the growth in different functional areas so that it's a little bit more dynamic. The other enterprise suites that they're trying to bundle up are great. I think that the core functions of the product itself are great. I think it might need a little more work at the extremities, trying to hook up with other software. Right now, they're doing a good job at trying to implement additional suites and software. What I would like to see is that the quality of what is currently in place just be increased.

There are some components of UIM that are dated, or they're being left behind and some newer ones are being put forward.

I can't see any new features, and if I did, I don’t know what I’d be doing around here. Can this feature do my job here? But no, realistically, we depend on these systems that when we see configured, we know exactly what we're going to get. It's been improving. Still, I think there's a lot of room for growth

The stability for UIM creates that reliant backbone that we need. If there is anything customizable that needs to be done, that is being done by the other suites; but UIM is very good and it helps coordinate everything and provides reliability.

The scalability is great. I think they understand that it’s a concern because it's at the enterprise level. I think they're moving in the right direction.

I know that right now we're a little bit outdated in the product version that we have; but it's just part of the product, and we understand that. Moving forward, when we update, and when we do all these things, I know that the scalability has been opening up in different components within UIM.

Adding components, such as MCS, which enables you to configure your entire enterprise from one place, is a good thing.

I used to work for CA UIM support. I would be the one to talk to. Having worked there, and now coming from the actual implementation where I'm an enterprise-level user is a very up-and-down, roller-coaster feeling. It’s like I'm stuck in support because as much as I want to say that everybody is consistent, and every technical guy wants the best for you, it just doesn't happen that way.

When it does, it's great, and we really appreciate it. When it's lacking, we suffer a little bit and it creates a bitterness. We don’t do anything up front, but we keep a record of it. Technical support was not the best. We could use more. We're wasting money because we see it didn't produce here or wasn't responsive enough.

It definitely raises questions and concerns, but I know CA is very open to hearing customers' concerns and listening to feedback. I think they’re very open and understand that that’s an area they can improve.

I don't do the selecting processes. My boss definitely lets me know, "Hey, we want to read into this," and I go into it with a particular perspective after he gives me some goals and requirements. The most important thing is the goal of your company and what they are trying to achieve.

We have looked at other vendors but upper management is always trying to cut costs, and understandably so. We were looking at other solutions which might provide a level comparable to what we have with CA, where we have what we need, while reducing costs; but it's kind of tough. CA's pretty competitive. They're good. They're solid.

Make sure you have a good grasp on what you need to get out of the product, of course. What does this product do for you? Once you have a good understanding of that, it's really communicating with either the architect or whoever is going to implement it to make sure that it reflects the goals, the requirements, the SLA, and so on. Then you can do the configuration and implementation.

It has a wide breadth of monitors and probes. It enables us to monitor just about anything we come across. That's its strength: it's got a wide variety.

It's allowed us to narrow our footprint. We're getting ready now to retire some legacy apps that we use for monitoring, so it's allowed us to narrow our footprint.

• They need to work on the user interface. I know they are, but to me, that's one of the big things that is holding them back. It's not with the times. It's not real intuitive. You really need to work with it to figure out where things are.
• We need to be able to group servers and deploy different packages to them.
• You should be able to better organize the grouping and deployment. That's kind of where they struggle. They need to work on that area. I know they are, but that's our pain point. The organization is lacking.

I think it needs a little work in terms of stability. We've had issues with some probes crashing. It seems like there are really more bugs in a release when it comes out than there should be. I would think they should be caught in QA. That's what I've seen so far.

It seems to be very scalable. We have 6,000 servers, and we really haven't run into any scalability issues. We have thousands and thousands of monitors. But the number of alarms for event handling can be a little better. I know they're working on that. They may have another solution coming out that will help us with that.

Technical support has been fair, medium, or whatever the middle of the road is. I wish they were a little more responsive on some items, and be a little more knowledgeable on some items. It seems like we need to go through several layers before we get to someone who really can help us with our problem.

We're not just opening a, "Hey, how do you do this?" It's more like, "Okay. This is broken. How do we go about fixing it?" It seems like it takes multiple conversations to get what we need out of that, to get a fix.

We had many solutions and this one came down from management. "You're going to narrow your footprint," and the powers that be picked it for us. We had to go with that. It was already in. Other products were already in house, so this kind of lent itself to, "Well, here's another solution from CA, so deploy that."

The initial setup was straightforward for the complex tool that it is. There is complexity in terms of the more you deploy it, the bigger you get; and when you start to add layers, it can be complex. Overall, though, it was fairly straightforward.

I would do a proof of concept and go through all the use cases to make sure it's going to fit your needs. You should also work with the user interface first. Ask yourself whether it is going to be too cumbersome for you, given the type of environment that you have.

Knowing now what I didn't know then, having really good and responsive technical support is very important. It is not something you really think about when you are looking for a better tool, but you have to live with the decision for years. It's hard to evaluate, I know, when you're first deploying or first looking at new tools, but being able to evaluate that would be good. The scalability and the ability to cover the range of our different requirements is also important.

We find the flexibility and portability the most valuable features. We are using it for synthetics, E2E, and its ability to monitor itself. We're getting rid of one product and bringing UIM to take over. We're using it for our application SLAs. We're writing, synthetically, all these transactions that can perform to our service levels. We are monitoring application performance with UIM at this time.

Currently, the environment that we're using it in is strictly application performance. We want to be able to give the business visibility on how the application is performing, whether it's in the cloud, a simple URL hit, or a thick or thin client. We're using it within the Citrix environment also.

Right now, I don't have any new features in mind. We’ll see once we get in and start playing with it a lot more in depth. We do have another team that's looking at implementing it, so that may be something down the road on which we can give more information.

The product out of the box is great. We were very impressed with it. We have only used it for what we need so far; the SLA piece for monitoring our apps.

We heard at a recent CA World conference that APM integrates with UIM. Spectrum also integrates with UIM, depending on the release and can actually cross-correlate alerts. When we have APM and Spectrum and we get them on the right versions, we'll be able to link all three together. That would be an improvement.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have not needed to use technical support for UIM. It's been great.

The other product was at the end of its life, so we had to find something.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had the engineer on site to walk us through the way the environment would be set up. We had it set up in a couple of days. He sat with us and went over the architecture, the way it was laid out, what our goals were, when we upgrade, and what we could do in the future to make it more beneficial.

Because I don't know the bottom line, I'd say it was a very good investment that we made.

We looked at other solutions, but they really didn't meet our needs. Dynatrace is one of them and Micro Focus may have been also. UIM met everything we needed and more when you consider other areas and departments with whom we work closely. It actually helped them out as well. It's not just our department utilizing UIM. It's going to scale across the company.

Give UIM a try. Build out a PoC environment. Play with it. Utilize all the probes you can that you think would meet your company's needs. Take advantage of it.

When choosing a vendor, we look at technical support.

UIM is very configurable. You can do lots of things with it. Now that comes with a caveat, right? If it's highly configurable, generally speaking, it's not easily cookie cutter place-able, right? There's a lot of programming that comes along with it. Once you figure out that piece of it, you can do pretty much anything with it.

I don't think it’s very complicated. It takes time, just like anything, but once you figure it out it's pretty much the same for each individual section of the product. It's just applied in a different way.

Currently, my reach is just the Windows servers, but soon it will be all types of monitoring and automation, including Windows servers, Linux servers, and applications that live on those servers. They are the pieces that I'll be looking at.

Currently, without going into too many details, we are leveraging the product to perform self-healing. If there's an outage of some sort or maybe even a metric, if you know what metric to monitor, to tell you if something is about to fail. You can take action to prevent the failure. Instead of being reactive, we're being proactive. Even to the point of being proactive and realizing these are the metrics that tell me, “this system is about to become unhealthy”, and reacting to that rather than reacting to an actual outage.

I do a lot of coding outside and inside of UIM. The biggest, most annoying problem, if you will, is the ISE that's embedded in UIM. It is very limited in its scope and what it's capable of compared to even some of the more primitive ISEs that are on the market. Personally, I'd like to see more time spent on the ISE, whether that's going to be in their new product, which is Unified Management Portal.

I've heard from up the food chain that they're going to be changing it and it's going to be more integrated with UMP. But I'd still like to see more improvement on the ISE, especially from my perspective because I primarily work in automation. The ISE portion is very big in my space.

In PowerShell, for instance, their ISE is, in my opinion, pretty good for what it does. You can tab through all the options versus in UIM's ISE, in order to do that there's actually a pane on right hand side that you have to click through. Even then, what the actions that are listed there do is not described well enough.

UIM is pretty stable. Everything has its quirks. As far as the monitoring platform as a whole, I've worked with a lot of different programs and it's pretty stable. It's up there with the top.

I have yet to run into anything that it couldn't scale. We've scaled it massively since we've started using it.

Technical support is very responsive. They're quick to escalate an issue that they don't know how to solve themselves. Where other companies fail, I think, is getting a customer to somebody who actually knows how to fix the issue. Whereas with CA, it seems like every time I open a case, they're very quick to find out what the actual problem is and get somebody in contact with me that actually knows how to fix the issue. No matter whether that's somebody actually on the technical support team or if it's a senior principle consultant that's outside of the technical support team. It seems like they're always very responsive to get that done.

For the most part, initial setup was straightforward. It's very one-step-after-the-other to get the initial basic monitoring portion of it setup. Then, obviously, there's a lot more things that it can do after that. That takes a learning curve.

Choosing UIM wasn't my decision. That came from above my pay grade.

Last words of advice. It's a great tool. One way I painted myself into a corner was when I first started using it I thought that it only can do this this one certain way. With UIM, the one thing I've learned is there's hundreds of ways of doing it and they're all right. It's just a matter of which way gets you there the fastest I guess.

I would say the most valuable feature is the consolidation of multiple data sources into one centralized repository for ease of administration and data analytics. For example, we have net-flow analysis, we have performance management and then we also have CA ADA (Application Delivery Analysis). Prior to CA UIM and CA Performance Center coming along, we had to look at all these systems individually. Even though when you look at it from the application layer, the network layer, and the system layer, all of these layers talk and rely on one another to provide a service. So, if one of them is having abnormalities, it's difficult for engineers to identity the root cause. This now gives us a single pane of glass to identify the root cause a lot quicker.

We are monitoring your typical router switches like Cisco and Juniper. We are also monitoring firewalls of various sources, VMware and all sorts of appliances. Also, we actually monitor applications, systems and services on the infrastructure as well.

The biggest thing is taking care of business. So, we’re good as long as business is happy and we can keep business doing what it needs to be doing. That means they can support the customers by cutting down on outage times or forecasting peak demand seasons with data analytics and stuff like that. Prior to technologies like this coming along we found ourselves being reactionary. With technologies like this, we can be proactive and begin to prevent failures before they happen. It's almost like looking into the future to a degree.

I would like to see integration into more data sources. For example, integrating facilities information such as temperature and other environmental variables, because heat can actually impact server routers. For example, environmental wouldn’t necessary align with an OSI layer, but it impacts all of those particular layers. So it'll be just like security would be another layer.

No technology is perfect, but CA is doing a really wonderful job of providing products that are reliable, scalable, and dependable to entities all over the world. People have to pay for this as well. If CA was not doing something right, I would not have seen 20,000 users at CA World.

In regards to scalability, I think that's a tough question. You really have to look at the implementation. If it's properly provisioned, then there's no issue. If you're sitting on a VM host and guests are competing for resources amongst that host and that host is not providing enough resource, then, yeah there's going to be contention there. As far as the system itself, it is very scalable.

Technical support is great. They're really great with the turn around time from submitting a ticket and getting an answer back for most issues. Most issues are not new under the sun. So it's just a matter of looking into the knowledge base and making sure your own system is provisioned properly. Then they'll feed you back information and stuff like that.

CA UIM was really the first time we’ve had a dashboard type of technology in our infrastructure. So prior to that, it was all siloed for the most part.

I was involved in the initial setup for the most part. I participated in gathering requirements and working with the account managers at CA. Then once we decided to procure, we took it to the software delivery life cycle, going into development, the DevOps type of model.

Some aspects of it can be complex. It's all about your learning curve and your dedication at the end of the day. Add to that having a great team to support you internally and then to reach back into CA.

I haven't considered any other vendors. I have individuals in the organization I support who were looking at other opportunities or products. But I would tell them, "Hey just give me an opportunity to allow this product to work." A lot of times, it's not the product, it's the people. It's the human. Granted, no product is perfect because humans aren't perfect, but again they are not far off from what they're touting themselves to be able to do.

Definitely insure to manage expectations you do a proof of concept and then executive buy-in. If you can get executive buy-in, you're good to go at that point.

We use CA UIM and CA APM. The most valuable features are trending and analysis. I also like the predictability of the systems, baselines, and that it is can prevent an outage before it happens.

It has allowed us to catch issues before they get to a point where there's an outage.

I would like to see more configuration around best practices and recommendations because the software that is being monitored and APIs are becoming more complex. It's just overwhelming what you can monitor. Having something out of the box that would allow you to at least monitor the most important things would be nice.

I would like to see a pack that just installs the things that need to be monitored. And this may not be where I know enough about it and it may not be configured correctly so I may not be getting everything I can get out of it. That's why I need my vendors to tell me how to get more out of the software that I bought. I know who my people are, and I don't think they understand how to configure it properly. My team doesn't know what to do with it, so I don’t think that is a problem of CA. But it is a business partner issue. I need to find out if it a problem on my side, theirs, or both.   It might not have been turned over, there may not have been best practices. It could be completely on my side where my people just don't do their homework. I have to stop right there because that could be the case.

I haven’t had issues with stability.

Since this solution is new to me, I don't know if it was properly scaled out for our environment to be as efficient and effective as it needs to be. A lot of the solution we have are single points of failure. I don't really have an answer about scalability. I would assume since we only have single points of failure, I guess scalability is something that wasn't taken into account.

I don't know who the vendors were. I know that I probably would have looked at SolarWinds. I don't really know a whole lot of vendors in this area.

In terms of selecting a vendor, it is just like any business. Either companies monitor in-house with a custom built solution and they need a better solution and support ability, or you have a product that wasn't performing and you want to get another one. Since our company was very small over 10 years has grown very fast to be one of the largest corporate travel company in the world, my guess is they didn't have anything and they needed something. Or maybe they did it all in- house previous to the solution, and what they had was probably very immature.

When selecting a vendor, look at the relationship, look for dependability and get references. Make sure the solution works. Look for a vendor who will be a good business partner. Make sure they offer a proof of concept and make sure that you dig everything out of the vendor that you can. Not from a purchase point of view, but from a knowledge perspective and best practices. That's what's missing in IT. It’s just not a lot of people adhering to best practices and things like that. You get workers that just aren't skilled in doing this, so they rely a lot on other people and recommendations. They rely especially on the people that built the software. I would rely on them. That's what I've done my whole career.

The valuable features are that it monitors our infrastructure, our servers, network devices, and applications proactively. It helps us to prevent problems and UIM tells us how to do that.

We use it for capacity planning and capacity management.

A would like to see a little deeper application monitoring and maybe some of the capabilities of CA Spectrum.

CA UIM is very stable. We don't have a lot of problems with it.

The scalability is very easy. We just went global and we scaled up to another about 2000 devices.

Once you get to the right person, you get your problem fixed pretty quickly. Now that we have had CA UIM for a little over 4 years, we have worked through those issues so we know exactly who to go to, who to contact to work on our cases, so it's not that big of deal anymore.

We had and older version Microsoft SCOM and it did not monitor Linux servers at that time. We needed a solution that could handle that. We had solo wins for network and we needed a solution that was scalable and a solution that we could migrate to our global infrastructure. In a previous company, I worked with CA products before, (Spectrum, eHealth, and Live Health), so I trusted CA and knew CA was a good product so I came back to them again.

My team was involved with the initial setup. The setup was was probably in the middle between straightforward and complex. We did have some initial problems such as getting our network to be monitored. We had some SNP collector problems. We got them all worked out. CA was very good and they did multiple hours over there over the Statement of Work (SoW) because we had problems. They stuck with us and got us going.

We did a POC with approximately 6 vendors. Microsoft SCOM was one of them. We were looking at cost, reliability, scalability, and the ability to monitor all our infrastructure and provide dashboard reporting at a high service level. All of that was very important to us. CA passed. We went out to Gartner consultants, and at that time four years ago, they selected CA UIM as the number one product for the price. To choose a vendor, make sure you know what requirements you want. CA UIM can do a lot of things. You really need to know what you want from CA UIM, or there is a potential of failing. I think one additional criteria is your statement of work needs to be very precise.