DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

CA UIM gives us interoperability between network and server monitoring, as well as the ability for us to be a one-stop shop. We are able to do all the monitoring for our customers.

We're a managed service provider and have multiple customers under us. CA Unified Infrastructure Management allows us to use one tool so we're not looking at five or six different ones. It brings everything into one dashboard so my team can pick up their information very quickly.

Our experience has been that UIM does not do discovery well.  While discovery exists, it does not have a method for reporting out on new servers, and it cannot be used the way our new customers would like.  Discovery should be more than discovering the IP or hostname.  We would like to see a tool that can discover the device and go through an information gathering process.  What is the server, what does it do, or even what is it connected to?

As for event correlation, this is a bigger issue.  Right now, UIM does not give us any form of true correlation. Our customers do not want four alarms for every server outage. They want a single alarm that tells them if the server is down.  However, the current system will not allow us to tie a ping response alarm to an SNMP unavailable alarm. We have to do custom work to make this happen.  There is also no direct correlation to upstream devices. If we lose a database, how does it affect an application?

CA UIM is very stable. We're using an older version right now, but as we move forward, the product is getting better every year. It seems to be more stable every year when they come out with a new release.

Scalability is good. We went from about 1200 to about 5000, so we've scaled very large.

Some of our customers had previously used CA Spectrum, but we did a complete business case analysis and then talked to sales teams from the other vendors. CA was very on board with us and worked with us better than any of the others.

For us, technical support was most important in choosing a vendor; trying to determine what kind of support we were going to get and then evaluating the ability to do the monitoring as a one-stop shop.

Initial setup was a little complex, but it was straightforward enough to where we did it ourselves. We've actually done it three times since with no problems.

Some of the rule sets and some of the way we had to do things were complex though. We started off on Unix and turned out it didn't have all the features we needed, so we had to convert it to Windows.

We looked at HPE, SolarWinds Orion, as well as a couple open-source projects, like OpenNMS. But, CA had the best product. We could use a single product and not have to buy four or five different ones.

My advice is to be patient, work with CA, and don't be afraid to ask questions or seek help.

We consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (using UIM and Spectrum) integrated with dashboards and reports, to give the business a real-time vision of the company’s health and position in the market.

Besides the technical benefits described, CA UIM and CA Spectrum were the key factors in increasing the SLA from the IT environment to 99.99%, from the 99.5% achieved without CA solutions. This achievement completely changed the way how LoBs see and recognize IT as their partners, avoiding the blame game and finger-pointing. After improving the SLA metrics, the next step was to get closer to the LoBs and provide relevant dashboards, punting together business views and emphasizing how it is related to IT, and vice versa.

After several weeks, this partnership and closer communication between IT and LoBs resulted in some dependency of LoB on UIM dashboards (i.e., every hour executive and tactical dashboards are sent to the senior executives). It is impressive how important it is to be connected with LoBs using simple, visual and intuitive dashboards that remove the roadblocks between IT and the entire organization.

I would like to see them improve integrations with other CA products to use the data on dashboards and more widgets on UIM dashboards.

I have used it for four years.

I’m a CA beta tester and found all issues that need to be solved in this program. I have no stability issues in my production environment.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

UIM is a very scalable product. It includes agents for a lot of technologies and new technologies that help the IT team to detect problems proactively with visibility of the IT environment and the business using dashboards and reports. It provides a unique vision when using UIM and Spectrum together, including a unique alarm console.

Monitoring infrastructure and network devices: UIM can monitor devices such as switches and routers, and infrastructure such as memory, CPU, disk health.

Most of the time, we need to restart the monitoring server when deploying new features. If it is possible to enable new features without restarting the managed server, it would be awesome.

I have been using it for two years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. It is very stable.

Technical support is 9/10.

I have been using this from the beginning.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

It is very reliable and easy to implement.

The UMP portal is easy to use and provides complete details of infrastructure monitoring, without needing to use IM. You can easily do a lot of monitoring configuration tasks.

There is nothing we can't monitor with this product and do so in a very easy and efficient manner.

Customer support is good, but sometimes needs bit of urgency from a CA engineer to look at the issue.

I have used it for six years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10.

I have never used another solution.

Initial setup is quite easy. Installation and configuration both are straightforward. I’ve never found any complexity with it.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated other options. Most of the other tools do not have this product’s most important features.

Go for it, as it’s quite stable and many organizations are moving towards it from their old product.

Monitoring: Time to Threshold (TTT) and Time over Threshold (TOT)

I work with enterprise-size IT environments with 10,000+ servers. These features help to reduce the event noise to a level that operation teams are able to manage. Rather than sending alarms directly from the server agents, TTT and TOT use predictive analytics on the metric data, which enables greater flexibility for event thresholding.

Visualisation: Unified Service Manager (USM)

USM is the core web portlet within the Unified Management Portal (UMP). From here, it is possible to dynamically group infrastructure components together, which is very useful for multiple reasons:

• Dynamic groups propagate all events from the infrastructure within. This allows for service-orientated, technology-based and business views, which greatly increases visibility of the entire IT infrastructure in a single pane-of-glass approach.
• Dynamic groups allow for sets of infrastructure to have monitoring applied automatically in a type of ‘policy-based monitoring’.
• Dynamic groups allow for configuring sets of infrastructure to be placed into maintenance mode, either on an ad-hoc basis or scheduled period.

USM allows the operator to drill down into the dynamic groups, to device views where event and metric data is combined to clearly visualise the current operating status of the infrastructure.

We are currently migrating from an IBM Tivoli solution. CA UIM will improve effectiveness of monitoring, increase visibility of IT infrastructure, reduce time to fix (MTR) and lower solution maintenance. In a large organization, CA UIM has the capability to reduce overall FTE substantially.

Parts of the Unified Management Portal are not written in HTML5. I would like all components (Portlets) to be HTML5. This would increase the speed and responsiveness of the site, and possibly improve the appearance.

Improved network monitoring and topology mapping: Although this functionality does exist, it requires enhancement. CA UIM is very accomplished at monitoring the majority of IT infrastructure and is capable of collecting and alerting on the vast majority of metrics across network device vendors. However, the configuration of network device monitoring could be improved. The latest SNMP_Collector, and ICMP (ping) probes only allow for monitoring of discovered devices and are configurable via the web-based Admin Console. The previous equivalent probes were less dynamic but more flexible, being configured via both the Admin Console and the client-based Infrastructure Manager. A combination approach of dynamic and manual network device monitoring would obviously be more beneficial.

As for network topology mapping, this is achieved via disparate pairs of discovery_agent and topology_agent probes located in each network segment gathering device information via ICMP, SNMP, Telnet and SSH. This mechanism actually works really well, but it’s the way the data is collated, interpolated and represented in the topology views which requires attention. Having some predefined views to depict different network layers, the ability to show routing of traffic or bandwidth utilisation would be great. Also, it would be nice if more detailed device information was available via a mouse-over.

Note: I have not used the topology mapping in UIM 8.4, but I’m not aware of any significant improvements.

I have used it for eight years.

One thing to note with this product is that in my experience, when configured and spec’d out correctly, CA UIM is very stable and fully scalable.

Scalability and security comes from a hub-based architecture. Hubs can be scaled horizontally and vertically, and can connect across DMZs or similar secure zones via the use of UIM application-layer SSL tunnels.

The internal UIM agent deployment mechanisms aren’t necessarily suitable for enterprise customers. With the use of BladeLogic or similar software deployment tools, it becomes a very easy and uneventful process. One thing to bear in mind is that the Unix agents are required to be installed as root, or root-equivalent, user to avoid potential issues.

The product support in recent times has improved significantly. I have had issues resolved competently and within a satisfactory timeframe.

The only bugbear is on occasion when reporting a product defect, CA respond that it is working as designed and ask the customer to add an ‘idea’ on the forum to be voted on by the users.

For example, I noticed that when using the process monitoring probe, the Windows memory usage metric was collecting how much memory the process was using as prescribed, whereas the Linux memory usage metric was collecting the ‘virtual’ counter and not the correct ‘resident’ counter. I was initially told that this was by design but after some discussion, CA admitted this was a defect and swiftly added the correct counter to the probe.

I have evaluated and used many monitoring tools, from open-source to enterprise-class solutions and everything in between. They all have good and bad points, but scalability and flexibility seem to be most discussed, followed by stability and security.

CA UIM comes out on top very often as it excels in all four of the above criteria, and is also easy to deploy and comparably simple to operate.

• Scalability: Addressed elsewhere.
• Flexibility: Is achieved via the use of UIM’s REST API available for custom integrations and the ability to build custom monitoring probes using supplied SDKs.
• Stability: Difficult to prove in a POC; however, I can testify that when implemented correctly with appropriate self-monitoring, the tool does not tend to fail without outside influence.
• Security: The solution infrastructure can be connected securely and effectively hardened. The solution is fully multitenant compliant, which means inventory, metrics and events can be isolated between groups of operators. This is particularly useful for MSPs who allow customers to log on and view infrastructure status or service levels.

Several products I have evaluated claim to be multitenant compliant, but are in fact only able to monitor multiple ‘customers’, but not segregate the event and metric data.

CA UIM can be used as a standalone monitoring solution in many small- and medium-size organisations. It tends to be integrated into other CA products for large and enterprise-size organisations, where greater/granular application transaction monitoring is required, more in-depth network monitoring necessary and full service views are essential.

For an enterprise-class infrastructure monitoring tool, I would suggest that it is very straightforward to implement after some basic training.

To paraphrase an unnamed CA UIM Sales guy, ‘When discussing CA UIM implementation times, we tend to talk in weeks and not months’. This was in response to a potential mid-size customer asking how quickly they could get up and running.

For a moderately large and complex server and application monitoring solution, I would suggest that CA UIM would take at least 25% less time to implement over an equivalent IBM Tivoli solution.

I have been involved in both in-house and vendor team implementation scenarios over the years. On this occasion, I'm virtually the sole resource responsible for implementing a 10,000-server solution.

It is likely, almost imperative, that someone new to CA UIM should seek some professional assistance during the design phase, either from the vendor or an independent consultant. Failing this, a CA UIM training course is advisable.

As with all monitoring solutions, prior to implementation, make sure to perform a requirement-gathering exercise, encompassing topics such as 'Infrastructure Functionality', 'Security, Encryption & Resilience', 'Presentation & Reporting', 'Event Handling', 'Integration', as well as all the various types of monitoring such as ‘OS level’, ‘Application’, ‘Database’, ‘Storage & Virtualisation’, etc.

The requirements under each of these headings would should be associated with one or more 'use cases', in order to validate functionality or compliance.

Without the above, it is difficult to know if you have successfully implemented the solution, and what areas are lacking or needing improvement.

The pricing model is modular and based upon level and type of monitoring by quantity.

Create an initial design document to help plan your implementation and identify potential issues beforehand. This document will inevitably evolve throughout the implementation and will provide a reference and a guide.

• CA UIM Solution is very easy and fast to use, it offers both agent-base and agent less monitoring options. UIM have lots of monitoring options that help us to manage our Enterprise heterogeneous monitoring demand.
• Database monitoring - helps us with monitoring critical database instances. We have many different databases from various vendors -- Oracle, SQL, Sybase -- and UIM helps us with managing all of them in one place.
• Infrastructure monitoring - Helps us to manage the data center, critical Ci's and v Center.
• Application monitoring probes - we are using Middleware application probes for monitoring critical apps.

It helps us to monitor critical servers, applications services, etc. We have many databases, hundreds of probes, and thousands of applications. This tool helps us manage all these and gives us insight into what's going on in our infrastructure.

There are several areas for improvement, among them are --

• Reporting capability - We're unable to drill down to the specific data that we'd like. We're also not able to get some data, such as trends, that we want when trying to determine root causes of issues in our applications. This is particularly frustrating because we have so many applications that we use and depend on that we need to know with some certainty what the issues are affecting them.
• End-to-end application monitoring probes function - We're quite large with over 500 probes, and there's no ability in UIM to monitor all of them through our many, many applications. We're relying too much on middleware applications to do this.

There was no issue with the deployment.

There has been no issue with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

8/10

I've used them many times, and they were OK.

It's very easy to implement and use. If you want to onboard devices and applications, it's just drag-and-drop. Very user friendly.

In-house.

It has helped us cut manual efforts and reduced manpower. It's helped us with automation. ROI 50%.

This is very good product for monitoring as it has lots of functionalities and probes.

I can use the Drag and Drop feature to build dashboards within minutes.

CA UIM needs some improvement with performance reporting (if we compare it to CA eHealth).

I have been using it since 2014.

No problems; it’s easy to deploy and manage.

CA’s technical support team is very supportive.

My customers were happy with CA eHealth. However, CA announced it would stop selling eHealth to new customers, so we did not have any other option but to sell CA UIM.

Installation is easy and straightforward.

I implemented this product. As I’ve written, this product’s installation is easy and straightforward, so I don’t have any implementation advice.

This product is expensive compared to other vendors (SolarWinds, ManageEngine).

Just follow the prerequisites, and a step-by-step installation guide is available on wiki.ca.com.

• Easy deployment of probes
• Configuration

• Simple architecture
• Lightweight software, which uses less hardware resource

Event correlation: Compared to other tools, it has less out-of-the-box correlation. I agree that any type of customization can be done by LUA scripting. However, an advanced correlation option should also be included out of the box.

I have been using it for two years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

The NAS probe has a performance issue. When there is huge number of incoming events, NAS fails to process them.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

The solution provided by CA Support (Nimsoft) is not fully trustable or reliable. Sometimes we have received good advice.

Technical support is 5/10.

We previously used Tivoli and CA NSM, which are outdated and are no longer supported. Hence, the organization decided to use UIM.

Initial setup was simple.

I implemented it myself.

It’s easy to implement. A good solution for medium environments.