DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

There is a large selection of Application specific probes available. We are primarily a Microsoft shop, and most all of our needs are covered with what is offered. This relies on backend sources such as PerfMon counters, event viewer, services and similar. It covers our basic monitoring needs in this regard.

We use this in a Multi-Tenant environment as an MSP. Prior to UIM deployment, we were using SCOM which was overly complicated and difficult to manage. UIM fulfilled our needs at the time by allowing simpler deployment and management.

Although it is better than SCOM, it still needs major improvements to usability. If you need a rapid deployment solution, this is not the best tool for that job. You can create Super Packages which allow you to pre-configure Probes, but it still requires a lot of invested time to set up and still needs customized to each environment if they are not identical. UIM and its agent/probes rely on JRE7u45. Support is not offered for any newer versions at this time. I would like to see better rapid deployment options, interface updates, and less reliance on Java.

We have been using this solution since before CA bought it from Nimsoft. I have been using it for about a year.

We have run into instances where probes are no longer supported and are integral to our monitoring, and there is not a bulk solution for replacing with the new supported probe. If you are using the SSL Tunneling in the Hub Probe, Support has been unable to identify a method to monitor the tunnel status which is built into the Windows Service. Many times, the tunnel will experience communication issues and being queueing thousands of alarms, alerts, qos but we have no way of being notified until we notice we are no longer getting metrics. The Hub probe has not been reliable for us in the past several versions across various sites and we often need to work with their developers to resolve issues. SAN and Networking appliance compatibly is severely lacking (Dell EQL, Nimble, StorSimple, Cisco ASA, and more all have issues or have no support). You can custom create via SNMP MIBs, but this requires manual implementation.

Support has been very responsive to our requests. They understand the limitations of the software and do their best to accommodate our needs and issues, but the software just doesn’t seem to be meant for smaller businesses and needs a lot of hands on attention.

We previously used SCOM which is similar in many regards. This was the first product we evaluated and chose it mainly because they offered to customize it to fit our needs. Other vendors were not as responsive to our requests, although I feel they may have been a better fit overall.

It was not straightforward. There are many modifications you need to make to text based configuration files that are not well documented is deployment instructions. We have multiple CA solutions that were not easy to integrate. This required and still requires time with their developers to resolve issues.

We had an outside company assist with the installation. I would recommend getting as much hands on time as possible with an expert. UIM is not intuitive, there is a high learning curve.

If you have a large scale deployment or resell services and have a dedicated administrator with java dev experience, pricing may be suitable for you. CA is one of the more expensive solutions, and not one of the best in its category.

UIM is showing its age, and need a major overhaul to keep up with competitors. I would recommend using other solutions.

Custom Dashboard is one of the best features of the product because it allows you to bring great value to people who are not technical. It gives them visibility over their infrastructure and the ability to cross-reference that information with business data. It's also good for big screens to show the power of the product, providing a great vision of the orientated services.

With the SLM feature, you can transform any collected metric into a Service Level Objective that affects a Service Level Agreement. You can then predict when your SLA will be below the specified marks.

Since it supports a wide range of different monitoring technologies, it allowed us to turn off GUIs from other tools and consolidate them into it, making it a single console, plus the dashboards do a great job of showing us what is happening.

With the increased amount of data it has to collect, a different approach to data storage would be nice, perhaps something similar to a NoSQL instead of a relational method. But this is something to be studied, of course C.A will choose a method that is capable of delivering performance and integrity.

We've been using it for almost three years now.

No problems at all so far with deployment, but you just need to follow the documentation carefully.

No problems at all so far with stability, if you happen to have a problem, just open a support ticket and C.A will try to help you as fast as they can.

Depending on the amount of data you intend to collect, the database to store it all may get large. Other than that, the product supports big numbers regarding scalability.

Customer service is good, most of the times you get the answer you need really quick, it will have situations that you'll need to wait for a longer period for solution (cases that require development), but it gets resolved at some point.

I hardly had any unsolved problem. They usually reply within SLA, but the solution may take some time depending on the difficulty of the problem.

I’ve used other monitoring solutions before. I chose CA UIM because it’s pretty good at what it does, makes your life a lot easier with fast deployment options, and CA is always improving it a lot.

The initial setup was straightforward, really fast, and simple. It was just "Next-Next-Finish" for Windows installs or as simple as just answering some questions on Linux installs.

We implemented it ourselves. My advice is that you should always read the requirements and compatibility guides before implementing as it has everything you need for a smooth installation process. Don’t try and guess the OS and DB versions by yourself or try to use the latest releases. It may take some time for the last release support, but the product is usually up-to-date. Always read the manuals before going full hands-on with some probes because it can save you a lot of time.

I have a rough estimate that the ROI is around 30%.

You should always send your number of devices and other relevant information to a representative partner or CA directly, because CA UIM has some differentiated methods depending on what you have in your infrastructure, but they provide you with the correct questions so that you have the needed amount of licenses.

The product is one of the best in the market. I can say that because of 10+ years of experience with monitoring solutions for infrastructure. Even more, it's better when you start talking about the enterprise level because of its great scalability. But this product is simple enough to be used by small-to-medium and medium-to-big companies. They offer also a free version called SNAP that anyone can try it out.

The cohesiveness of the product. It's versatile and easy of use.

We're monitoring servers, network devices, storage components, load balancers, phone systems, virtual infrastructure, applications, etc. The various SDKs are great and have also allowed us to write custom probes for anything else we've needed.

Again, the ease of use and the administration, I'm a single UIM administrator, and I can administrate the whole product from reporting, systems monitoring, network monitoring, it's a very practical solution.

Maybe a little bit more on the reporting side. It does integrate with a product called iReport, but that's very cumbersome to use. It's a very full featured product, but something you'd have to work with every day to fullyleverage.

Like with any big product, it's had it's ups and downs. The last few releases have been outstanding. The stability has really come along way in the last few years.

We've increased the product's footprint twice and it's rose to the challenge each time. We've integrating multiple other companies that have been acquired with this product. It's just been a fantastic solution.

The tech support has been very well. Sometimes it takes a little time, if it has to go thought the back end support. For the most part, very happy with it.

We had numerous solutions. We had SolarWinds, we had WhatsUp Gold, we had a lot of different things like that. With CA UIM, we were able to roll all those into a single monitoring platform. It's not nine different products that are configured to work together, it's one cohesive central standard product.

We actually used a CA support to help us roll out the initial product, and it took the learning curve way down. I was able to watch and ask questions. I was really engaged in that process with them, so that when they left, and it was deployed, I was able to pick it up and I've done multiple deployments my own since then.

When selecting a vendor I'm looking for: support, are they going to be there if I need them, the maturity (are they mature enough that it's not going to be all over the board), and consistency.

I think I evaluated fifty different products before we went with CA UIM. It was just the out of the box functionality was there. They had probes for everything in our infrastructure. Linux, Windows, it works just as well on either. We have a heterogeneous environment. Everything was there.

The deployment and everything went really well. The biggest feature we've seen is the ability to track availability. Availability reports, how's the product performing, not just up down like ping monitoring. We can get in there, we can pull metrics, wherever we need them, it's just very easy to use.

It is probably an 8/10, just because there's always room for improvement. A solid eight because it's always been able to do anything we've asked of it. We've done custom integrations, written custom probes, and it's always there, anything we need to do, it's fully capable.

Recommendation to peers: do your homework. Really get in there, really look, set up a sample. Again, I can not say enough the cohesiveness of the product. It's not multiple different piece meal products that have to be configured to work together, it's all one product, under the hood, and it does what it says it does.

• Scalable monitoring
• Integration of all monitoring on one tool.
• Simplicity on creating dashboards.

Optimizes delivery of managed IT services with CA Nimsoft Monitor.

Implementations, operations and technology departments are benefiting most from this tool.

3 years

Yes, at the first time of implementation, we encountered many issues with the tool, all due to a wrong configuration of the disks on database server.

Yes, it was unstable for couple months due to the main component that inserts the QoS data on Nimsoft database.

No

On scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), 4.

On scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), 4.

Yes, the main reason for change were high support costs and a difficult management tool.

It was complex, due to the configuration that we already had with another tool, implementing everything again took us longer than planned; it really is a difficult tool to configure, specifically in our infrastructure.

Vendor Team, the provider level is poor, finally was configured by a CA Engineer.

CopperEgg, Splunk.

Discuss whether it is feasible to do so through this tool, because the administration is complex, I recommend that due to the integrations with network monitoring, servers, SAN, VMware, etc., it's worth buying.

The product has a lot of flexibility in how we can report data, collect it, report it, and query it. Previously, we were using eHealth, which was a lot more cumbersome. Late '90s technology, so it makes sense that UIM would be more advanced than that.

It's becoming much easier to get more flexible data out to the people who request it from us, and also, we can make it more self-serve for them than it was before.

Mainly the policy-based management that they're working on. That's huge because changing configurations on a large scale is very tedious at this point, and keeping track of it is tedious. We'd be able to do other things rather than spending the time on the administration, and also there'd be less errors. We would have less times where we would find, "Oh, we've got the wrong threshold on this server because we thought it was over here, but something got overwritten when we moved this. That sort of thing won't happen as often.

We did a POC a little over a year ago and we started rolling it out in May, so about six months that we've really been using it.

We've had a couple of minor issues but some of it had to do with our own inexperience with it. It's got lots of room to improve in terms of management. Set up our configuration in groups, that's a lot more challenging than it was in the old product, but hopefully the new features that they put in in the next couple releases will make that easier.

That shouldn't be a problem. We only have about 2000 systems in it, which isn't really that large in the grand scheme of things. It's doing fine, and we are losing far less resources than we were told we would need to have, so we've got a lot of room to grow in what we've allocated to it.

It's generally pretty good. We do occasionally have a problem with they'll be really fast on the initial response, and then if there's not an apparent, obvious solution right away, then sometimes it can be slow and dragged out for a really long time. If we get our sales rep on it, he's usually able to get things expedited.

Since we already had the licenses for a longer period of time, we were going to move to Performance Center. These are all CA products. We were going to move to Performance Center, we built it under CA's guidance.

In the beginning of 2014, they said, "Move to UIM." That was kind of a step backwards at the time but it ended up being the right direction to go, but we spent a lot of time trying to get the other product to go. We had tried to implement it, and certain things that you would think any monitoring solution would have were not available in that one. Performance Center was meant to be the next generation product, but then they redirected things to Nimsoft/UIM. I think that was a year-end decision at the beginning of 2014 that CA made.

I thought the initial setup was fairly easy. It didn't take very long. We just run the installation, and it would build the database, our DBA set up our new space, so it's easy to cut over once they moved the database, so it wasn't nearly as difficult as, say, when we tried to set up SOI a few years ago. That was more challenging, but that may have improved since then.

Rating: 7/10. It's got the potential to grow higher. It's not like this is as good as it's ever going to get. We're very pleased with the product in general.

Advice for others: If I was looking in to the product I'd probably start by asking CA some questions, try to use it to pigeonhole our setup onto somebody else may work totally wrongly for them. Start small and build up to it to get their own familiarity with the product going.

Centralization and distribution are the most valuable features for us. Those two things are pretty key for our organization.

• Centralization is important because we can manage and view everything from one point.
• Distribution is important because we can manage everything from one point and do it on a mass scale.

We started with nothing, so getting anything was better. But through the years, it's improved stability-wise and is our bread and butter for monitoring. The openness of it means it can accept alarms from anywhere, which is pretty key because we have other systems that that are not CA.

It's too modular in the sense that there is not an awareness of things. If you set up an alarm for 10 different things but the actual host is down, then, in theory, you could get 10 alarms. Going forward, it would be nice if there was some kind of awareness of not just the host, but it knows what a service is and you can define it, it can suppress those kinds of alarms. Thay way, you only really get one alarm that is important instead of getting flooded with 10 or 15.

I would say, too, that I have seen some of their roadmap features and I think they are working towards that, but it is just a little more difficult because of the way they designed the software.

We've used it for about seven years.

We've had no issues with deployment.

There's nothing out of the ordinary with deployment because you're going to have some issues with all products depending on how it fits into your environment. Product iterations get better and better over the years. We've worked with UIM for seven years now, and we've seen a lot of different versions, and they get more and more stable.

I wouldn't say that there has been anything out of the ordinary.

I'd give them 7-8/10 as they're really responsive. CA's acquisition of Nimsoft has not resulted in lower quality support. We have twice-a-month meetings with them to talk about issues. They've helped us out a lot.

When I first started, we used Groundwork, an open-source tool.

It's pretty straightforward and intuitive.

I implemented it in-house, which, as I later found out at a conference, that I had set it up better than most others.

I did the evaluation before we decided to go with Nimsoft.

Look for three main things -- scalability, because you want a platform that will grow; ease of management, because you may have thousands of devices to manage; and single-point data presentation, because you could have hundreds of hosts with all their data.

CA UIM meets all of these at a less expensive price than the other large vendors.

The most valuable features we're taking advantage of today is computer memory disc monitoring and the alerting on it. We're able to predict how close we're approaching our thresholds so we can head off a disaster and we can troubleshoot it before it becomes a big problem.

We have the solution across all the production servers in our operation. We have seen, over the last 4 or 5 years, about a 30% decrease in escalations in crisis management, less severity events because we are trending and tracking against thresholds so we get early warning alerts. Our goal is trigger solutions in escalation resolution before it becomes a critical event.

We monitor SQL databases, we have a lot of servers; Windows servers, we have Linux boxes and we have network equipment.

One of the things we'd like to see is a more streamline and baseline reporting mechanism. We use several CA products and we'd like to see all of the products dump information into a common format so that we can harvest it into multiple dashboards. Right now if you use multiple applications, you need 3 different experts on 3 different reporting structures. We'd like to see them come with a unified database and ability to harvest that data.

We haven't had any issues with downtime with the solution at all. We do have, at times, the robots which are probes that log onto server. Sometimes they'll hang or fall offline and we generally have an auto-restart if that happens. Most the time we find out we caused it ourselves because somebody was performing maintenance.

We've been able to scale it across 20 platforms in 3 different data centers. It doesn't mean it's simple, but once you've got your thresholds down and your methodology, your strategy of what you want to monitor, it works pretty well.

We've used technical support before, especially when we first loaded, our server installed our design. Very responsive, stuck with us on the phone till we resolved our issues and at some points they had to come back a few days later with a solution or a patch to fix us.

We were having system outages, or server outages, or connectivity outages with the network and we weren't able to see it. The tools we had in place weren't robust enough and weren't flexible enough for us to design thresholds and different levels of monitoring. We started researching tools and we decided on UIM.

I think the initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was a little more complex than we thought but it wasn't insurmountable. The biggest challenge we had was that we didn't understand how our applications ran or how our hardware was responding to our applications so we set the thresholds pretty low, generated a lot of alerts, and then had to adjust. That was probably the biggest challenge we had going into the project

We chose CA primarily because of the size of the company and past relationships at other companies I have worked for. Also, we looked at vendors for many different products but we chose CA because of the the flexibility of the product and the supportability of the product.

When selecting a vendor we are first and foremost looking for a partner. We're not interested in a vendor/client relationship. We're not interested in just being a dollar sign at the end of the quarter. We want somebody who will work to understand our business and understand what's unique about us. I'm sure that's a common thread with many customers but it's really important for us to have a partner relationship. The second thing is we want serviceability. We want to be able to call tech support, or talk to a systems engineer, and have them engage with us and work with us through a problem, not just throw us canned solutions and assume we're going to apply those and walk away.

I'd rate it a 9/10. First of all, I don't know that I ever reach a 10 with any vendor, but a 9 because the solution works as advertised, the service is there. The responsiveness of the tech support is very, very pleasing. They come back to you when they schedule, they follow up on their commitments. We've had some challenges expanding our footprint in other data centers. Like I said earlier, it's not perfectly easy, it is complex but once you get it dialed in we're up and running and everything's smooth. Their service teams have been there with us all the way, so that's really important for us.

When it comes to advice to others, I think you should focus on having an understanding of what you want to measure and monitor in your environment. It's more than just saying, "Yeah, we're going to monitor all the servers." What thresholds? What do you expect your CPU utilization to be? What do you expect your memory utilization to be? What's important for you from a customer service responsiveness? Do you have a systems engineer who's willing to put the time in to understand your business before providing you a solution? Those things are really key for us.

1. Scheduled maintenance - it gives a good backbone to CA UIM as a product because we do not have to rely on another Event Management tool to do that.
2. Logmon - this probe is sophisticated in the sense that it offers you options as to how to monitor the log - from the start, from last resumed etc. It also has options to execute commands when a log is found.
3. Adding third-party widgets onto the dashboard - you have the liberty to freely exaggerate your UI on the UMP Portal.
4. URL_Response - This probe has SSL monitoring available, which is pro-actively calculating in how many days the certificate is going to expire! It is pretty cool.

It had been suggested that we should look for other tools in order to ensure Application Monitoring. We managed to convince our client to use CA UIM as it individually ensures monitoring of all the aspects of an application, be it processes, event logs, URLs, ping availability, server response time, log monitoring, database monitoring, clusters, and what not.

If it had solid capabilities to ensure complete network infrastructure monitoring is performed that would be good. Everything in a single platform for the complete IT infrastructure will be a boon for every customer. In addition to that, telephony, and VoIP monitoring is also an aspect that can be looked at. Transaction monitoring will be yet another field of research and innovativeness.

It has been close to three years that the product has been deployed in our environment and serving us well in order to monitor the complete server based infrastructure. We recently upgraded from v6.5, and have had no issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Support from the vendor has generally been rather slow and ineffective, at least in our case. This should be a key area for CA to dig deep.

We had been using BMC Patrol and BPPM for infrastructure monitoring. However, we switched to CA UIM as it promised to be equally competent. And we have not found ourselves complaining since then.

It is a bit tedious architecture as of now, a one-server-per-component set-up. It still does not qualify to be called user-friendly.

We have had vendors responsible for completed deployment. Before proceeding for implementation, prerequisites should be gauged effectively, it helps ease the whole implementation.

It provides a wide variety of monitoring options to the user. In addition to that, the reporting has good features like trend reports, customized dashboards, etc. It still has a way forward to strengthen the network as well as application monitoring and newer versions might have that in scope.

The product promises an overall good experience to users. Users will find it easy to access, without being highly technical or thoroughly well versed with the product.