We offer products from Broadcom to our customers. We are only offering DX Spectrum, DX Infrastructure Manager, APM, and CA Assets and Liabilities Management in our country. 

It is used for network management. Our clients have a large and complex network, and they needed a solution that gives them the ability to look into and manage the network. They are able to detect the events that happened and fix them on-prem. We have around four customers of this solution. One of the top banks here in Nigeria is using DX Infrastructure Manager. A government agency is also using this solution.

One of the things that I like about DX Infrastructure is that the topology is good enough to see what is happening in the infrastructure. You also get alerts if something is happening in the network.

There are many features and benefits. It is serving our customers in knowing exactly how their network is performing in terms of reliability. It also helps them in planning the capacity. They know how much bandwidth the branches are consuming.

The only challenge that I have with this solution is the reporting part. The users are not really comfortable with the kind of reports they are getting. Sometimes, they want to see reports in their own format. Customizing those reports with Jasper is not very easy. It could be because of the knowledge gap. If you have the knowledge of how Jasper can be configured to suit customer requirements in terms of reporting, it is good.

There was a time a customer complained about one issue related to Netflow analysis. Broadcom has a separate model for that, but the customer wanted everything bundled together. It could also have IP management so that I am able to see or analyze IPs so that the IPs that are already in use don't get assigned.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

It is a stable product.

It is scalable.

Broadcom acquired CA. When they were CA, their technical support was okay, but since the acquisition, they are kind of slow in terms of support. Being one of their partners, we need their support in terms of selling this product to other customers. There is a knowledge gap between me as a partner and OEM. OEM needs to come and position themselves very well in the market and help us with some of the opportunities that we are trying to drive for these solutions.

It is a very straightforward solution. Its deployment doesn't take more than 30 minutes in terms of the server and the network, but it also depends on the architecture of the deployment. Some people have a large or complex network.

Customers pay for the license and the support.

I would recommend this solution to others. We currently have engagement with two banks for this solution. We are trying to pitch this solution to them.

I would rate DX Infrastructure Manager a nine out of ten. I have not really compared it with other solutions to see what are the differences. Based on my usage, it is serving, and it is okay. Customers are not complaining.

We're a managed service provider so we monitor customers and their networks and infrastructure and we're their support. We're a customer of DX and I'm a services infrastructure architect. 

Prior to using this solution, we had three point solutions in place; one for voice infrastructure, one for servers, and one for networks. This tool meant we were actually able to collapse everything into a single interface which made my team's life easier, but it also meant that our first line staff then just had one view of the customer's entire infrastructure.

The big attraction of this product is its out-of-the-box capability. It means that there is not a lot of custom development required. 

The product could be improved if the company kept up with service developments, in particular from the cloud vendors. As Azure, AWS and Google are rapidly adding features and functions to their own public cloud offerings, UIM has not necessarily kept pace with that development. In particular, it was the platform as a service capabilities. The infrastructure as a service capabilities were quite good, but the platform as a service was lacking significantly, along with a lot of the serverless capability as well. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The stability is pretty good although it still has some quirks. It is a legacy tool and as such, there's been a lot of angst in the development of it. Once you've been through years and years of bug fixes it's quite stable. Some of the newer components are still rough around the edges.

In our initial roll-outs in the early years, the product proved to be quite effective in its scalability, but as we continued to grow, we have seen scaling limits. My team, the infrastructure team, are primarily the administrators of the solution. There are six of us in the team. Then there's our level one in our team with about 20 people, and then there's some SMEs that handle specific components within the system and there's probably 70 or 80 of them.

They're pretty knowledgeable and they rely heavily on documentation. I don't know if they have a lot of direct hands-on field experience, but their knowledge of the documentation is pretty good.

The initial setup, which I carried out, was complex. That is primarily because it was a significant learning curve at the time. I was also supporting the existing infrastructure and trying to learn the new tool as well. We didn't have an implementation strategy. We piloted it with one customer and then expanded that to two more, and then expanded out to the rest. At the time, it would have been about 30 odd customers. In total, I think it took about a year as the customers cycle through their contracts, we flipped them over to the new tool. Once we got a feel for the tool, it was much easier. 

 I believe we pay around CAD $400,000 per year. It's a pay per consumption fee. 

We're currently evaluating other options. I'm looking for an MSP friendly tool. We have to be able to differentiate between different customers. I'm looking for a tool that has a good degree of scalability, more than what we have now. A tool that, if it doesn't have capability in the box, provides a means to extend the tool for our custom purposes and also a better price point than we have now.

Cloud vendors have expanded their services and features and functions within their own platforms. Having to rely on a third-party to keep pace with that development cycle has proven rather disappointing. That's why we're looking for a tool that has the capability to enable us to extend the tool on our own, if we choose to.

I don't think I would recommend this product. My issues stem from the turnover between companies that we've experienced in the last 10 years. The continued development of the tool has not been great. I think they've become lost in their tracks.

I would rate this solution a six out of 10. 

We deploy these solutions to customers like big banks, here in Nigeria, as well as in some government agencies. We liaise with the OEM of the product to deploy the solution for the customer. We do infrastructure management projects, all with CA products.

We use it for infrastructure monitoring across the board. We monitor our clients' infrastructure from a central location: their servers, applications, etc., from end-to-end.

It used to take longer to identify issues and to resolve them. But with this solution, we are able to know exactly where an issue is coming from and to tackle it. It helps us to reduce the time and cost involved and the number of employees involved. That's where it gives us added value.

It gives us visibility inside applications. It helps us to dig down and find the root cause of any issue within the network. It flags issues and sends an alert or SMS so we can dive down and know exactly where an issue is coming from, and resolve it as quickly as possible.

One issue I'm having with CA now is the complexity of the solution. They have APM now, Application Performance Manager, as part of it. I think they are still trying to understand how the application works. In terms of deployment, it's not straightforward. We are having issues with that. APM is not really user-friendly, in terms of the dashboard. People want to see a dashboard on the screen, to understand in real-time what is happening.

Also, there is something a customer requested from us. They wanted to know if we could manipulate the script to do the following. If an alarm is sent by the product they want to see it scrolling on the NOC monitor, instead of them having to click it.

There is also room for improvement in the reporting. It is not really good enough, according to our customers. So what we now usually do is use Power BI to get them the kinds of reports they want.

Sometimes we contact CA itself. They log in and help us to resolve some of the issues. I would give them 8.5 out of ten.

We did not have a previous solution. I have tried other solutions, such as Microsoft SSCM and SolarWinds. I've played around with them, but I have not really used them.

First of all, we get the stakeholders together and gather their requirements, exactly what they want to do. We can then provide them with the tech for the solution. We engage their different units to understand their processes. So, by the time we present the concept for approval, they will sign off and we can commence implementation.

We use an in-house consultant to gather the information. There is also a company called Feedware, a foreign company we partner with. They are quite good, but in terms of response time they do respond on time. In all other ways they are okay.

CA is a very nice solution. Before you make a final decision though, make sure all the stakeholders understand the solution and how it works. If they don't understand how it works they might not be able to appreciate it. It's a powerful solution, but give them some visibility into it, its capabilities and what they can do with it, before implementing it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It's not a ten because of the reporting aspect. Apart from that, the solution is okay. It's the reporting that users complain about.

Server and database availability as well as performance monitoring in my environment. We also monitor URLs using UIM.

We now use only one console to monitor all servers, the database and the network. It has allowed us to consolidate four previous tools (BMC, HP, SolarWinds, Nagios).

It is easy to implement but requires good planning. If you don't plan the number of probes it can lead to an event flood. It is also reliable when it comes to monitoring.

Reporting capability can be improved especially when it comes to availability. Additionally, automatic baselines can help reduce the count of alerts.

The benefit is easy installation. Thus, the model approach of the product and out-of-the-box probes, which deliver direct value.

You can integrate clouds, hybrid infrastructure, and on-premise infrastructure into one product. You have also a big range of application probes, which is needed on our side.

We want to see more investment in the UI and the dashboard (from what we have seen here at CA World, that is the case). We want to see this because usability and ease of use of the product is becoming more important for our customers. 

The stability is really great, because it works on the big scale. We do not have fails.

It is one of the only products, which you can do multiple tiers or multiple proxies. No other product can do this. You can monitor it on a high scale of devices. 

We use a lot of solutions. However, we found out that UIM is the best selection for the customer, which is why we selected to use UIM, also coming from the public sector, an insurance sector, and so on. 

Having all of our information within one tool set; our alerts, our monitors, and the things that our operations team needs to function. 

We are coming from an environment where an individual had to login to whatever server, or whatever niche tool, that they implemented. Now, they will be able to go to one place to get everything they need. 

It is the foundation for our monitoring solution. We are coming from a very old NSM solution, and some of the features will allow us to do more monitoring to meet our needs for the next five to 10 years. 

It is going to be about looking at the technologies we choose to implement over the next couple of years, and how we can get more native information from those solutions. Everyone is talking about cloud and having Office 365 availability. I understand that it was just released. We are looking forward to enhancements in that area. 

Since we have gone live, it has been extremely stable. 

There has been a couple of minor issues that we have had to work through. Quite frankly, it has exceeded my expectations. 

Our scalability will meet our needs. We did some performance and load testing getting towards implementation, where we pushed more than 250,000 messages in 15 minutes. So, expectations are pretty high.

My experience with technical support has gone fairly well. We had some challenges with a particular plugin getting towards implementation. It required an enhancement in order for us to enable the features we needed to go-live. Within the scope of 45 days, they were able to enhance the plugin, roll it into a GA fixed release for the code, and you will see it again in the next full release of the product.

We were a previous user of CA NSM. From a supportability perspective, we did not want to continue using something that CA would not support. It was a logical step. It allowed us to go and migrate from NSM to UIM. So far, it has worked well. 

I would give it a nine out of 10 at this point. There are a couple of things we are still working on. If we get those implemented correctly, then I could give it a higher rating.

Currently, we are building a visibility dashboard which allows our level-1 and level-2 engineering teams to actually look at the events, and be able to designate which ones are critical, which are important. It alerts them. They are able to simply look at a dashboard to be able to predict and resolve issues.

The CA tools allow to me to get into detailed transactions for custom ranking, and be able to make predictions. It also gathers data. Some other tools may be good at one area, but not good overall, including the mainframe.

CA has been very famous for the mainframe. I think that's actually the edge, by the way, for CA products, as there are many, many dotcom products that don't touch mainframes. I think that CA should still keep that. 

The area where CA is changing is, I'll give you an example. The fresh technology should have been out a long time ago. But it appears to be we're catching up on the UIM, because Microsoft basically says they are not going to support the fresh, starting next year. That means they are a little bit behind on the waves in the architecture, etc. I think that can be improved.

Another thinking is, if the developer can get to the level-1 engineer level, they will develop a better product. I suggest the developers at CA really work as a level-1 engineer, because then you have a different sort.

It reduced cycles for a lot of quick out-of-the-box functionality. 

It also allowed us to get away from being stuck in SNMP, VTP V2, based off of agent deployment.

Easy admin functionality. You can quickly do all the admin functionality without reducing the cycles. 

Continue to advance the filter capabilities, and more input fields.

It's very great, it's always up, it's available; don't have any outages.

Great. It's easy to push out across numerous servers. Very scalable. 

Resolution of problems happens quickly. If not, it gets advanced to product support and they do an exceptional job working with us.

We used eHealth, which was owned by CA. It was getting close to end of life, and it was also stuck on SNMP version 2. Moving to UIM allowed us to remove ourselves from the REST registry, and start doing agent deployment.

I give it an eight out of 10, for dependability, reduced cycles, and functionality.

The ability to monitor any platform. We have Windows, Linux, AIX, and mainframe all being monitored with the same UIM infrastructure.

The number of probes available. Out of the box, I believe about 200 probes are available. And, if there's a probe that is not available, you can write one. You can also go to the communities and suggest, and based on demand, CA will write one for you.

I would like to see auditability. We've built our own audit functionality to ensure that every CI has the desired model configuration applied to it. And we run that on a daily basis. If that became part of the product, I think it might be a little bit less intensive in terms of resource, because we're doing it with scripts.

Very stable.

Scalability's gotten better. When we first were using it, there were some challenges with that, but we were able to work with CA and scale it up to an enterprise class.

We were using CA Nimsoft Monitor, and we knew we had to invest in UIM because NISM was a few years past sunset. We realized that we needed to embrace the latest technology being offered by CA.

I would give it an eight out of 10. Business class, I would give it a 10. Enterprise, eight. And there are just a few more things to make it more enterprise-class friendly.

• Manage and monitoring network infrastructure
• Manage warning and error notifications
• Operations dashboard

• Great customized dashboards and drill down reports with auto serve analytics.
• Enterprise scale and performance

• You can manage different companies and groups.
• Deep application monitoring tool
• ServiceDesk integration

I think this software has a lot of functionalities. It is a little complex to use versus other softwares.

Mean time to repair. Enhanced monitoring. We've also begun to disseminate a lot of reports, graphs, and dashboards to management and some of our other engineering teams.

I definitely appreciate the flexibility and ease of use. We've been using UIM for almost three years now. It's pretty much point and click, very easy to use. And we've had no problems scaling it to our own environment.

The biggest feature that I've been hoping they would enhance on is inventory management: things like adding/removing nodes. 

Also, a little bit more functionality in the Admin Console.

Stability goes along with the easy management, just so long as you have a distributed system set up. I've had no problems with maintaining availability.

Our environment hasn't grown much over the last three years, but we have increased the amount of models that we're monitoring. And the one time that we did increase, it was as easy as spinning up a new server, deploying a hub, and attaching it to our current environment. So, it wasn't that bad.

A-plus. Any time we call up support, if the issue isn't resolved that day, I'm surprised. And if we ever do have anything that needs escalation, our account rep is always there to make sure that our needs are taking care of.

Extremely straightforward. As a matter of fact, the 8.51 upgrade that we just completed was probably done in around 30 minutes; from downloading the installation file, executing it, and upgrading across our entire environment. Wasn't that bad.

Among the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, based on previous work experience, a stable environment is definitely number one. Because, an unstable environment means I wake up a lot of times at 3:00am, a lot of long weekends, a lot of hours. A stable application makes my job much easier. 

I rate it a 10 out of 10, based on everything that we discussed. I really enjoy the product.

Through monitoring the environment of our customers. It is working well.

It delivers our customers many metrics, so they may make decisions.

It is easy to implement.

Some parts of the services view. The UIM has no features through goods and services yet. 

It is stable. We have some short downtimes, but CA helped us get back up again.

Scalability is good, but it could be working better.

Technical support replies to my questions very quickly (same day).

We used Spectrum. We switched because UIM has new features or other features  which are much better than Spectrum.

I did the initial setup. It was simple.

I did receive some help from CA implementing some features.

When we switched from Spectrum, we were only debating between CA products because we are a CA partner.

I would recommend the solution.

We use UIM primarily for monitoring and managing all of our clients. As an MSP we need some kind of tool to be able to go out and do that. CA UIM has fit the bill quite nicely.

It's been pretty good. It does have its hiccups. It takes a fair amount of customization, but overall it's done what we need it to do and, when it doesn't out of the box, we are able to actually go in and tinker it enough to make it suit our needs quite nicely. So it's been doing a pretty good job.

It's the outcome of our being able to perform our job and gather the information we need in order to provide value to our customers. The real value is our being able to pull all the historic data that we need in order to gather every little metric and nuanced piece of information from a given device, a given piece of infrastructure, in order for us to generate alerts. 

If we want to notify our clients, or for us to turn around and maybe run reports to proactively identify an issue with a device, that may not seem evident at first. But when you have all the pieces of the puzzle together, and when you can see these metrics aren't necessarily lining up nicely and they're acting a little bit abnormal, we can put that together for a bigger picture and provide a recommended action.

The convenience of both the web portal as well as the thick client. We are able to go in and actually leverage the thick client for a nice, easy drag and drop solution. It works out really nicely, especially for our front-end team. The team that I am on is actually quite small, so we need to leverage our front-end team to assist with making changes, and actually running the software. Having the GUI, that simple user interface, really helps us to offload that work to that front-end team to help free up our time.

Usually it's reliability issues. Some of the components don't always function as intended, or don't function as you would think they should. 

To give a specific example, within this product there are individual probes, and each of these probes doesn't always necessarily output the same kind of information into our database. So when we try to collect QoS data, from one probe we might get a ton of information, lots of good stuff that we can use in our database, but then from another probe we might not get so much, or we might not be able to pull the things that we want to.

I'd also like to see more probes and more templates. More probes in the sense that we were coming across devices that we're expected to monitor and manage for which, out of the box, there isn't a nice clean solution. There are probes that are dedicated for certain devices and certain device types, which is great. But then there are times we come across nuanced products for which we have to develop our own solution. There are probes that exist in there that allow us to make a customized solution, but it takes a lot more time.

The other element is that there are no real templates, out of the box. Let's go with an example where we do have the probe, which is great, and we do have a really nuanced customer with a small set of devices that maybe not a lot of other customers use. There might not be a template in place, so effectively we have the tool in front of us but we still need to develop a solution. So it would be really nice to see a little bit more of something like a central repository of templates that we could use. That would help us expedite our onboarding process.

Stability is pretty good. As I said, it does have its hiccups at times. We use an on-prem solution, so for the most part it's pretty good. 

Our issue comes in scaling. We're hitting a point with our customer base where we brought on enough clients in using the software that we're starting to hit some interesting connectivity hurdles. As a result of that, some things can take one or two attempts for it to work the way we want it to; maybe probes closing out or a connectivity from our primary infrastructure right down to one of our client sites. It can take two or three approaches, but overall its pretty good. There just are those occasional hiccups. 

They're good. Their response time has been pretty good. They don't necessarily always have the answer I want, but that may be because the answer I want doesn't necessarily exist, so I can't fault them for that. But overall the response is pretty good. As far as the turnaround time, it's fast, the quality of the support answers that we get is usually pretty good.

There have been times where its been a little bit insufficient, in the sense that we might have needed to move it to a different engineer, or they may need to escalate it to go to their development team and get some answers, and the time frame on that can slow down a little bit. But for the most part, it's been pretty good.

I was not involved in the initial setup but we did a major refresher and I was involved with that.

It was pretty easy actually. It's a relatively simple project to set up. It's difficult to master but easy to initially deploy and configure, so I'd say it was pretty easy, off the bat.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• level of support
• reliability of the tool
• functionality of the tool and 
• cost, obviously. 

Know what kind of products you are going to be using UIM to monitor and manage, and ensure that the compatibility is there. Because if there is not out-of-the-box compatibility, it can take a significant amount of time and effort to make things work.

We are using it to monitor all of our infrastructure, network devices, and applications across our datacenters in Europe, Americas, Mexico, and Asia. It has performed pretty well considering there are quite a bit of devices. We have 2400 servers and quite a few network devices. It has been performing pretty well. We like it so far.

One benefit of it is, compared to the last tools that we had been using, we can make sites for all of our departments to look at their own things: the network team, the server team, the Linux guys, and the application guys. That is something we have not had before, and it is helping them get a view into how monitoring happens. It is bringing all the groups together a little more. 

• The ease of administering
• The probes
• The reporting on the interface. 

It has all been pretty easy.

I would like a credential management portion, since a lot of probes require different credentials. Some require the same one, but you have do it across a bunch of different servers and once you have like 2400 servers like us, you do not know where these probes are anymore and you do not know where you put in credentials. If they had some credential management interface, that would be the best.

The stability is generally pretty good. There is the occasional Q backups just because of how the hubs communicate. Like different hub versions tend to break that and some are better with it. It is hit or miss. For the most part, it is usually pretty good. 

Scalability is very good. You can scale it pretty much however way you want to as long as you have the servers to throw at it. 

They are helpful once you get to the senior engineers, usually. The first level has not been the most helpful, but maybe a lot of our issues just require higher engineers. I am not sure. 

We were using about four or five different solutions and everybody had to have all these different tools up at the same time. We were looking for one where we could just have one solution. 

Since we did not have any exposure to it previously, it was kind of complex. However, looking back at it now, it was pretty straightforward. 

We looked SolarWinds (they have an infrastructure monitoring solution), Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, BMC, and quite a few more.

We eventually chose UIM, because it was easier, looked better, and you could write reports really quickly. The overall package was better than we thought. 

I would recommend this solution to another company, as I am happy with it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reputation and 24/7 support.

The primary use of our UIM product is for monitoring Windows and Linux servers.

Provides a comprehensive monitoring solution for our open systems and also the mainframe. That is our biggest benefit. The comprehensive monitoring aspects of it with over 200 probes available and one robot.

The vast array of robots that are available.

We have a customized auditing feature that we have set up to ensure configurations are deployed to each server as per our desired model. We have 104 models and 104 packages. All of that has been custom written. If the product had something like that built in, I think that would be a benefit. 

That is an audit that goes to each server each night and verifies that the setup is according to our desired model for that particular server type.

We have a few customized routines we have had built for our scale. It is beyond auditing. We had to come up with a few alarm hubs and concentrated hubs for different segments which are not a standard use case. I would tend to think, in enterprise solutions, our use case would be sort of typical. So, we had to do some work to make what was more of a business class solution work at the enterprise level. 

UIM is very stable.

Scalability is good. We have had to do some customized horizontal scaling solutions that we fed back to CA, which we think they are incorporating, but it is scalable.

They are actually very good. Technical support is good. If we get to product support, the product manager is responsive. We have expressed some concerns and areas for improvement, and they were addressed.

We had no previous solution. It was the early days of Windows NT 3.5.

We decided to go with CA in the late 1990's, and we have been with CA ever since.

Initial setup was complex, given our business use case. We are not hosting standard back office solutions. We host a really complex set of solutions which we wrote. Another division handed us the opportunity to monitor their solutions as written, and UIM was very useful for that.

An opportunity with licensing that was presented back in the late 90's which gave us pretty much site license for any of our products. Then, once embedded in our operations and development, it was hard to dislodge. That was our primary reason. There are a lot of vendors out there. Everybody has a bell or whistle that is better than the next guy. It is what is integrated and what is your support kind of deal that you can do for me?

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: integration and support. It has alway been well-integrated and the support is good.

Infrastructure monitoring. Right now, we do not have an application monitoring setup. That is something that we are looking to get, so at the moment we are just using it to monitor the infrastructure.

We just got it set up a year ago, and then had a company move in between. So, we just started using it, technically, probably like three months ago.

Diagnosing issues is a lot faster. We can pinpoint what is going on more quickly than trying to figure it out. Trying to drill in it in other ways, especially with our teams being kind of split. We can all access it all at the same time.

It allows all of us to be able to see what we need to see very quickly and easily.

It notifies us quickly and easily on the 3D view. We can see when the monitoring lights show up over the racks. It is nice to be able to just see that at a blink of an eye if an alarm is going off, then we can just dial in from there.

It has been very stable. I love it so far.

We have not run into any issues. I will not know until we deep dive into it later, when we get everything up and running. We only have a few racks online right now. Until we get it fully deployed, I will not really know if we would be able to easily add or remove devices as needed.

We have run into a couple of issues, but our rep has been very readily available and responsive. So the issues were fixed right away. It has been great.

My co-worker, who is involved in the initial setup, says that, "Everything has been great so far." Straightforward.

From what I have seen, version 9 looks great.

Monitoring the servers, the infrastructure and we also monitor applications with a specific probe doing Synthetic transactions. We use a dirscan probe to monitor files to make sure that they transfer at the correct times, and it will send alerts if they don't. We use logmon monitoring and we use the event log monitoring processes. We monitor processes for up/down state, CPU usage, memory usage. We use the NT Services probe, the monitor services on the Windows boxes. That's to name a few.

Regarding performance, we've had some struggles with it at times, but we get a support case opened up and support has been very good at helping us resolve the issues that we encounter.

The monitoring of the applications to let our business know when things are performing and that they're up and available.

We have less downtime. We have alerting to let us know when disks are filling up so that we get that taken care of before it becomes an issue and is noticeable to customers.

In the UMP, certain devices will show up multiple times and they don't correlate correctly. That's one of the issues. 

Sometimes the probe, on its first release, we will find some bugs with it and notify support and then they escalate it to the upper level and they get things corrected.

The dashboarding. They're going in the right direction, getting away from flash and using the HTML5 with the Cabbie dashboards. That has been very helpful with us in developing dashboards. But maybe some additional out-of-the-box dashboards with different standard tools that people are using. 

The one thing that our company has started to use is MarkLogic, and they don't have a specialized probe for that. We've reached out to them and put feedback on the community trying to get votes on that. But so far, it hasn't gotten a lot of votes.

The stability is good. They have an HA feature, high availability. And whe we were setting it up with use of support, we decided not to even set up that functionality because it's very seldom that we have a problem with it going down.

Scalability has been fine. As the new servers are brought on with the new MCS tool, it allows us to get configuration on the servers put on in a faster time.

I'm happy with the technical support we've received, and their response time.

We actually had UIM before it was UIM. It was Nimbus in 2004. Then it went to Nimsoft, then CA bought it and then rebranded it CA UIM. When it got brought into our company, in 2004, we used it for Synthetic transactions, to monitor the email and different products on the web, and the response times to that. And then we were using a different product for our network monitoring. 

We wanted to try to eliminate some of the excessive tools we had so we moved our network monitoring into CA UIM at that time.

When we first moved on to UIM, and brought the network monitoring in, at that time, the event correlation product wasn't built in - so one event happens and then it triggers three or four other things. And when we were doing that, the product we were getting rid of did do that. CA had said that that would be on the roadmap. It seems like the roadmap has changed now, and they're doing more of the event correlation with Spectrum, but we don't own Spectrum. So we have a little bit of a struggle there with the event correlation, and it seems like CA is not doing the event correlation with their SNMP Collector probe. They've moved more towards Spectrum.

It was straightforward. I and another person set up how the servers are going to be set up and then we got approval through CA. We asked them if that looked good to them, and they came back and with what we had set up, they didn't have anymore recommendations. They thought that what we're going to do was going to be successful.

When our company is looking to invest in a vendor, our criterion is that we will try to stay with a vendor that we have a relationship with already. 

I rate it an eight out of 10 because the ability to configure the probes is much easier than with other products. Before we went with the UIM product, I had to evaluate other products and the configuration of those was much more difficult than with UIM.

I would advise, because they have the new SaaS product - and I have a feeling we're going to be looking at that at our company also - doing a demo of the SaaS product and see if that meets their needs.

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.

Complete IT infrastructure monitoring including servers, applications, database, cloud, and network devices.

• Ease of usage for administrators.
• Flexibility with monitoring and statistics collection.
• Latest version of tool comes integrated with Jaspersoft reporting solution, giving excellent reports.
• Dashboards are pretty good.

• Stability
• Alarm segregation

Two years.

WASP failed to start on time.

Yes, prior to version 8.5.

An eight out of 10.

No.

Initial setup was a straightforward and a comfortable operation.

Vendor plus in-house.

Not applicable.

Reasonable setup cost and licensing prices.

• Cloud monitoring

• Easily skinnable
• SAP monitoring
• Reporting Tools
• Probe packages and probe deployment

Through action automation (using NAS and robot actions) we got reduced operational effort, improved operative tasks, and optimization of resources.

I would like to see improvements in the maintenance mode area. I would like to set only a probe from a robot or group in maintenance or place profiles from probes in maintenance. Making a GUI with criteria such as selection by robot/hub/probe etc.

I've been using it for five years.

No deployment issues encountered.

No stability issues encountered.

No scalability issues encountered.

We didn't use customer service.

10/10 CA Support team is excellent we get from them issue resolution within a single interaction and anchoring alternative solution.

Previously we had multiples tools to monitor IT infrastructure and other apps e.g ManageEngine to monitor databases, Nagios to monitor telco devices (switches, and routers, etc.) We switched to CA UIM because we had a lot of issues when we tried to correlate events and get unified metrics from our monitoring tools databases, in the same way we had maintain multiple tools and open tickets with multiples vendors.

Initial setup was straightforward. Installing and deploying software was very quick and easy. We have experience with similar tools implementation.

We did the full implementation in house.

Licensing model and packaging:

Server pack - Charged per server.
Server and application pack - Charged per server.
Service response time advanced pack - charged per site.
Ping pack - Charged per device.
Network advanced pack - Charged per device.
Flow analysis - Charged per device.
Storage pack - Charged per terabyte.
Ecometer pack - Charged per device.

We also looked at OpsView and SCOM.

Monitor governance and solution sizing are key topics to start solution implementation.

Basically, the most valuable feature for us is that the dashboard if easy to use as it aggregates all data.

It's really been beneficial to the applications teams in their ability to see CPUs and disc memory. It monitors memory on the servers associated with our applications.

One of the things I would like to see an improvement on is the ability to do mass deployment. Also, I'd like a federated identity feature, where I can give our users a login and they can choose whatever thresholds they wish to have.

Even better, I would like to see a synthetic transaction report from the reporting feature that our business unites can use to record their transactions and provide it back to us. That would save us a lot of time.

Finally, I'd like some self-service functionality out-of-the-box, so that you can assign probes, or deploy with thresholds, or whatever you want to do. You just put it in a server and let it self-service.

There's been no issues with deployment on my end.

It's been very stable for me as an end-user. We haven't had any problems yet.

No scalability issues so far. That's been fine.

I don't use tech support for anything. I rely on our in-house team for that.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

If I had to choose all over again, I'd probably look more into the mobile function of it.

Monitoring infrastructure and business applications are the most valuable features.

By getting an early warning about problems, services can have high availability and perform well. In addition, we can respond automatically to failures so services can be recovered immediately.

It would be good to implement views showing the aggregated status graphically. For example, they could use colors reflecting the status, and the possibility to drill down to detailed information. The views should be configurable so the administrator can organize them the way he wants. Dynamic views should be supported. That means the members of the views changes based on conditions defined by the administrator.

I have been using this solution for over five years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

We were using HPE Operations Manager and SCOM. We switched because it's less resource demanding and has more functionality out of the box. Especially when it comes to support for different monitoring techniques, so that fewer custom-made solutions (scripting, etc.) are required. There are probes available for most kinds of monitoring metrics, applications, and operating systems.

Setup was very straightforward. It's possible to have a fully functional monitoring system up and running within one day by use of the easy-to-use setup procedures and the automatic robot deployment functionality.

The license cost depends on the number of probes and robots. I advise customers to be selective with which probes to deploy on the different servers.

We looked at SCOM and HPE Operations Manager (OpenView).

Be aware of your exact needs so you can ensure the product will meet your needs.

The main feature for us is its flexibility with their message bus and their API to make it do what you need it to do, since everyone's different. There is flexibility in the SDKs to customize it.

It really depends on where you're coming from. In 2009, we were working with Nagios -- before it was UIM and called Nimbus -- and weren't particularly unhappy, but there was an executive decision to go in a different direction. We were out-of-date and weren't taking advantage of some of the new features to see whether they would make a different for us. There were new capabilities, such as analytics and machine baselines versus static thresholds.

That said, it does provide us with a reduction in signal noise levels. It gives an alarm when there's something going on, not just when there's an expected spike that happens every night on a server.

Although this may not work based on our environment, but topology discovery and root cause analysis would be nice to have. Right now, we don't have the RCA and rootcon topology awareness. It may be in the new version, but based on our architecture, it may not work. It would be a big win, however, if we had it.

Another useful feature to have would be automatic configuration per standard by new robots that check in for any particular customer. This could help us decrease the configuration time.

We've had the same version since the install in 2009. We're looking to upgrade, and we do have the latest version in our lab, but I'm anxious to have it available in prime time.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had some issues that may to do with versioning, though not completely. In our backend, the database structure and message bus are on the really old version, though the hub is the newest version. There's a point when new features on the hub may no longer be possible. This may be where our version is hurting us.

Sometimes our hubs get choked up and support has never been able to isolate the cause.

We do have times where the hubs get choked up and we've never been able to isolate why with support. Is it something in our environment or is it something they see from other customers? Is it hubs that are too busy? Is it our REX infrastructure? We've never been able to isolate the cause. I've had several support cases over the years about a scenario where the hub gets into a partially functioning state and so all the robots have realized it's not working normally and have moved over to their backup hub. That hub itself still expects to hear from all those robots and so we'll get a flood of hundreds of alarms saying, "Robot inactive. These robots are not checking into me." It's really that they're just checking into the other hub.

That's the issue -- there's no intelligence at that layer. And because of that, one of our most common alarm floods is from the hub itself.

I had an escalation one time to double check that the hub failed-over okay and was back online because they got a hundred tickets opened all at the same time. That's the main point that we've had in terms of instability, is on the hub. We have hubs at other sites that don't have as many robots or aren't doing as many ping checks and they have much fewer issues. It could be that some of these hubs are just too busy and they're more likely to get choked up.

There's also the issue of portal performance. We have UMP released and it's not awful for our customers. If a customer logs in, from a security stand point, they're only seeing their data. If they have 10 servers that we manage for them, the performance isn't awful in that scenario. As an internal employee, when we log in and we have the permission to see all of our data from thousands of devices, the performance is a lot slower and a lot more painful and that's something that we're several versions behind on the portal.

We've had no issues with scalability.

We've had some concerns, especially since CA's acquisition and re-branding of Nimsoft. For a while, there was a dedicated support center just for the monitoring product. But now, there's a more standardized support structure where Tier 1 is not as specialized. I haven't, however, had a lot of cases to claim that it's worse than before, but we have had tickets that have dragged on for a long time.

There was an instance where they fixed a bug after 6-8 months, but it was the wrong bug. There are a couple of threads on their forum about comical support interactions where they get told, "Oh, that's an enhancement. Go type it and we'll vote on whether to fix it. Go type it out on the forum." I don't think that's always the experience in every case, but we have had some challenges like that, where it's like, "How are you calling this an enhancement? This is just basic core functionality that's not working" and getting agreement on that. At times that's been a challenge.

When we first implemented Nimbus in 2009, it wasn't fully vetted by the technical staff because management pushed it on them. For what we pay, I know many executives don't think we're getting enough ROI. We doing basic monitoring -- CPU memory, disk space, SQL responses, URL's, pings, and custom probes we've written using their SDK. Writing our own probes is one of the perks with something like Nagios.

The licensing cost is several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we're only getting several hundred dollars' worth of value since we're doing basic stuff. That's the challenge.

And we're hamstrung because we're still using the older version, and we're not getting great ROI. There's a lack of clarity on where we want to go, but we could do a whole lot more than we're doing.

There are things that are nice in just covering the basics for us, but then we have pain points on some of the more advanced stuff.

• Weblocker service
• Perimetral antivirus
• Firewall security
• VPN service
• MultiWAN and Balance service

These features are very valuable as they allow productivity to be supported by blocking and monitoring websites accessed by collaborators, as well as controlling the levels of access to the various services we have in our operation, in addition to functionalities such as Load Balancing and Multiple WAN connections to help us in business continuity.

I think it has helped in different ways:

• It has provided greater security for our most important asset which is the handling of information.
• It has given us greater control and management of the flow of information that transits our data network.
• It has generated confidence in our customers and suppliers, so that they know that their information and ours has a higher level of security.
• It has improved the productivity of our employees.
• It has supported us in the process of safeguarding confidentiality and the correct handling of information.
• It has provided us with help in offering IT service to users.
• It has helped us to make the IT department more productive and efficient.
• When in charge of the infrastructure department it gives me certainty about what is happening in the company network.

• I think it can be improved by a greater provision of specialized technical support, as there are very few trained personnel there.
• Improvement in the technical documentation of the system.

We have used this solution for four years.

I did not find problems with stability. I think the advice we got at the beginning helped us to get the correct dimensioning of the equipment and the functionalities of the product. Once it came into operation, the product always performed the expected functionality.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would rate the technical support as 9/10, since the support provider always showed knowledge and was able to solve the problems. The only negative point is the availability as they are usually late in responding.

We did not previously use a different solution.

The installation process was simple, especially because the installer was guided by an expert and her way of communicating was always clear and concise. From the first day, the solution came into operation and the tuning process was given progressively.

I think the price of licensing is very accessible, considering the functionalities of the product. The product-price ratio is better than other brands such as Fortinet or SonicWall.

We performed an evaluation on Fortinet, SonicWall, Juniper and Microtik.

The advice I can give you is to first make an assessment of the needs that your company has. Once they have identified the products that offer solutions to their problems, then don't only consider the price but consider also the costs of licensing, support agreements, product functionalities, product positioning etc.

Consider reviewing evaluations made by other technology vendors and if possible ask for a demo to your local IT providers. They will be happy to show you the products and their different advantages.

• Service oriented views include physical and virtual servers as well as network devices
• Predictive analysis
• Log monitoring
• Alarm correlation
• Scheduled reports

We are transitioning to a proactive monitoring. By using thresholds and predictive analysis, we are reducing incidents.

Network monitoring beyond SNMP.

I have used this solution for ten months.

We have not had stability issues yet.

We have not had scalability issues yet.

There has been good technical support so far.

We used an open source solution for some time, but decided to get a fully supported solution to improve service availability.

The initial setup was simple. We just had some issues with the initial database setup.

It is not the cheapest solution, but it has competitive prices.

We evaluated SolarWinds.

Check or ask for a compatibility matrix to ensure that your environment (server OS, virtual environments, etc.) is supported.

This product is very flexible for the administrator. We can do whatever we want. It is easily customizable and upgradable.

We are using this product for all my customers and internal stakeholders. We did the following:

• Enabled a complete monitoring solution for their devices
• Integrated a ticketing system with an in-house tool
• Made customized report generation

• Alarm Management
• Alarm Correlation
• Jaspersoft reports

We have been using the solution for six years.

We had some issues with stability.

We encountered scalability issues in some areas such as bandwidth monitoring.

The technical support is very good from Europe and Australia, compared to the Indian support office.

The setup is very straightforward and flexible.

The pricing and licensing is acceptable. This is a very good product for small and medium size organizations.

We evaluated BMC and ManageEngine IT360.

Go ahead and choose this product.

The features valuable for me are scalability, redundancy, and the wide range of probes available for just about any platform.

Another major advantage is the easy configuration management. When you define standard “base” monitoring templates and on top of those, define “differential” templates, having a tool that allows you to manage these hundreds (and even thousands) of templates in an organized manner is an absolute necessity.

CA UIM not only allows you to manage the templates, but the new MCS module allows you to dynamically assign them to groups. This means that any node/probe belonging to that group will automatically receive the templates.

Note: At this time, MCS does not yet support differential templates, but it is on the roadmap.

When this customer did the PoC, the competition clearly failed in this area. Furthermore, the event management part (alarm server and alert console) is feature-rich. It allows for some advanced, alert processing and correlation.

Nodes are now monitored in a standardized way, thanks to configuration management. We are a lot more pro-active to solve potential issues, thanks to event management.

Different teams are using different dashboards according to their requirements. For example, the end-user service desk uses a high-level dashboard with the state of the most important applications, printer malfunctions, etc.

A lot of the functionality is available out-of-the-box without having to script it, although scripting it is still needed from time to time. This means new objects/metrics are effectively getting monitored quickly without a lengthy development period.

I would like to see the retirement of the heavy client (infrastructure manager) in favor of the web-based admin console. It is close, but it is not there yet.

Support for the PostgreSQL database platform would be nice. At this time, you can only choose between Oracle and MySQL when running CA UIM on Linux.

As a DBA, I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL. (This is my personal preference. By no means do I find MySQL a bad product.)

For this customer, it’s their first implementation. However, I have been using CA UIM since 2014 and its predecessor, Unicenter NSM, since 2004.

We had no stability issues. The built-in redundancy allows for maintenance windows for patching.

Scalability is one of its strong points. A manager server (hub) can manage a lot of nodes. Adding another hub is really straightforward. You just need to make sure you have plenty of storage for both the database and the primary hub.

The technical support is very good. You still need access to the old support.nimsoft.com site for downloading new versions of probes. Overall, it is very good.

CA support did have a bad reputation 10-15 years ago, but they made a lot of effort to improve it.

The customer was using Nagios, and still is for the network part.

The main issues were:

• The lengthy development periods (because you need to script everything),
• The difficulty of having any custom reporting/dashboarding capabilities
• The total absence of decent event management functionality: This is something most cheaper monitoring tools anyway don't have

The actual installation was very quick and straightforward. Of course, you can spend ages configuring/tweaking as the product has endless options. It all depends what you have defined and how complex your environment is.

Most of the time was spent defining the architecture: What probes go where, redundancy, tunnels for the DMZ networks, and capacity planning. I recommend spending as much time as required on this, as you will benefit from it later.

It is definitely not the cheapest on the market, but you can save a lot of money by carefully making a list of which probes you actually need and how many of them are required.

Often probes can monitor multiple instances or are included in other packs, so you don’t have to purchase them separately. Make sure to be precise. Your CA representative can assist you with that.

The customer did a PoC with two contenders: CA UIM and Microsoft SCOM.

Try to look beyond the price tag. You really do get a lot in return, especially when you have a highly heterogeneous environment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This product helps our organization by providing a shared model to the customer which reduces the cost for humans and infrastructure via the multi-tenancy feature.

• Storage monitoring

• Bi-directional Integration with ticketing tools like ServiceNow, BMC Remedy etc.
• Application code level monitoring for the entire workflow on different platforms like Java, .NET, etc.
• Server certificate monitoring
• Bi-directional integration with other monitoring tools like IBM Tivoli, SCOM, ScienceLogic, SolarWinds etc.

• Only EMC Clarion, IBM, Hitachi and NetApp is possible
• No exhaustive viewable dashboard on the health of storages
• Capacity forecasting not available
• Doesn’t support SMS alerting via GSM modem, but works with cloud SMS web application which in-turn requires lot of manual effort to configure
• Enterprise alarm console view lacks event correlation even from the base level
• No run book automation feature in place to enable
• Reporting customization for needs is a complex mechanism
• Less capability on individual device dash boards and service health dashboards
• Huge customizations for creating each dashboard as there are no OOB dashboards available
• Network Discovery is less than excellent on the devices categories, discovery modes (SNMP, WMI).
• Doesn't have the intelligence to group devices automatically based on the device type
• Network topology is not automatic as it requires lot of manual interventions to define
• Web portal views for different categories of infrastructure components is not in OOB feature, needs a lot of manual intervention
• Web portal is not available for OOB like the application HA
• HTTPS enabling for web application doesn't work as expected due to certificate issues
• Multi-tenancy feature lacks in segregation of devices in the database which has the same IP in multiple customer environment

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Support SLA for response and resolution is pathetic, even the quality of resolution is not up to the level of expectations. Take enterprise support subscription as the basic support will not be effective during critical incidents.

• Multi-tenancy
• Ability to set thresholds per system
• Wide variety of probes

As a data center, we provide monitoring of client systems. Automatic alarm generation, client notifications, and managing SLAs are paramount to our success.

The scalability of the web-based portal needs improvement. Users will need to quickly become proficient in scripting to take full advantage of its capabilities.

I've used it for three years.

There have been no issues with deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

Scalability for redundant data centers is challenging.

Customer Service is great 10/10.

Technical support is a bit behind 8/10.

We started out with HP, then added Nagios, looked at EMC, and finally selected CA UIM.

We have a complex infrastructure, with multiple sites, which the systems handles beautifully.

We have over 10,000 client systems monitored and negotiated a package deal.

We used a consultant and utilized the training after we set the systems up. In hindsight we should have taken the training, then set up the system.

Decide upfront about monitoring thresholds and use templates.

• Easy GUI administration
• Unified alarm console
• Support for multi-tenancy
• Intelligent high availability
• Alarms suppression
• De-duplication
• Easy dashboard creation with several data sources such such as SQL, Oracle, and MS SQL databases

UIM has given us a platform to pro-actively monitor infrastructure and applications as a unified solution. We can have access to reports on applications and of the servers on which the applications are hosted from the same dashboard which can be exported as a PDF for historical data as well as a predictive data. Apart from which, it gives us many out of the box probes classified as -

• Databases - DB2, Informix, MS SQL, Oracle, Sybase and JDBC
• Applications - Cisco packs, Cloud monitoring packs, End To End application monitoring, Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, AD, Lotus Notes and many more
• Gateway probes - For integration with key market products such as BMC Remedy, HP OVO, HP SM, Service Now, and SNMP traps based integration

• Multi-tenancy for ICMP profiles of servers is not there
• Availability reports in percentage is not calculated by the tool out of the box
• Rest of the things can be achieved by tweaking the script in Lua

I have been using this solution since 2011, almost five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

7/10

7/10

It's very simple and straightforward. The steps for implementation should be prepared keeping in mind that the pre-requisites are met.

I have implemented this product in five or six environments and do have a strong knowledge and troubleshooting approach.

The ROI, based on a rough calculation for a five year project, would be 50% for sure.

Pricing is one of the lowest for such a product in the market. If you have an experienced tools administrator you may want to go with this product over any other market product considering the cost efficiency.

I evaluated BMC Patrol and HP OVO. We chose CA as the license cost was much cheaper and almost all the functionality/requirements could be achieved via this product as well.

What's most valuable to me is the fact that it is very customizable, allowing me to play around with the configuration and thresholds. Also, I enjoy the simple GUI which makes it easy to use.

It has allowed us to monitor the crucial parts of our network, minimizing downtime and issues. Also, it alerts the relevant teams as soon as we have breaks in network connectivity, high load on hardware, etc.

There are a few areas for improvement, but I would have to say some of the Java content is a little buggy and would definitely like to see continued upgrades and improvements in the GUI. I know some of the stuff is preferred to be set on the controllers, however accessing the console from GUI is a more efficient way as you can control your user accounts there and it makes it safer than giving someone access to the controllers. The problem is sometimes you have to access the controllers in order to do certain tasks.

I've used it for one year.

There were no issues with deploying it.

There were a few instances when Nimsoft agents would crash on hosts. However, this was not too serious and it boiled down to some minor external factors that were solved quickly with customer support.

There have been no issues scaling it out.

We had meetings with CA's customer quality once a week and, overall, the communication was pretty good and reliable.

No other solution was used.

The setup was fairly simple and straightforward, and we had some decent training initially that made it smooth sailing.

Implementation was done in-house. As long as you take the training and follow the instructions, you can't go wrong, but if you do, customer support is very helpful.

As a simple solution for monitoring it's pretty handy, simple to use, very customizable, and integrates with Salesforce.

The decrease in time to resolution on problems, also a reduction on finger pointing of teams, "It's the network, or it's the application." Things like that, the ability to pinpoint those problems very, very quickly.

We use it to monitor all of our infrastructure, so servers, telecom devices, all our applications, to try and get a true End 2 End experience, and understand the user's experience.

We primarily chose CA UIM because we had a bunch of disparate systems. We had some network monitoring, we had infrastructure monitoring, it was siloed off into our different environments. We needed to pull it into a single tool, and we needed the flexibility to gain some more insight into the end user experience through synthetic transactions.

The ability to be able to pull data out of multiple data sources and surface it all into a single tool. Some of the other tools that we had were very limited, with UIM you can scrape virtually any data source. The synthetic transactions were a big deal because we really are having this shift to trying to understand the users' experience from their point of view, being able to dashboard and visualize the products and the information on the alarms that we have. Our previous tools didn't give us much of that capability.

Continuing to mature the SNP collector and the network side of the tools they're still not as strong as they need to be. If you're moving from a different product like Spectrum, or something like that, it's a little bit stronger in the networking area, continuing the development of that area.

It was to unify things and bring more visibility into the monitoring space. We've really tried to move from being reactive to proactive. With the tools that we had, we had lots of alarms, and lots of things that we could react on, bet we didn't have the ability to start getting proactive, so we needed to be able to do that as well.

Stability is very good, we've not really had any major issues at all with it, honestly. In developing a product and moving very quickly with the development, so you're going to have bumps on the road. There are some issues but they're quick to respond to those, they're quick to work through them, so it's okay.

We actually have a close relationship with the tech support team, as well as the development team as well, working through issues and problems as they arise. We have a pretty large infrastructure that we monitor, and we get some of the scalability issues or some other issues that they may not have seen and they're very quick to respond. Tech support has been really great.

I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but we've reduced our outages by about 15%. We've reduced time to resolution by about 40%. Lower overhead as far as man hours.

When we initially went through and purchased the product, we started out with a proof of concept and we went in to the proof of concept with the end state of actually turning it into production. We had pre-sales come in and help us work through the problems, getting it all set up and it was very quick to bring online and have collection of data and show value, many times on certain products and certain pieces of products within hours. You've got good data collection, so it was pretty straight forward to set up and configure. We didn't have any issues at all.

It's been a couple of years since we bought them, and I don't remember off the top of my head. We had some other ones we looked through, and the tool just really fit the needs.

The fact that they're still doing a lot of development in the networking space, they're still trying to mature that side of the product to get where it needs to be. That's really the reason, beyond that it's a great product. We really like using the tools, we like all of the things that we've gotten out of the tool set, the ability to visualize, the ability to help our troubleshooting, the in depth analysis for our infrastructure teams and things like that. It's been really great.

Do your research and really compare them side by side, but give CA a chance to put their product against any because it's really one of the best in.

The most valuable feature for me particularly within the enterprise space and what CA does is that they provide an integrated central approach to monitoring. No matter what tool we're using whether it's a phone system or whether it's a storage system, whether it's Unix or Windows, whether it's an access point or a firewall, it can all be seen in a common pane of glass where you can see everything. All of our staff can all be trained on the same tool and then other people can see all the dependent infrastructure within the same tool.

It allows our communication to happen much more effectively. The primary benefit for us at this stage in our approach is that we've been able to cut outages by about 300%. For us in terms of an integrated management approach, it's an interesting question because the benefit that we get, it's two-fold. One we're monitoring everything so we're able to proactively see things that are going on but we also end up really driving the charge on technical debt. Because once we put everything in infrastructure monitoring, we have systems that maybe haven't been updated that now come front and center. If you have a storage array that you have been meaning to upgrade or you've been meaning to optimize, once you put it in monitoring, before we even start alarming and cutting outages, people tend to clean up those systems.

3 years.

You end up pairing off a lot of technical debts so most of that 300% improvement, I mean reduction in outages actually didn't come because of our monitoring, it's because we put the monitoring in place. That's the hard work that's done by our infrastructure teams in order to support it. The solution is very stable. When you're in the outage management business, the last thing that you want is your own solution to be going down. It doesn't speak well for the whole solution but we get a tremendous amount of stability from the system. We have redundant nodes and all that stuff all in place. The last thing we usually think about is the system itself going down just because, to be honest, in the five years that we've been running it, we haven't had any issues.

It scales fairly well. I mean the key with scalability and I think this is true with anything, you have to be able to configure it. The challenges, I think some people will take on an enterprise piece of software and not bring on the people to get it tuned and configured right and then it consumes a whole bunch of data. Then there's this fear of like, "This product isn't scalable." It's like, "Well, you have to tune it to takeout all the default data that you don't want and things that aren't helpful. A lot of enterprise solutions are going to give you the whole kit and caboodle right when you install it and you have to know when to turn it off. I think people end up thinking that something isn't scalable only because when they take it to the enterprise level without tuning it, it doesn't.

We had, to be honest, some of those pains ourselves, we were generating way too much data in our reports, we were generating a ton of network traffic. Once we tuned it and figured how to get just what we wanted and get just the right amount of metrics, our storage numbers and all that came down very reasonably. Serious technical support gets the job done. I wouldn't consider it to be the strength of the product. I think there's a lot of really smart people who run CA. Their product is in other solutions, their products are being implemented by an army of consultants. CA is largely implemented, well from my own experience, not by the consulting team but by hands on guys who work there which means they know the product. I don't think there's as much dependence on the support.

You start with the product. I will look at the product, how you it’s managed, how it’s run, how it’s designed. I’m an architect by trade so and that’s what I did my graduate work in. I'll look and see whether they have an architecture that’s scalable and supportable that they’re modernizing, they are making investments to make sure that it stays current whether it’s with programming languages or new tools or new modules. I look for a strong community base so I want to see something where people are working together outside of their confines of the company to develop either solutions, plug-ins or modules or to share information.

We've had some problems, some challenges with silos of support in situations where we would spend weeks working on something and then I'd finally escalate it and a senior technical person would solve in 10 minutes. The weakest part of the products we use is in the mobile space. We can't seem to get the products to work at all and we can't seem to find the mobile team to even talk to about it. Their mobile app is Circuit 2003 you know kind of very crude. It doesn't have any interface, it doesn't actually connect to our devices. I would say the strongest area for them is going to be in mobile. When you're running like we are in operation sweep, sometimes my guys are only one deep and they got to use the restroom and I send them in there with a mobile app in case something goes down but I can't do it if the mobile app doesn't work.

Generally when a company becomes serious about operations, older companies have been around, they understand the value of operations. Younger companies or some people might say more entrepreneurial companies don't have that strong operational focus. I think one of the cornerstones for that is when you get your house in order in terms of operations and infrastructure so that you're not your own worst enemy. You're not designing solutions that don't work whether it's in the application space, you're not buying infrastructure that isn't performing or you're not able to be accountable with the people that work for you to get them on the phone or addressing issues because they simply don’t know about them.

Today’s enterprise software can’t just be about the product. It has to be about the kind of ecosystem that that goes into it and companies need. If they don’t make a choice to invest in that ecosystem, they miss out on some of the best resources in terms of staff and technical development. I’m looking for a company that’s going to be straight forward. If they can make money because they have a good product people will pay for it. If they have to trick their customers into buying the product by selling them one thing and then forcing them to buy another because they don’t want to lose the investment they already made, that’s not somebody I want to partner with long term. I have personally worked with IBM’s product, HP’s product and CA’s product. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses. I wasn’t actually a part of this decision to make the investment in CA but CA has stood up against all of those vendors.

Say, they as were strong when you got down into it, they have some areas they are stronger other areas, they aren’t as strong. We’re a university so we’re not really in the making money business. Our decision was really about just ensuring that our students and our faculty and our staff had the best experience they can when they interact with technology and that means it’s up. That means that it’s working, that it’s fast when it should be fast, it’s stable and that really drove our decision. It’s that universities are very unique environments. The original campus, in the network sense, was a college campus. A lot of the technology that’s used in enterprise was developed on college campuses. There’s a lot of driving factors in there that come on the operational side to try and keep it stable. We realized that in order to be effective, we need to be able to see everything.

There can’t be a fog and it says, “We know how the servers are running or We know how the servers in storage are running." We don’t know what’s happening with the network or we know what’s happening with the network but we don’t know what’s happening with the VOIP or the phone systems. All of this technology is dependent on each other when things are down. Ends up resulting in a lot of finger pointing. When you have a centralized integrated approach and everybody can see everybody else’s stuff, you cut through all of that. If you have tuned the products and you can pinpoint exactly to the problem, then everyone can be working together on a resolution as opposed to spending all their time finger pointing, “I think it’s your network. No, it’s your storage array. No. It’s your server.” That all goes away.

I think the more complicated space is the ones where you have a mature monitoring solution but it’s not a central integrated monitoring solution and you have to figure out how to trade, things you’re going to have to give up for that silo in order to move it into an integrated approach. That’s always harder that just taking something that’s had no monitoring and bringing it up from scratch. I would put them in the top of the eight, solid nine category. I think they still have some work to do integrating some of their acquisitions. Like I said, the mobile and support space I think. My team has been very effective. These are a lot of people that I don’t interact with on a daily basis.

I think most of the time when people are looking at these other low cost solutions, they are not thinking about what they’re really going to spend. They’re not thinking about whether it’s sustainable, the solution that they’re putting in and they’re really going to see their return on investment. We had very specific needs in higher education that drove us towards CA. I don’t know if those needs would have been similar for instance when I was working in a marketing space. We’re watching a lot of websites and a lot of that kind of traffic. You need to look and see which product meets your particular space the best.

For me, the most valuable feature is multi-tenancy as it can monitor networks and applications simultaneously. That's a big help for me.

The centralized dashboards and many monitoring tools have made our organization a lot easier to manage.

It needs to be more stable and have improved reporting. This would make it better out-of-the-box.

No issues with deployment.

Once in a while it lags, but it hasn’t become a big issue.

It has adapted well over the years. No issues here.

I would give them a 7/10. They are quite knowledgeable and have helped us on the few occasions we have needed them.

We could combine many tools, so this was extremely useful and saves us a lot of time. That's why we switched.

The initial setup was straightforward.

You shouldn't implement it in Windows, and do it in a different database, preferably an Oracle one.

What's most valuable to us is the breadth of technologies for which it provides monitoring. We have a large catalogue and different types of systems and apps we need to monitor.

It's allowed us to get better coverage with our monitoring and to consolidate all monitoring into one solution.

It needs even correlation. We are looking to consolidate into UIM over time, but one of the biggest discrepancies is that UIM does not have even correlation amongst its features.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We have had very few issues even without anyone dedicated to managing it.

The scalability has been good. We take extreme advantage of polling and monitoring in multiple data centers as our footprint has gotten bigger. The only concern is with the database, but they have improved controlling data retention.

Technical support is OK. It varies depending on issues. Config support is good, but getting bugs fixed from support case through completion has sometimes been difficult.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We had done a comparison and narrowed it down to UIM. For the types of tech we wanted to support, it was a better fit.

It comes down to identifying what you need out of the system. Make sure it's good out of the box and try to align your software selection and the priorities of your business.

The most valuable features of the solution to us are the networking and server aspects. The architecture behind it is also valuable.

It's fairly new and we're all still learning it. We're in the process of migrating to UIM and phasing everything in.