Serviceaide ChangeGear Reviews

The most valuable feature to me are--

• Workflows with Knowledge Management
• Dictionary
• Thesaurus and synonyms
• Permissions
• GUI HTML editor
• Metrics you can get on every document and ability to aggregate those to get really good reporting

It's provided self-service and automation, notifications, and reporting. That’s where we spend most of the time fishing for things. It’s good on a day-to-day and macro perspective.

It’s always the little things. There used to be a spell-check function that allowed us to add technical terms, but it no longer exists, and I’d like to have that back.

Also, adding group names is a complicated process that involves adding analyst names, and analysts change all the time, so it's nearly impossible to consistently add group names.

There's no issues with deployment.

We switched out whole-knowledge search to an “and” instead of “or” search. We have 10,000 examples. But this made it unstable and it timed out in the middle of searches. Now we have just one URL that supports people use and another for the general masses.

Theoretically, it’s great, but there are those time-out issues. It’s a web-based product, which we like, and thus are able to scale sufficiently.

I haven’t had to use them for a while, but they’ve been good for the last that 15 years I’ve used it. For a while, they were never in my time zone, but not any more.

I wasn’t involved, but I installed some GUIs that were straightforward to set up. Also, the settings – workflows and templates - were very straightforward as well.

It loses points because it’s not GUI enough too "code"-y.

You should go into their sites and communities. They’ve built that up a lot and you can get help without contacting support, e.g. YouTube videos.

Finally, plan exactly what it is that you want.

The most valuable features for me are:

• Scalable architecture,
• Customization potential - the UI, background, and data movement allows you to be able to tailor to the nitty gritty details of what you might need in your environment, and
• Advanced workflow management.

It has the ability to integrate with other CA tools (we use a lot of others). It fits well into the CA ecosystem of multiple products.

It needs a better integration engine.

A UI for a lot of the systematic commands which are still command line interface-based needs improvement.

Good stability – partially because we implemented it well for hundreds of concurrent users (not thousands) and we never have issues.

It's planned for, but not added on so easily. With newer versions with the next upgrade we plan to issue it to more users.

Most often I try to go to high-level support personnel. They redundantly ask for the same information as you move higher up in the support information system, so you need to give them so much information that that often doesn't matter. Once you find the right person, it's easier to get what you need.

There was a merger and acquisition and we had competing products, so we looked for a tool that could merge two products, initiating the transfer. We looked for commitment from the vendor for further development of their tool.

The complexity depends on how you set up. A tiered approach focusing on the modules of management within the program would be best. You can't just roll out all the modules all in one swoop.

We also looked at BMC and ServiceNow. We chose CA because they integrate with other systems already, so this was easier.

There’s a lot of practices that others consider standard, that you need to adopt yourself or enable/configure, as it's not a given that it's already there.

Size of your business will dictate whether or not you should be looking at this tool. This is not appropriate for a small or even a medium-sized business. Too much overhead for a small company. There's the need for continual maintenance.

Easy to use.

Improved the effectiveness of my Service Desk Team and improved the SLA timing.

The implementation of Server Monitoring on Non-Windows servers.

1 year.

Yes, deployment of Non-Windows Servers.

Yes, once or twice the agents would stop working to provide the information required.

No issues with scalability.

4/5

3.5/5

Yes, From HP service desk and monitoring, switch due to company direction.

Straightforward for Windows server, had a lot of issues with non-windows servers.

Vendor.

35% improvement in SLA's timing.

Setup customer - 250k USD, did not calculate on the day to day cost.

BMC.

Get better vendors in implementing non-windows servers.

The ability to add Additional Information Screens on the fly.

Actually this product and its limitations reduced the Service Desk effectiveness compared to the product we were using.

You cannot make any structural customizations to any of the screen since this is a SAS and it is a shared database structure.

2 Years

Yes – we lost functionality we had due to the fact that you could not build in all the custom feature we had with HEAT.

We had numerous outages due to issues with product and data center issues.

No issues with scalability.

All support was in India and was not good.

I found them adequate at best.

We had been using FrontRange HEAT and when we outsourced the Service Desk (big mistake) they provided a solution called On-Target. After they failed to deliver the functionality in their contract they were required to purchase us a new ticketing system. We did not go back to HEAT since the CIO wanted everything outsourced and nothing in-house.

It was easy for me since I was very familiar with ticketing systems.

We worked directly with InTeq who owned InfraDesk before they were acquired by CA.

Product was very expensive and I was not happy with the limitations of the SAS.

The cost was a 3 year contract with InTeq and was 300K a year, since it has been acquired by CA I am not sure what it would cost if you were a new customer.

Yes – we looked at going back to HEAT but FrontRange came back with a bid for their other product ITSM which was too expensive even after I told them that we wanted HEAT with Change Control and cost was important.

If you need any kind of customizations or think you may need them in the future, look for another product.

Monitoring Infrastructure.

Monitoring multiple environments and platform independent.

Few probes need improvement in their function and the way they get deployed for monitoring.

3 Years.

No Major issues but slightly delay in response if configuration changes after deployment.

No.

No.

Customer satisfaction service provided by the vendor.

I would give 4 out of 5.

Yes I did but I ended up with unreliable solution and stuck with platform dependencies.

It is pretty straightforward as it has number of different ways to communicate with the end client that makes me feel very comfortable with is flexible product to work on.

Approximately but not constant to $65,000.

Managed by the company finance as I’m a Technical Product Manager and not familiar with Finance in exact figures.

Yes I did. That was Nagios but it platform dependent and there I had to switch to Nimsoft.

This is the best product for Large Infrastructure companies/organizations to monitor their infrastructures/servers etc.

Essential service management solution all in one, like 100- for service request, 200- for change request, 300- for incidents, 400- for problems.

It helps to improve the escalated efficiency among different levels of engineers. For example, normally level 3 system or network engineers will directly pick up the 400- level tickets; while level 1 engineers (like myself) will focus on 100- and 300- tickets.

When tickets are closed occasionally, it is quite hard to reopen it, which will cause lost-tickets.

More than half a year, I suppose I started to use it in May 2014.

Not yet.

Yes, sometime it takes a long time to update the newest status of ticket.

Not yet.

I give it 3.5.

I have not called CA technical support yet.

We are the web portal, so there is no initial setup for software client.

There is a need to improve the ticket updating speed or frequency, as sometimes, a ticket is shown ‘being locked’, but it’s actually not locked by anyone.