SYSVIEW Performance Intelligence Reviews

It makes life easier because if you are experienced enough you can find any problems and resolve them easily. Thus, making the machine more reliable and stable.

We would like to see better graphics in the next version, so that even less experienced individuals can find problems without much effort. This can help one to see the bigger picture and easily figure out what's going on.

It can help to display the data better and you would not need lots of knowledge to see what is going on within the mainframe.

The stability of this product is excellent. We did not encounter any issues.

It is a mainframe product, so it only runs on the mainframe.

I have used technical support and it is excellent.

We were using a different solution before this tool and moved over to CA because of the total cost. We already had a contract and an existing relationship with CA.

In my opinion, most of the products work anyway so it is primarily the cost factor and the product’s easy to use functionality, that are important factors while choosing a vendor.

I was involved in the setup process. If you use the defaults, then it is quite straightforward. However, if you have to go through the entire process for the first time, it does take a little bit of time but is not bad.

It is a good product for mainframe management. It is a lot easier to install and maintain than most of the other products that I am familiar with, such as BMC vs CA mainframe management or IBM mainframe management tools.

The transaction troubleshooting for the applications is the product’s most valuable feature. Giving the opportunity for those applications to be able to see what's wrong with a transaction and make corrections; giving them the information readily accessible.

At the same time, from a systems end, we use it for taking care of the everyday type of stuff that the applications don't see. We get on and hopefully keep the system up and rolling.

I think a lot of the stuff has to zero in and make it quicker. I think overall the SYSVIEW product right now has a lot of commands. There's a lot of panels. A lot of information. What we need to do is trim it down for the applications or the avid user. A lot of what they're doing right now, they're bringing in new hires out of college. We don't want to make it more difficult to use. We want to make it easier to use.

I think SYSVIEW has to sit down and look at the tool. That's what we're trying to do with them now, make it a little bit easier to utilize versus trying to remember all these individual commands. It would take something simple; develop a couple more panels, fast path panels.

I have been using it for over two years.

Stability has been pretty good. We have not had any issues with it lately.

Scalability has been 100%, too. We haven't had any issues with scalability. We use it on a lot of systems.

It has managed the transition very well.

It takes a couple of prods once in a while to get technical support going. I try to convince them to say it is something that's valuable for everyone. Even if you go out and test the waters with it, you'll see that this kind of stuff that we're suggesting would be kind of nice. From that end of it, they've been pretty accommodating. They sit down with us and listen to what we have to say and then, we try to collaborate and come up with a viable solution, which is good. It's all we want. Because we don't see the whole picture from our end, they don't see the whole picture from both ends. We sit down and come up with a good solution.

I'm not too crazy about the CA community; it's kind of like Facebook or anything else, it's nice, but we go right to the jugular most of the time. If we need support, we go to support.

Now, the one good thing on the CA community is possibly the video clips that come out. We kind of suggested that and that's getting better. They're creating more and more. Now they have slacked off a little. I haven't seen too many developed lately. But they need to get more of those. I think they're used a lot. We can use them in our training and they're very valuable.

Other than that, my social is just to collaborate on a certain thing and get these votes. I say something like, “Hey I’ve got an idea, here's a vote.” I've put a half a dozen of them out there and they'll get no votes; no one looks at them. It’s the same thing we do when we collaborate on the sprint sessions. There's not too many people that voice their opinions. I think it's the same thing you know. They don't want to sit on the communities and they don't want to open their mouth in the sprint review. I don't think it's just unique to that.

It's good that people are listening. I just wish they would tell us more. For example, we went to a couple of sessions that they had locally in Pittsburgh; a CA community-type, three-day session. We ran on a couple things and at the end he said, "Oh yeah, by the way, we’ve got this now." Well, why didn't he tell us sooner?

If we have an idea, it would be nice if they come back and say, “Hey, we are working on your idea but we need a little bit more information.” But that type of information isn't really relayed. It's like a big wall in between. Even though they're working on it, they don't tell us.

We actually had two other monitors and we still have one. This product actually replaced one of the other monitors we were maintaining. We went through rather intense outlining of our pre-requisites - here's what we want - and CA actually took care of most of the issues. Our concern was what SYSVIEW didn't have and the other products did have; they accommodated us with it on time, within the specified time frame.

It's a good product. It's a busy product. We like it. I wouldn't tell them about the logs or the transaction history because that's my pet peeve that's been around for a long time. But I understand that SYSVIEW already invested a lot of money and time into the product, so we’ve got to come in from the back door. When I talk to other people or tell other people about the product, I actually tell them it's a good product. It does what it's supposed to do. The support’s good and that's the main factor right there. That's what you want out of a product.

I didn’t give it a perfect rating - I'd never do that – because there's some still more work to be done on it. It's a good product. It does what it's supposed to do.

I really appreciate that actions can be triggered by thresholds. For example, when a threshold is reached, a job can be launched without having to use triglevel, capevent or another option.

Many SYSVIEW users have ceased manually performing functions.

Many sectors of IT appreciate and use the MVS display phase.

We can easily monitor any batch and CICS event, and this assures us in times of very high workload.

I think they could improve the frontend action stage and alert thresholds, for a better and more-usable job action or REXX launch.

Better management of the relationship between a threshold and the start of the response action, be it a job or a REXX, similar to the operation of OPS/MVS (in centers where there is not a SYSVIEW/OPS/MVS pair).

We have been using it for 6-7 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support has very good, kind people; they are available and prepared.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The first time I saw SYSVIEW, I found it straightforward and easy to use. I then encountered some difficulties when I started using it full-time. But now it's alright. In any case, when I speak to the service center, I still discover new product features.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

I can easily and highly recommend it.

Almost all of the features are valuable but specifically z/OS (base), CICS, IMS and MQ.

The TCP/IP feature is used a little, and the CAPTURE feature occasionally, helping a lot when dealing with some issues.

One of the most important usage for us is implementation of alarms based on product-provided metrics (especially on loops). In CICS monitoring area, we even use autocancel functions based on threshold settings.

Perhaps the IMS monitoring part could be improved (at least according IMS specialists).

I have been using it for over three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Most issues have been minor errors or performance issues (most of those were handled by appropriate parameter settings).

I have not encountered any scalability issues; setting is quite granular.

Technical support is very skilled and helpful.

I previously used the BMC MainView family of products. We switched to CA mostly for cost reasons.

Initial installation and setup is quite straightforward but after that, some customization and planning is necessary if you want to get the best out of the product. But the customization part (or parameters for customization) is quite well documented.

Before choosing this product, the IBM solution was another option under consideration.

In previous releases, the default setting was consuming too much CPU perhaps, but since 14.1, this was tuned quite well. Still, I would advise checking the interval setting in SCHD* parmlib members in case you want to keep CPU usage by SYSVIEW as low as possible. Using ZIIP is also good thing, where applicable.

Our data center uses this as the main product for mainframe system monitoring for hundreds of clients. The integration of CA OPS/MVS to alter and automate the action by threshold setup is the most valuable feature of this product.

We are targeting the standardization of our mainframe system monitoring product for clients and CA SYSVIEW is our first option, and packaged into our total solution for our mainframe service. Our client can use this product without additional cost while other products additional costs.

I would expect this product to be integrated with mainframe Linux system monitoring which is more popular in our mainframe solutions.

I've supported this product for about six years. My company has been using this product for 20 years. We're planning to upgrade to R14.1 in next half a year to support our z/OS 2.2 upgrade.

In general this product is stable and no major issues are reported.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

9/10 - I can always get quick responses for our request and for new release issues we get dedicated experts and coordinators to support our upgrades.

Our client used IBM OMEGAMON and other monitoring products previously. We recommended that they convert to CA SYSVIEW which is our global standard, and has a lower cost and full functionality of our standard mainframe solutions.

It is straightforward and we can bring up this product with most default values. We have packaged this product to our SOS repository and this makes it easy to implement to all regions automatically.

I am only technical support and have no idea on pricing and licensing. We have a dedicated team for this.

We are evaluating the IBM OMEGAMON product which many of our clients are using. We recommended that they consider CA SYSVIEW first with no additional cost. For IBM OMEGAMON, there is an additional cost involved.

I recommend this product to others due to its easy implementation, comprehensive functionality and good organization of documents.

The CICS option is used very frequently. For myself, I mostly use the z/OS part. I also really like the XSYSTEM functions in case I'm having trouble logging on to an LPAR.

We have automated the monitoring of our CICS regions and CICS transactions. This leaves much less manual monitoring for the CICS people than before.

The creation of dashboards could be made much easier, such as the way it is done in BMCs MainView for example. Currently, you need to do some programming to create dashboards, which is time consuming and error prone. A dashboard you can create in seconds in MainView takes much, much, more time to create in SYSVIEW.

We have never had any issues with stability. The product runs without any problems. On the rare occasion that there is a problem, the recovery is really good, so there was never an outage of SYSVIEW at all.

We have had no issues with scalability. Additionally the product needs fewer CPU resources than other products.

The technical support is very good. You always get an immediate response as to who is taking care of your issue, and you get regular feedback of what’s going on. Normally the cases are solved in a much shorter time frame compared to competitors.

We previously used Omegamon. I think we switched because of financial reasons. Probably CA made a quite good offer, but this was before I started here, so I don’t know about the details.

The setup is not really complicated, but there are many configurations options, where you can easily get lost.

I can’t say anything about pricing and licensing as I’m just the techie and have nothing to do with contracts.

The decision for switching to SYSVIEW was made long before I started here.

Start with a small and easy configuration and get it running. Make yourself familiar with the product, then switch on additional features one at a time and get familiar with it. Otherwise, you may get lost in options, features, and parameters. The product is quite comprehensive.

The CICS and DATACOM optional components are the most valuable.

We particularly like the versatility of the product. It can be used in REXX, batch or interacting with automation, CA-OPS/MVS interaction is particularly good. For example, OPS/MVS will trigger events that will check SMS storage groups through SYSVIEW and email reports on volume information

It needs better documentation explaining the different possibilities of what you can do with the product.

I've been using it for over 15 years.

We've not had any issues but it's worth testing the product out fully before implementing live into production.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

8-9/10 - CA's whole support offering has improved vastly since the 90's.

To reduce licencing costs, we merged other products. We needed SYSVIEW as this was the best if not the only monitoring tool for Datacom. We used SYSVIEW to replace CA-LOOK, SAS, MAINVIEW, and could also be used to replace SDSF.

The initial setup is very easy. It is a bit tricky if you have to perform customizations, as migration can be tough, but things improved a lot from v13.0 as you can now have in-house written information in your own libraries and transfer them to the new versions much easier.

We find the predictive analytics to be the most valuable feature. We are using this a lot with CA Workload Automation iDASH and it is really making a difference for everyone involved.

I wouldn't say that it's improved the way we function, but that doesn’t mean it won’t and we really feel that so far it’s working well.

It's a complex solution, but we haven’t run into issues yet. I have heard of issues from others, but we haven’t seen them. Then again, we are not yet using cross-instance job dependencies in Workload Automation, so we're not sure whether there may be an issue there.

It seems stable enough at this stage, but we haven’t unleashed it fully yet. It seems like it will do well.

It is totally scalable. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use it. Scalability is an essential requirement.

Technical support is knowledgeable and has improved greatly over the years as previously it wasn’t great. When we open even low-priority cases, they respond quickly.

We originally wanted to use JAWS, but we figured eventually that we would go with CA because of what they had to offer.

Initial setup was complex.

We compared it with JAWS. We chose CA because it just had everything we needed.

Have a good service contract. We can call on their engineers to come as we paid for a certain amount of time and you need someone to show you.