BigFix Reviews

It's primarily used for endpoint license monitoring. It's for the usage of applications, monitoring usage of CPUs, and stuff like this. When you have an audit, you can prove very fast what product you are using and what kind of CPU resources they are using.

There are other use cases. For example, I can find details for every use case where I need to know something about the software installed. Once, we had a Log4j bug. When the Log4j bug was live, we could use BigFix to analyze which of all the servers and clients this bug is used.

It's very usable for a technician, for an administrator. It's very straightforward. The usability is very close to everyday technical tools that you use as a systems administrator. So it's quite user-friendly. That said, it's not user-friendly for someone who is not working a lot with stuff like this. 

It's quite user-friendly if you are technical and if you just know what you want to do and to do the tasks. It's not user-friendly for someone who is a new user or something like this. It's specialized and user-friendly.

Maybe the online help could be improved. 

It'd be nice if you would have a lot more phrases and keywords that you could search for and find answers with the help.

It would be nice if there could be an extra interface. Not really to script something. However, if you want to make a drag-and-drop script, something like this, that would be quite useful for us.

I've been using the solution for one year now.

It is pretty stable and reliable. That's not a problem at all. 

The end users are all the teams. We have a Windows team, Linux team, application team, et cetera. All the teams work with the outputs of this tool. There might be 40 to 50 people or something working with this product.

You can have relays, and then you can scale it. It's a scalable system.

I work with it regularly, every week.

Their online help mechanisms and documentation need to be improved. It's hard to find documented answers to your questions as the search functionality isn't ideal. 

That said, their direct support is excellent. 

Positive

I have not worked with any other similar product.

I did not set up the system. It was set up when I got the task to take care of this product. It was already installed.

The product itself doesn't require a lot of maintenance. Of course, the server and client updates would be good as the tool has clients. The clients install them on all machines. However, the topic itself needs a lot of maintenance. If you want the data in BigFix to be up to date in case of an audit, you have to take care of the insights of BigFix. BigFix itself is running. However, the list of the servers needs to be correct, et cetera.

It was set up within the company. There was no outside assistance.

I don't handle the licensing aspect of the solution. I can't speak to the price. 

I am working with the latest update. I'm an end-user of the product.

I'm totally satisfied. For the use of the product that we have, it's totally working. It's fine.

I would recommend the solution if you are using a lot of IBM software in your company. If you are using BigFix and you have the client installed on every machine, you are nearly always audit-safe from out of the box. I would recommend it to everybody who has to take care of a lot of IBM product licensing. For everybody who has a lot of IBM products to be licensed, I would recommend using BigFix.

I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for vulnerability management and patch management. We use BigFix to get information about the vulnerabilities that exist in the environment. We complete prioritization of those vulnerabilities and provide recommendations to the remediation teams. We assist the teams in case of any issues with remediation.

If our customer has a high number of critical vulnerabilities inside their environment, we use BigFix to do the patching. We are able to decrease the number of high and critical vulnerabilities by at least 30% in six months. This is a huge improvement and makes the environment more secure. 

The patch management and the BigFix Inventory have been the most valuable features.

The BigFix Inventory could have an increased scope regarding the tools that can be detected. It does not cover all the possible software installed in Asset. We used the BigFix module in a ILMT module to have the proper coverage. If we had the two of them combined, this would really assist with the inventory of software. 

Sometimes we may have a few issues with the fixlet Relevance where the Windows patches sometimes identifies as a false positive. We have opened tickets with the support team. They fixed that as soon as possible.

This is a stable solution. The only issues that we have had in the past with BigFix is with the sizing. If you don't perform the right sizing of the BigFix server, you may have performance issues. We have had no major issues with the performance itself.

This is a scalable solution. They are releasing a lot of improvements in the latest versions of BigFix. That will help us monitor how the tool is performing and if it would require change or increase of the hardware or the environment to make it run in a smoother way. The scalability has improved a lot.

The initial setup is straightforward. It involves sizing and designing the architecture to put BigFix in place and set up the proper relays. We experienced no issues doing this.

To begin the setup, we tried to identify the baseline of the customer to see how many endpoints the customer has. We also looked at the locations to know if we do need to put a low-level or top-level relay in place in each one of the data centers. In our case, as it's a huge environment, we set up two top-level relays and then a low-level relay in a different data center to not put a high load into network bandwidth when we try to transfer patches over the network.

We implemented this solution in-house.

The extent to which we use the different features of BigFix depends on the needs of our customers. We often propose new features when the need arises. 

BigFix is one of my favorite tools. I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

I support multiple customers who use BixFix for many uses including for security compliance, server automation, remote control, software distribution, patching, etc. 

One of the biggest benefits BigFix has had for our organization is the ease and efficiency to perform many different tasks, across pillars and platforms, all from one pane of glass.

It has immensely reduced network traffic when it comes to downloading patches. Across the board, I've had a number of customers who've had platform tools that I'm able to combine into one tool.

We've set up and started using BigFix to patch and have had much higher patch saturation rates than in the past. We do historical tracking with BigFix, and we can see that the success rate's gone way up.

It has also helped to reduce help desk calls because of the success rate that we have with the patching. As the success rate goes up, we get fewer calls. 

The power is all in the platform. It's great to be able to patch. It's great to have a bunch of stuff for security compliance, etc but the power truly is in the platform or the tool.

I would like to see SDK for Web UI included in the next release. 

Overall it's a very stable solution.

I've worked with customers that have a couple thousand endpoints to a couple hundred thousand endpoints. I've also looked at other competing technologies out there, and it is definitely one of the leading tools on the marketplace in terms of the scalability performance.

The initial setup is very straight forward. Depending on the customer, it can be complex as far as doing the necessary planning. Some customers can miss the point of doing a lot of that planning up front. If done right, it's not complex at all. You get really fast ROI from the tool.

My customers definitely do see ROI from using BigFix but it varies from customer to customer. 

BigFix has faster ROI than SCCM. It's more scalable, requires a lot less hardware, has faster reporting, quicker data to get out of it; it's better.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because there's always room for improvement. I've been working with tools like BigFix for quite a while and it's one of the best tools on the market.

Software distribution and patch management are the most valuable. Patch management is the native first usage of this product. Bulletin and Security Update are ready to use. Software deployment is fast and the product can be tuned for poor bandwidth network.

This product has massively reduced the wasted time for a technician to deploy or upgrade a security patch or a software version. With only one technician, you can deploy a large application in less 24 hours (Office, SAP, AutoCAD) in all your computers worldwide. We have used this product to upgrade Office 2000 to 2010 and now Office 365, for 80,000 users.

The console interface is not friendly, and requires training before using it in production. The levels of permissions are too complex to share the product with other teams. The technician must have all permissions to work easily. There is no web interface.

I have been using BigFix for three years.

We had problems with stability from the first use. There was network bandwidth outage when we deployed a huge application or a lot of security patches. This problem was solved by specific client settings and their management, and some changes to the architecture of the product.

Customer service and technical support people have a high level of knowledge. The forum and knowledge database are very interesting and up to date.

I previously used Symantec Altiris v6.5. We stopped using this product because the maintenance cost of the hardware infrastructure was too high. This solution requires high numbers of servers, as opposed to IBM BigFix.

The initial setup was straightforward. Installation was easy and a basic configuration is enough to start to work locally in the same network. But it is more complex when you need to deploy it worldwide.

Our implementation was done through a vendor partner team. My advice: choose a partner with real experience on this product. The settings and design of this product are not complex but require a great deal of experience to adapt it to your IT ecosystem.

I cannot reply about ROI.

I can estimate the reduced cost of servers maintenance to approximatively $500,000.

During deployment and design of this product you must involve the services that will use the product. You have to change the mindset (concept) of your team if you used another product in the past.

The most valuable features for us are scalability and reliability. Hands down.

My organization came from a product that was not nearly as reliable. It was causing failures across our infrastructure and across our enterprise. Switching to BixFix has alleviated that to a great degree.

The other part is it's now allowing our company to think ahead how we can incorporate other pieces of BigFix that other solutions don't have integrated natively. So we can get five or six product sets out of BigFix as opposed to just a single product set on a solution that didn't even work to begin with.

IBM dropped what's called BigFix Detect on us here at Interconnect this year. That blew our socks off because we had just completed signing a contract with a software that does almost the exact same thing called Carbon Black. So we came here and noticed that they're putting a Carbon Black type solution into BigFix. I will be curious about how that particular application develops over time and into the future. I'd like to see them continue to scale that out.

A major feature that I think they need to add to Detect is application whitelisting. That will be incredibly important. If they can get that I might be able to convince my company to start using that.

Stability is excellent. It doesn't crash, it can handle whatever we throw at it. It does a good job with that. Other solutions that we've had haven't panned out that way.

Scalability is excellent. There are people here who are using BigFix in much larger deployments than what we have. We're not small by any means but we're also not the largest out there. We know we can trust with confidence that we'll scale up well over time.

We haven't had to use the technical support at all.

We were using a different solution before this and we outgrew it. My company has gone through a period of hypergrowth and we went from handling just a few years ago 60 stores with maybe 500 endpoints in them, to 1600 stores now with tens of thousands of endpoints. So we knew we needed a new solution because the one we had just kept breaking, over and over.

I was not involved in the initial installation.

For myself as a manager who makes business decisions like selecting a vendor, there needs to be a level of trust and a level of partnership where I can go back to this vendor and actually get support and help if we need it, when we need it. Interconnect has been a great resource for that. So there's got to be that trust level there, absolutely.

I will never push a product I don't believe in. So I have to see that it works. I would argue the same is the case for anyone above me in our business or enterprise. We don't want to work with vendors whose products are half-baked. They have got to work.

So we ended up with IBM because we are partnered with GameStop and they were already using the product and saw that it worked. So we didn't formulate a shortlist off the bat. We said let's try GameStop's product and see how well that works for us, and then if it's not working we will go out and make a shortlist. So we didn't have to do that, fortunately.

The advice I would give is not to be turned off from the learning curve. There is a little bit of a learning curve to it. But that learning curve is there for a reason and the talent that goes into actually using BigFix properly takes a little while to tune, but that is what makes BigFix so powerful. That being said, as a result of that you're going to get reliability and scalability and a much faster response time than probably most products out there.

Our primary use case is for endpoint configuration management.

Our patch cycles are much faster. They usually all happen within a few days or less.

The most valuable feature is the patching. 

It's much more flexible than SCCM. There are more things we can do and especially the cross-platform support is better. 

It actually increased network traffic. Microsoft and Apple have incredibly large downloads, so when you're downloading to thousands of machines it's huge.

I would like to see more emphasis on using the web console, to have the same power as the full fat client console that they do they now. It's a lighter way to log in and it would be faster for our operators to do their work. The console tends to take a long time for a large number of clients.

It's stable. I've been running it for more than ten years and it's generally pretty good. 

Scalability is very good. It's scaled to our current needs.

Their technical support is decent. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We implement in-house. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

I would advise a colleague considering this solution to definitely understand what your needs are and see if the product meets those needs. Don't try to shoehorn your needs into a tool.

I primarily consult with other companies for their software asset management purposes. I use BigFix to help deploy the IBM license metric tool and BigFix inventory.

The older version of the tools that I use also included the connectivity aspect, and the fact that the tool now has it separate from the collection of usage data makes the deployment of these tools much easier.

The fact that it works with endpoints so well is the most valuable feature. A big part of the collection of IBM License Metric Tool data is from the endpoint so it really helps.

Even at a very large number of endpoints, it's very stable.

Their technical support is very good. The PMRs I have had to open with IBM are answered pretty well. I have nothing but praise for these people.

I self-taught for this online, so the initial setup was a little difficult to pick up at first. I had to create a couple of testing environments and destroy them in order to learn how to use it. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of reading of the manuals. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. I'd give it an eleven but it's off the scale. It does what it says it's supposed to do. Once you get over the learning curve, it is pretty easy to use. Plugging in the endpoints is pretty simple.

I would advise someone considering this solution to hands down use it. 

I use BigFix to help collect information on endpoints to assist my team in troubleshooting break/fix tickets. I also use it to proactively create solutions for problems that come up and to help with patching of individual applications as well as for checking for compliance on an operating system level.

Being able to intelligently create reports, gather data, export CSVs and give that to the leadership of some of the client groups that my team supports has been a benefit to my organization. 

There are instances where we have been able to utilize BigFix to reduce help desk calls by automating certain things. Along with the concept of savings calls for the help desk it's saving individual help desk tickets that get navigated to our group by automating things which save us man-hours.

The most valuable feature is the ability to create my own properties and analyses to collect information so that folks who might only have access to web reports, but not the console, can gather information and I can create reports to give to the leadership of my client groups.

The stability is generally pretty good. The one thing that we came across is the battle between load on endpoints and load on our servers and relays versus how quickly, effectively and reliably actions can be taken. I'd like to not have to take an action on a system while I'm working with someone and then have to say whether something will happen between five seconds or thirty minutes from that point. 

I haven't messed with SCCM too much. There's a lot of things that are desirable in SCCM regarding scalability. There are lots of workflows that exist that SCCM is pretty universally used and can make things happen instantly. It can also help with a lot of the zero configuration, zero-touch computerization things but we get to get a little more specific with BigFix. We can employ a lot of things from all kinds of different sources to help tailor our solutions and we have better functionality with Mac and Lenox.

My experience is that you can get really deep and detailed with this solution and the sky is the limit in terms of how complicated you can get if you're willing to dig in and spend the time to learn how BigFix works and invent some of your own processes.