BMC TrueSight Operations Management Reviews

Our company uses the solution to monitor assets and infrastructures for customers. We have 500 technicians who load asset details and monitor hardware or SMP-based devices. 

The out-of-the-box format allows us to integrate any components within the toolset console and provide an end-to-end solution for customers. 

The event management tool builds correlation logic and protection algorithms into a field of events that is valuable when a data center goes down. Some event management tools are built-in and some are customized to the environment. 

The dashboard and performance graphs should include a way to automatically schedule and export reports.

The licensing category has single endpoints and entities but should also include CMDB and other integrated components. It should be capable of providing which countries need more licenses and what endpoints they use to narrow down information for developers. 

BMC Helix is the SaaS solution but it is not yet mature so some features are missing. It is difficult to transition customers from TrueSight to Helix when the same customization is not available. For example, the solution provides control for building custom knowledge modules in the repository and bringing them to the server endpoints. However, Helix does not allow control over the repository and instead manages it within the solution. The customer should have complete control like they do in the solution because the SaaS format can cause data privacy issues.

I have been using the solution for eight years. 

Technical support is good and responsive. They provide advance notice of updates and actions. 

I rate technical support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

The ease of setup depends on the environment but is straightforward as long as prerequisites are in place. 

A simple environment is easy to setup. 

A complex environment with multiple data centers and touch points will have a complex architecture. It is important to make sure that service is available across the environment with a zero mean time error and that takes time. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

We implement the solution for our customers and have certain guidelines that we follow. 

For example, a customer interested in mounting dashboards will not be given complete access because we control user-level access for them. We determine if the customer wants to view events in the console or if they want to see the performance of their hardware. We then provide a set of guidelines and documentation that includes those specific features. 

We give customers the level of access they desire rather than complete access to the entire solution. 

The solution is based on endpoints and knowledge models which can get costly. 

Pricing is a little bit high so I rate it a six out of ten. 

There are many options in this category, each with its own pros and cons. 

For example, ServiceNow might have some beneficial features but might be missing others that are available in the solution. 

For us, it isn't so much that the solution is better than others but rather that its features are the best fit for our needs. Use case is important and we feel the solution is better for operations management than other tools such as ServiceNow. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution monitors our customer’s infrastructure.

The solution has major features that enable users to use the tool more effectively. The tool is flexible enough to be customized based on customer requirements.

The product must provide more AI capabilities. AI is already available but must play a deeper role in the solution.

I have been using the solution for the last 15 years.

The product has been in the market for more than 20 to 30 years, which tells us about the stability of the product and the enhancement that the vendor has done to ensure that the product is on top.

The product’s scalability depends on the person working on it. The administrators can make any required changes. Since I am experienced and certified, I do the maintenance myself.

The time taken for deployment depends on the deployment size and the environment. The installation process and configurations vary depending on the customers' environment. The initial components must be installed based on the customer's requirements and server availability.

Any customer who has multiple servers will not be able to monitor them manually. The tool helps to know the unknown. Instead of having a person, we use the tool to monitor the server for errors.

The cost depends on the usage.

I will recommend the solution to others. People who want to buy the solution must ensure that they use all the features. They must spend time with the tool before deciding to buy it. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

ITSM is used for incident tracking. We have deployed it for one of our customers that is in the telecom domain. Service providers are using this tool to log tickets related to the product they are using from the main organization. They log tickets in case they're facing some issue with the services they're using or providing to their customers. 

Apart from that, we have implemented the end-to-end change management life cycle and the knowledge management module as a self-service tool. Basically in all ITSM modules, we are delivering solutions to the customer.

I'm currently working with product version 21.3. It's deployed on-prem.

Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers.

The UI for the end users could be improved and more flexible than it is now. If it becomes more flexible, it will be the best interface among all ITSM centers.

I have been using this solution for about 12 and a half years.

It's very stable.

It's highly scalable.

Technical support is very good.

It's straightforward. For complexity, I would rate it 1 out of 5.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

My customers use it to monitor their enterprise and define their services. With a lot of the AIOps features and things like Service Impact Manager, my customers are able to reduce their mean time to repair (MTTR). MTTR is very important for companies who are reliant on their critical IT applications.

Sometimes, a lot of customers, if they're not using the products, don't know that they have an IT issue unless a customer contacts them, and says “I've got a problem.” With TSOM, they are able to be more proactive. The IT department gets alerted more quickly, and sometimes, they can resolve issues before the customer even knows that there is an issue.

This solution helps our customers to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect app performance. It has good monitoring all the way from storage up to the servers. Now, all the things I'm seeing in the cloud are very good, as well.

A lot of the integrations with all the other BMC products are fantastic, because it has a great discovery tool which can model applications and integrate those into TSOM. Then TSOM, once an alert is detected, can automatically create tickets in the ITSM system, which is Helix.

Its event management capabilities are very open and flexible. I haven't seen a use case scenario with a customer that we couldn't actually solve the problem for, so it's really good. There are some interesting things that happen in an enterprise network (things that people don't normally expect), and the event management product is very flexible. You can solve problems as far as your imagination can go with it.

I would like to see a little more out-of-the-box event correlation and expanded AIOps type capabilities. Where you can train your artificial intelligence operations to be able to memorize an issue once you encounter one scenario, so if you encounter that same problem, you can get to the root cause very quickly.

It is very stable.

It's very scalable. It is horizontally scalable. Right now, I'm hearing good things from the product team that they want to do some things as far as vertical scalability, as well.

I really don't have interactions with support myself directly. Some people who work for my company, they do that. 

The technical support does a good job. I used to be a BMC consultant back until 2013, and in those times, the support was very good.

It does help reduce IT operations costs. A lot of times, people are doing things manually. They might have a network operating center where they just monitor screens all the time, so you can reduce labor costs. From a scale perspective, if they have thousands and thousands of servers in their data centers, you can determine which ones are more critical over the other ones and focus on the critical pieces, not the pieces which don't matter.

I have customers who use other products. Sometimes, they ask me to evaluate other products that they're considering.

I am working with one large company right now who is looking at the ServiceNow Event Management product, and it's a little immature right now. Therefore, I told them about that. There are also other products that feed into the ServiceNow product set which are very expensive and very difficult to implement. This is one place where I have made the recommendation of BMC, specifically over ServiceNow.

Understand your use cases. Take a look at the use case to product fit. I don't really recommend many other products. We are sort of committed to the BMC product set because it's good. We have a lot of experience with it, and came from a company who was acquired by BMC Software. The product manager for that company, April Hickel, she's done very well. She is the product manager for TSOM now. I know her, her innovative capabilities, and her whole team. I've been working with them for a long time, so I know not only that the product is good, but the roadmap is good, and the people behind it are very good.

If you have a good imagination you can solve anything, but you need the right tool to be able to apply that to.

We use BMC TrueSight Operations Management in a Microsoft-based environment which we feel is best for performance monitoring and management. In our company, most of the workload is on Microsoft but the new version of the solution can monitor the workload of Linux too. My multi-fact servers are readily available and best practices are being suggested. I do not have to work and create everything from scratch because most of the features are there. Most of the alerts are available and very active but there are times I have to modify the extra alerts.

The most valuable features are the rich reports, high performance, and the look and feel of the WebEx webpage are very good.

I have been using BMC TrueSight Operations Management for approximately five years.

The solution is stable. We have not needed to speak to the vendor regarding any issues, it has been operating very well.

The solution is scalable.

We have more than 200 users in my organization using this solution and there are approximately three staff members that log into the solution for management and to check the resources. We had plans to increase usage of the solution but because of financial issues, we are not able to at this time.

We have been in contact with technical support to align our objectives and to determine their effectiveness and for information regarding updates. We have been satisfied with the support and we have not needed them for any issues, only information.

The solution gives clear instructions of what systems are required. You are able to simply plug data as a virtual machine in your environment and they have the option of going to the cloud. In the cloud version, you can easily enable the subscription and start working, deploying, and integrate with your environment.

On the client side, I do not have to configure or update anything on the software. It discovers what is running on the client-side system and it automatically does everything.

We used a vendor to do the implementation because of our company policy and to make sure it was done correctly.

The solution only requires updates for the maintenance of the solution.

The price of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is very high. If there was more flexibility with the sizing of the licensing it would be helpful, especially during the pandemic. We have wanted to expend but the licensing cost is too high.

I rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management a ten out of ten.

We do work as independent consultants, but mainly the focus is on a crisp and reliable base layer for Service Level and Business Service Management with a working CMDB. In order to map the data and events correctly, you have to have a solid foundation.

The Event Management is outstanding; still is the most interesting part of the product.

The sizing (which is difficult), the maintenance of it and the upgrade paths. This is a difficult area which is not easy to cover, as every client has a different approach of implementing the product.

Stability is mainly a sizing issue. The product needs to be correctly sized and architectured. For this, you need skill and experience. If you follow this advice, you will have no issues. If you implement without a plan or architecture, you will be lost.

This is related to stability. You need to know what you have, then all will go well.

Customer Service:

People buy from people. If your account rep is a good one, all goes well. You cannot answer that easily. I have seen light and shadow, as one could say.

Technical Support:

Support has room for improvement. Very often, you find yourself answering the very same questions over and over again. I would give it a 6-7.

Some of the clients I have came from other solutions; mainly because they were outdated they switched, or because they were discontinued. The same applies in the other direction, especially if the clients had the wrong account rep.

Initial setup seems to be easy. The deeper you go, the more you need to know about the product, especially about its agents. Some functions are under-represented, especially the Agent Consoles, which are a little too basic compared to the old versions. So you still use a mix of versions which leads to no savings in hardware at all. HA setups are complex (best to use VMotion). Ports are not that well documented. Again, experience is the point. If you know the products under the hood for a long time, you will do good; otherwise, you might run into problems. This is the same for lots of products in the area. If you know what you do, all goes well.

We normally do these kinds of implementations; I am a consultant, not a real end-user, as the clients no longer have the expertise on board (no matter which product they use).

Monitoring is like an insurance. If you have it, you feel safe. If you do not have it and run into an accident, you wished you had it.

Use conservative figures. In terms of hardware, monitored servers and also effort. The product is not cheap. But as with other products, you get what you pay for.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other options, and we still do. Mainly, it ends in a mixture of tools, and using open source-based tools reporting up into it, like Zabbix, OP5, Nagios XI or something like that.

Estimate enough time for the implementation. Never trust anyone who tells you that you will be finished in three months. Calculate at least one year for all tasks.

We use the solution to monitor a vast infrastructure, including operating systems, maintenance, Windows, services, processes, applications, and databases. Therefore, we have integrations with monitoring products such as Microsoft, Cisco, and SaaS solutions for management.

The solution provides visibility to our infrastructure, how it is, the resources we are monitoring, and quick updates when it has any problems. We have integrated it with ServiceNow to open instances.

The important feature is device management.

The dashboards are not good. We have a limited dashboard, and if we want better dashboards, we need to use other solutions like Grafana because the TrueSight dashboards are not good.

TrueSight could add any new resources because everything is changing to BMC Helix and will be discontinued. 

Some points didn't evolve. We are still using the node architecture, a node type of agent, and a decent cell, which was created many years ago.

I have been using BMC TrueSight Operations Management since 2009. We are using V11.3.05 of the solution.

The solution is a very stable solution. After you get everything done, take some time to get the recording done.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

Scalability depends on the number of servers dedicated to the solution and infrastructure management service; you install it from any integration server.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The initial setup is not that easy. It can depend on the environment you are deploying. It could be tough to do. It took a few months to get everything ready.

It takes many servers. One server has a central console that will present the data for all the components.

I rate the initial setup a five or six out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

Deployment was done in-house.

The product is expensive, depending on the types of monitoring you have. You need to acquire more licenses.

I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.

We like the features that are presented to us, such as remediation and remote actions. It is possible to customize the agents and consult the graphs from the devices

I advise you to find someone with experience before entering the space.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We are using it to monitor open systems and some iSeries systems.

TrueSight has helped to reduce IT operations costs.

The solution has also helped to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect app performance. The solution has application monitoring called Application Performance Management. It's an improvement on the old, traditional TMR. It's integrated within the TrueSight solution. It will notify regarding application performance and report issues with applications.

One of the valuable features is the integration of the monitoring and the Console access.

We manage our open systems. Using the TrueSight platform we can monitor server performance and notify the customers using the integrated ticketing for events. We can let them know if there are any issues with a server, or application, or database.

The solution's event management capabilities are a strong point for TrueSight. They are based on the previous BMC Event Manager which was very stable and pretty powerful. It was an excellent product.

One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy.

In addition, it needs some details such as auditing inside the product - there is no auditing for the policies.

It's pretty stable. TrueSight uses a major BMC product called Patrol, and Patrol has been around for many years. It's one of the best products and it's pretty stable.

In addition to the traditional Patrol Agent, BMC TrueSight added the predictive functionality so we can predict a trend instead of having a static threshold. We can let people know, in addition to what is happening, what is going to happen. We can predict that and have the ability to do a cost analysis.

BMC's technical support is pretty good. They do have ups and downs. In the past, it was very good but there was a certain period of time where they had support from overseas, from India. The quality of support was not as good as the traditional one, but I do see that it is getting better now.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The documentation was pretty good. The deployment was not very buggy, and the Patrol Agent was pretty stable.

We deployed it ourselves.

We did a comparison with a different product on the market. We had a CA product which I believe was called Spectrum. We compared BMC with that and InSoft. We felt that the BMC product was much better than CA's product. We also had an HPE product in the old days, and BMC is a better solution.

We had BMC for a long time. We had multiple products which we compared, and BMC is a better solution, so we removed the CA product. BMC is better in terms of support. It takes fewer people to support, it's easier to configure, and easier to change the configuration. It's also easier to change the special settings. And it's easier to maintain.

BMC products are very good. All products have pros and cons. For example, all the enterprise monitoring solutions are not really set up for multi-tenancy. BMC products are very stable and the support is good, and the configuration, especially, is easier to do. I think it will come down in pricing, although the cost is not something I am not involved in.

We started using TrueSight in the early stages. Like every product, TrueSight, as a new product of BMC, was going to take some until BMC improved it, got all the bugs out, got all the features added. It's not perfect but I do see improvement. When a product is in its infancy, it will always have some issues. I do see BMC trying to improve that. It's getting better now. It's pretty stable. It's a very good tool for traditional open systems and mid-range.

I would rate TrueSight Operations Management at eight out of ten. It's not a ten, because, as I mentioned, it is missing some capabilities in HA solutions. In the past, we had load- balancing HA. Now, it has to rely on an external load balancer to achieve HA. 

But I have to say that my view is limited because we do not have the whole suite of BMC products. There are certain things we do not own, like automation and deployment. If we had the full BMC suite, I would probably give it a ten.