Clarity SM Reviews

The biggest strength of Service Catalog is that it's integrated with other solutions on the CA platform. They're all designed to work together.

It is, however, pretty generic. It's very similar to other service desk modules I've seen and used in the past such as ServiceNow, Remedy, and others like those.

We're essentially in business services. The role of the business architect that we play is the definition of our services to our customers, the internal capabilities to support those services, the service delivery processes, the design of those processes and automation, the structure of the organization, rules and responsibility, functions, and change management. Service Desk helps us with all of that.

Its biggest weakness is the user interface.

We don't experience a lot of down time. It's so stable.

Recently since we've been doing more automation, there are some scalability issues there, just in terms of volume, transactions, and speed. End users have gotten notices that say, "Script running, do you want to continue?"

The development and support teams handle that.

I wasn't involved in the implementation.

Determine what the impact would have on your organization and how it needs to operate. There's this fundamental change that comes with buying a platform like this. Don't assume that you can just put Service Catalog out there. If you really want to take advantage of the entire suite, there's a significant organizational impact on how you manage, your job descriptions, all of it. It's recognizing what it is up front before you make a purchase.

The ability to add external databases.

In combination with Automation for Cloud Services, it has increased the ability to dynamically allocate Virtual Machines for test and development.

Pretty much all of its areas: It has a very outdated UX - circa Windows XP It has a lot of errors in its documentation. It has a lot of undocumented quirks and limitations. It has a lot of bugs. Its UX does not support HTML 5 style controls resulting in the need to build very bizarre workarounds. Its API architecture is not orthogonal.

6 months

Yes. As listed above.

Yes, in using the Service Catalog Editor it would periodically require that IE be restarted because of the memory leaks.

Yes. Because features like Copy Linked Service did not work properly, services replicated at various levels of the hierarchy had to be simply copied, resulting in a maintenance nightmare when scaled to a significant number of services.

Customer Service: Horrific. Unless an explicit and costly "service issue" was raised through the enterprise support agreement, CA had zero interest in accepting problem reports. And when a request was made for improved or corrected documentation through the Enterprise support agreement, the response was "we do not receive enough such requests so no such support is available, - CA Services will contact you shortly to discuss providing this custom function".. No such followup contact was provided.Technical Support: Horrific. See above.

No prior solution existed. The main reason for the choice of this solution was because Microsoft System Center did not adequately present its support for Linux and thus management perceived there to be no support.

Complex. Too many moving parts that are poorly and sometimes incorrectly documented.

Multiple vendors

Yes. Microsoft Systems Center, IBM Tivoli.

Our primary use case for Clarity is to manage portfolios and projects, and to manage the software. 

The most valuable feature are the time sheets, it's a very powerful tool.

The report solutions are a little short and that could be improved. It's possible that part of the issue is the customization because we had the tool customized for our clients. Clarity is also quite an expensive solution and it would be helpful if the cost was reduced. 

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

The initial setup was complex, it's possible that the integrations between this tool and other tools like Quality Center, ALM may have made the setup more difficult. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Incident request, problem, and change management.

It's a solution. It needs a facelift, but it works. It improves our service delivery process. We're more efficient. We're leveraging the ticketing system, which is always more efficient, so we can measure and improve.

Extraction, the reporting tool that I tied into it. It's real-time reporting that's easy to use.

The user interface is just boring. I'd like to see a more interactive UI, from the end-user perspective, and from the analyst's perspective. I would like a product that looks like it was developed maybe in 2015, or at least 2012. Right now you see it, it's very flat.

More than five years.

It's pretty stable.

Scalability is good. All I have to do is buy more licenses and I can scale up as big as I want - maybe stand up another server and get a bigger database - but I'm okay.

They already had this stood up when I came to this company. But I own the system now. We just upgraded about a year and half ago and it was painful.

First of all it cost me a think $70,000 to pay my consultant. We had the testing of the dev environment, and then testing of the production environment, so it was two weekends out of my life. And stuff broke. 

For me the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is quality, because if the quality's not there then it's my time; quality of the vendor's service that they provide. If they're going to upgrade, I expect them to do the testing. Cost is a concern, but I'm already paying out the nose.

I heard an industry analyst say this once, and this is very true: No one likes their ticketing system. Everybody wants another one. It's just a difficult space. However, I would look for something that users want to use, and if you can get that amount of self-service tickets to rise, your cost of support goes down. So a good user interface is important.

Working problem tickets and change orders.

It has a lot of information, the way we have it set up, that you can use. We can attach documents and do screen prints.

Keeps track of any issues that we're having, as well as any changes that take place. 

As an end user I don't probably use it the way that other people would use it, but maybe automatic opening of tickets for other products would be helpful.

I think that we would like to see tickets opened and closed automatically. We would also like to see different functions for employees versus administrators versus managers; people being able to lock down certain features once they are there. That could be available now and we just don't have it turned on.

I have a feeling that the newer release has a lot of things in there that are useful for us, I've just haven't seen it because we don't have the newest release in.

It's stable. We're running an old version of it, it's a few years old.

I don't know because it's the same as when I started using it a few years ago.

I've used technical support, but not for this product, only for the products that I support. But, in general, my experience with technical support from CA has been good. There have been no surprises in my recent interactions with CA, they've been good.

No, we had an earlier release of Service Desk Manager. 

When selecting a vendor our most important criteria are support, stability, and availability of the product in the future.

Just make sure it has all the features that you're looking for in your particular environment. 

We use it for incident, problem, release, change, knowledge, and configuration management.

With its scalability and ability to connect with various systems, we have been able to exchange data with several systems automatically.

The UI is old school with a lot of windows opening and slowing down the process of ticket creation by the end users. The reporting ability of the tool needs to improve drastically. Currently, the solution is provided with Business Objects (BO) and is too slow to use for every day reporting.

I have used this solution for 18 years.

Once in a while, the processes crash and we are yet to find a root cause for it. The product is very sensitive to small network outages (even for 1-2 seconds).

There were no scalability issues.

The technical support is provided, but it is often too slow. Hence, it requires us to implement a workaround, since the fix has a long way to travel. It often depends on the person who picks up the issue on the other end.

The initial setup is tricky. There are a lot of things to keep in mind, especially when everything is moving to the cloud or is virtual. Scalability becomes a challenge if we use the wrong resources.

There is always a challenge with the cloud solutions, such as ServiceNow. But the level of customization that we can do with the tool is normally not possible with the other tools in the market. The UI should be more intuitive.

The needs an improvement with its UI which looks old school. The product also is quite complex to implement. However the framework it uses is quite scalable and the product can be customized a lot.

1. Ease of customization

2. Modules of integrated ITIL managers

3. Integrated remote access to tickets

The product update process has been improved, and I like that they have included advanced high availability. Also, the process of adding new customers using multi-tenant is relatively simple.

They need to improve the High Availability, and the native integration between CA Service Desk Manager, CA Process Automation, CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self-Service.

We have been using it for nine years, and currently have two customers with older versions of SDM. The products have been installed on site without multi-tenant.

The implementation of solutions using secure protocol is always complicated. It is not simple to set up, as it requires changes to specific files. It could be simpler.

There were no issues with stability.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Customer Service:

High. Collaborates with gains in maturity.

Technical Support:

It's excellent. All there agents are willing to help, even involving other teams in more complex cases.

No.

It's simple, as we used the manufacturer's documentation (Green Book).

My advice is to define the scope of use and only then plan how best architecture. The secure protocol issues, high availability, and the use or not of a homologation environment generate operating and financial costs.

The ROI was satisfactory, but I would advise you to review the scope, as several solutions for simple things can have a high cost, for example, why use CA Infrastructure Management (Spectrum, eHealth, NetQoS) when Nagios could serve your customer demands well.

Plan a Homologation Environment and possible uses for other areas of the organization other than IT. These points are extremely important and can impact the management and maintenance of the product.

We also evaluated ServiceNow to reduce infrastructure costs, but some CA Service Desk Manager features do not exist in ServiceNow, even though it is a more expensive solution.

My advice is to get to know the product very well in relation to ITIL processes. A lot of customization only exists because we do not know the product at that level. The manufacturer's documentation "Content Pack for ITIL" is required reading even if the company is not a service provider.

I am enthusiastic about ITSM solutions. In addition to CA products, I know of LANDesk Service Desk, OTRS, Octopus, Zendesk, Microsoft System Center Service Manager, Axios Assyst and BMC Remedy. All of these solutions are excellent and have lots of documentation with the best implementation practices, both the system and the ITIL processes. I always recommend studying these documents before any customization.

It brings a maturity of collaboration and support, facilitating the work of analysts, and benefits end users in service.

It provided greater agility in service and a more agile management vision.

We would like to see improvements mainly without the Service Desk. This was where we saw the greatest gain in unpaid performance and collaboration.

We have been using this solution for ten years.

There were no issues with deployment, because the wizard of this version has been greatly improved.

So far, there were no identified stability problems.

So far, there were no identified scalability problems.

Customer Service:

Customer service is excellent, because it leaves a reality of collaboration more evident.

Technical Support:

Technical support is excellent, because it provides and demonstrates collaboration, which speeds up the service.

We did not use a different solution previously. We just upgraded.

The initial setup was direct and easy with the settings that occurred in the wizard. We used to make it version 14.1.

We implement the solution with the support of the manufacturer. They had a maximum skill level.

As a financial institution, we cannot provide such information.

ROI is closely linked to its current maturity. Aim to know exactly where you are, where you are going, and map the necessary actions and adjustments before deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We were already satisfied with the benefits of the previous version of this product.

The training of analysts and a campaign to demonstrate end user benefits and functionality is very important.