Clarity SM Reviews

The process automation component is incredibly valuable. It cuts down on the workload of teams, organizational and clerical work, and allows employees to be more efficient.

I would like to see not having such strict compatibility requirements when working with other applications. This is just limited to certain parts of the application, though, such as email and how it interacts with certain servers.

This solution doesn’t always work in the real world with company and security requirements.

To clarify further, there are some parts of the application that have some inflexible settings, i.e., for the Maileater feature, you can only specify certain ports, encryptions and 1 certificate. This doesn’t always play nice with the email servers. For example, what happens if the settings that CA SDM send, are not the recommended settings that the email server is expecting? Maileater is the biggest issue we’ve had recently, and I’d provide another example, if I could. It is an issue to keep Java up to the latest security level, as it makes working with CA SDM also a little slow, but that seems to be a universal issue with many applications.

The company has had the product for a while. I have only been using it for a year.

They have two setup options. I can only comment about the advanced availability setting, which is stable.

There have been no issues with scalability.

The support staff is amazing and if they weren’t, I would have given this solution a lower rating.

I was only involved in performing a reinstall on our development environment. The setup was easy. The documentation could have been better for a couple steps, but support was able to help.

The product works very well when using all the recommended apps with it. I suggest using the recommended or preferred hardware and OS for the product so your life will be a lot easier.

Incident management

Adoption of ITIL incident management for business process re-engineering was very easy to fit into the CA Service Desk Manager Incident Management module. It allowed IT operation support to easily identify, track and monitor incidents with data in 45 days that was analyzed. Within the first calendar year of deploy, the incident manager was able to strategically set and meet the field support goal of responding and resolving 25% of incidents remotely.

Ticket event and notification creation/management is cumbersome and has not improved over the many versions I've worked with. Workflow design and management requires knowledgeable administrators with programming experience.

I have used it for 9+ years.

I have encountered stability issues, although the tool is relatively stable in smaller to mid-sized environments and has gotten better with newer versions. Complex client environments can severely impact stability. When there are network hiccups, the system does not recover easily without manual interaction.

The tool can be load balanced and clustered, which makes it very scalable. The architecture can be designed to segment the Service Desk support team and the regular users. This is helpful as the Service Desk can continue to work efficiently when other users are experiencing performance degradation.

Vendor support meets customer SLAs. First-level technical support is very good at escalating as appropriate.

I have used many different solutions. My role is a consultant that helps design and enhance service management solutions. The customers mainly switch as they adopt the ITIL framework and move away from non-ITIL products that cannot be (easily) modified/adapted to fit the new IT operations strategic model.

Installation is straight forward for conventional configuration following CA-recommended specifications. Advanced Availability configuration is more complex and requires good planning.

As a technical consultant, I'm usually brought in after tool selection is decided on.

The tool supports several of the ITIL processes. Plan the implementation such that when other functions/processes (inter-related as well as non-interrelated such as ITAM, CMDB) are to be brought online, the initial implementation solution does not need to be re-engineered.

• Incident management
• Problem management
• Exchange management
• Conflict resolution management, defining two configurations items across the board

I think maybe the biggest improvement has been in the integration parts of our organization. Though it's an easy solution to use, I find colleagues talking about CMDB parts. Sometimes I feel that maybe there must be a way to improve it where it's kind of simplified in a way where it's more usable. I think sometimes it's too much for someone to use, or someone gets lost, or someone complains about having too many things in there. It's not easy to manage, not user friendly, and maybe not easy to use.

So, when you get down to it, you have to see the details in the ways in which it's used. Maybe they have to work out the interface in a way that is more usable based on whatever you're trying to see.

I know that there is a mobile application version coming with version 14, though I haven't seen it yet. Hopefully it's going to really improve the mobility. It's one of the things that I would love to have. It would help those inside be able to change the way that they are doing business. I haven't seen it, but I would love to see it.

We use the ITN model, and we're about to upgrade to version 14.

Perfect. One of the most stable solutions ever.

No, we have our own developments.

I'm managing the project, but I'm not integrating the technical part of it. I used to work in the front technical team for the center and the old versions, but nowadays I'm just managing the project as manager.

Implementation wasn't complex. You just have to know what you're doing, maybe you have your process set to where you know where things are, if it's clear enough where technically there's no issues. It's just the way that you want to configure it.

For a service desk, maybe look at other options due to the cost. It will happen someday probably because of the cost. Now ServiceNow is coming along and wiping out everything.

Perhaps the cloud will bring down the cost. If somebody has an alternative with a cloud-based solution, that would bring down the cost.

It is mostly used for support. If customers have issues, they log tickets and the issues hopefully get fixed.

It works well for this. We do some things a little strange as you can customize everything, so it has to handle different things, and it also does this well. 

Probably it streamlines the organization. They have actually had it longer than I have been there. So I am guessing in the past, support tickets were probably handled through email and stuff like that, so I am sure things got missed and lost. Now, it is all there and stuff does not get lost.

It is easy to tell what needs fixing and the priority of things.

Probably the support end of it. You can track where the ticket status is all the way from the beginning to the end, and the whole company has access to it.

It seems to be fine. We have had it for a long time.

We had a few issues with the last upgrade. It was actually caused by another system that it talked to, it was not Service Desk's fault.

It works well. We have lots of stores that call in. We have gone from 200 stores to 600 stores and it supports all of it.

I have not really used technical support, but things get fixed by them on time and I have heard good feedback.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but was involved with one upgrade of it. The upgrade was pretty complex. They are really focusing on fixing the complexity of the upgrade, so it looks like it is going to be a lot easier.

We had a consultant helping us a little during the upgrade. 

I have no clue on pricing.

Get a demo. Try it out. See how it works.

I have been surprised by how many products CA has. We also use Agile Central, which used to be Rally. We just started to use it in the last year and a half, probably, so we are fairly new.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Bigger companies are usually better, just because there is other help online if you have issues. We have some vendors that we might be one of five customers if something breaks, and there is really no community to help. It always helps to have a good community around the vendor

We use it as a help desk ticket. Anytime users have a problem, they can go in, put the ticket in, and we are able to track what the technicians do.

Its benefits. Going back to the ticketing part, we are benefiting by being able to put time to what our technicians are doing. Without the ticket there, without them having something that says, "Hey, I worked for this user to do this." We do not have anyway of tracking without the software of how much time they are spending on different things that they are working on.

The ticketing aspect. Knowing that there is a ticket there. Something that we can justify what our users have done for our end users.

I come from a ticket background. I have been with this company for about a year, but I have been in the ticketing system with my previous company for the last six. The big thing, or the problem, that I have is not being able to see tickets on a bigger scale. I can see the request, or if it is the way they categorize them, but I can't see the overall bigger picture. 

Let us say, for example, I have a technician that is out for a week, and I want to go into all of his open tickets regardless whether it is a request incident or a change order. I can't do that very easily. I have to go through and look at the request. I have go through and look at the instance. I have to go through and look at change orders individually. Instead of being able to say okay what is on this technician's docket across the board. I have no way of doing that.

We are still working towards integration with the hardware as well, where I have seen others products more tightly integrated with hardware. For example, with Quest KACE (formerly Dell), the hardware is right there. I can easily add hardware for a user to a ticket. I know you can do that in this, but it is not as easy.

The stability seems stable and robust enough. There are parts inside, which I could see being done differently.

The scalability is good. As far as it goes, we are not that big of a company, but it seems to do well for us in this area.

Not being part of the process when we choose this product, because I have only been with the company for a year. In any kind of software like this, if you can take it for a test drive, because we did change software at my old job, that is a real good key or determining factor as to whether or not you like the software. Take the software for a test drive in your work environment.

I function inside of CMDB, Chain Configuration Management Data Base. I use it to work with our change management process, or configuration management process. To reduce down time, mean time to repair, audit functionality. Pretty much everything within CMDB, which is a subset of Service Desk.

It's a part of of a tool that other people use, and the big part of the problem with CMDB is getting a high rate of adoption. CMDB is not something that people see as a necessity, especially technical people. They don't want to deal with auditing, they don't want to deal with a lot of that stuff. So the fact that it's something they're already familiar with is a big deal. For a lot of companies, it's not built into their service desk, to my understanding. So that's a good thing about it. 

It's fairly easy to use, from a UI standpoint. Those are the main things that I would say are good about it.

It helps us have a clearer understanding of our environment, that's the big part of it that I use. As far as the ticketing part of that, it integrates within our email. If you're an end user, just a person, you don't need to go the website at all, you can do almost everything through email, so that is nice. 

I would like to see the API cleaned up. Right now, because of the way CA works, they combine a lot of applications. That's just the nature of it, they can't fix that probably. But the API is a mess, it's hard to navigate, hard to figure out. The documentation is okay, but from a back-end standpoint it's kind of difficult to work.

At our company, I think it's pretty stable. We have a good set of people working on it. I don't typically have any problems, with the front-facing part of it. There are not any really issues of stability from what I can see.

I would say we're a small to middle-sized company, and we haven't had any issues with anything like that. I wouldn't say it's a problem for us at all.

They've been good. My biggest problems have been working through the API for Service Desk, it's kind of a mess, that would be a nice way to put it.

They've been able to help me to get through, to where I need to go. Without that it's difficult, to say the least.

My company has been using CA for a long time.

I've been a part of PoCs at our company. When looking to invest in a vendor, the criteria include

• cost -  obviously a big concern
• functionality - if it's going to work within the tools that we have now. 

We're really big into automation, so integrating with other tools that we have is important. And CA - since we use so many of their products, between the mainframe, Service Desk - we really do use quite a bit of what they have. So they have a leg up as far as that goes.

I've worked with quite a few different products, from ServiceNow to Remedy, a lot of ticketing systems and the like. This is my first CMDB, as my main function. I would rate Service Desk lower than some of those other ones that I've used, because it seems like it's a little bit behind with innovative type of stuff. I like the UI, it's good. I would say, stand-alone, if I wasn't comparing it to anything else, it really does do what I need it to do, so I would give it a seven or an eight out of 10. Comparing it to other things, it would be about a six, because I think other software is better.

In terms of advice to a colleague looking at similar solutions, it would really depend on what they need. If they were looking for CMDB functionality, I think it really does do a good job of that. I think if you have other CA products, it does a good job of integrating with a lot of that. But I would encourage them to look at other products as well. I don't think it's an "industry leader." I think it's right up there with other tools, but depending on what you're doing and your environment, I think it's on-par with everything else.

One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constant needs of the experienced customers, we always have to make changes with the way we are working so as to achieve satisfaction for our clients; this application has many ways to do that.

We have certainly increased our quality level.

First of all, the system is more robust. In this way, we can elaborate on more complex services. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

Secondly, the application has the possibility to integrate with other systems and transforms more solid information.

Lastly, owing to the integration with BI, we now have various possibilities to create reports in which we can see where and when we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the number of open and duplicate tickets.

One area of this product that needs improvement is the user mobile experience. We need to get more solutions on the mobile devices of our clients so that they have the same mobile experience as they have on the computer.

I have been using it for about four years.

Particularly, I didn't have any issues with stability.

None of my clients have reported any scalability issues, neither have I experienced any issues.

CA technical support is one of the best that I've seen.

I have used a different solution before but it wasn’t what my clients really needed; thus I moved over to this product.

The setup was straightforward, i.e., once you have almost everything planned, it is quite straightforward.

It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. The product is worth it.

We had evaluated and looked at the second product in the market.

Plan every step that you need to implement and always look ahead to what your client would need in order to get there.

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.