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.

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. 

With CA SDM, my entire service management business is ITIL aligned with better productivity across all IT processes. From incident management to release management, CA SDM empowers and energizes ABS and their clients.

We are ITIL compliant and we have a lot of experience implementing IT services. We offer these facilities to our clients and customers. SDM has many automatic functions that allow us to offer value when implementing business rules in a short time and without code, just by configuring the tool.

We are an enterprise that sells IT services and all our areas involved in IT processes use the tool.

I think each tool suffers difficulties when a customer has requirements completely outside the standard, which is very common.

Technical support is good, once scaled to a second level. But usually, there are difficulties in the first approach.

CA develops and acquires enough tools and adds them to its solutions, but does not necessarily fully integrate them before releasing them. That also makes initial implementation difficult.

And finally, CA currently has problems delivering the tool in the cloud. CA tried to insert a new tool in the cloud but failed. Today, only MSPs can deliver the service, but not CA directly.

We have been using CA Service Desk Manager for 12 years.

In 12 years, we had only a pair of important isolated stability issues.

We have not really had any scalability issues. Rather, the companies are the ones that often do not have clear information about when they have to make the jump to a next level.

We have a lot of experience and do not have much need of manufacturer support. But, like most large companies, it is an area of opportunity.

We looked at open-source solutions and other branches like IBM or Remedy. SDM, at the time, offered critical differentiators that made us change and stay until now.

SDM comes preloaded and preconfigured. We have started a service desk in a week, but without a doubt, the difficulty comes from the customer environment; the volume, the processes to be assembled, their level of maturity, etc.

It is not the most expensive nor the cheapest solution. It depends on the negotiation with CA, but in general I think it is a fair price.

We evaluated BMC Remedy and ServiceNow.

I would recommend evaluating the tool with companies that have already implemented it. It is very important that you can find references that can be consulted.

You want to know about their time of experience in the market, whether they are certification tested with the manufacturer with an expert level, and are a reliable business partner for implementation.

Creating tickets is a frequent part of our job. The scoreboard allows me to check for high-priority tickets, check status of tickets I created and search for tickets with keyword searches among other plusses.

We lean on it quite a bit in creating incidences, tracking them historically and following up open tickets created by a number of sources. It also serves as a cross-reference for other tracking tools we use in our daily work.

It’s always bothered me how you need two steps to close a ticket (solution then update status) to do essentially one task. I’d love to see that merged into one easy step. I also have issues with Configuration Items but I think that it's our issue, not a CA issue.

I started using this program when I was hired in August, 2013 and there was a major upgrade roughly a year ago. I can’t quote version numbers to you, however.

We have major problems keeping SDM up and running with issues popping up once or twice a week affecting service. I do not know if it is the software, the server or the lack of a backup to fail over service to. I would think more resources should be devoted to it.

We always contact our technicians first and they contact CA if necessary. Often, the issue is resolved with a 20-minute reboot of the server. From my end user prospective, I’d say 7/10.

The primary use case for the product is the help desk, and it has performed okay. It is working as it is designed.

It is a one stop shop. With the service catalog integrated with IT panel to the Service Desk. It is very nice to be able to use, because the workflow is all-in-one for the same product. 

As far as the integration with using all the CA products, all the components integrate well together and are very easy to use. 

Previously, we did not have a help desk at all. So, it has made a difference.

It would be nice to be able to just click the executable and have it do the upgrade with minimal configuration, post installs, etc.

Once it is installed, it is pretty stable. With the way we have it setup, we use virtualization and we are probably running 99% uptime. 

It is very scalable and very flexible. 

The support is great. That was one of the big features of using CA: the technical support. They are very helpful and willing to go above and beyond.

We did not have a previous solution. We did not have a help desk at all.

I was involved in the initial setup. The setup was complex. Out-of-the-box was definitely a difficult configuration because a lot of manual configuration needs to be done. It is due to the flexibility of the product. 

I am also having issues with the complexity of the upgrades. In regards to configuration to the new version, when you are not completely out-of-the-box, like an SSL configuration, it cause us issues with the upgrade. 

We looked at ManageEngine, Semantic, and a couple other companies.

We chose CA because of flexibility, working with them and another company, and the support. Support was a big thing about choosing CA.

It has been very functional for what we will be using it for.

You want to keep in mind what your end goal is; what you want to accomplish would probably be the biggest thing.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: In this case, it was the support that made the big decision on who we went with. We also considered cost, ease of use, and flexibility.

Service Catalog is one place where you can do things for the entire organization. Whenever a new employee joins, you can put in requests. Now, we're using the old version, though it’s not great. We're trying to customize it to our requirements as a healthcare company.

This is first time I’m working on this platform. I use it for Service Desk Catalog and ITSM asset management. I use all functionalities.

The new version should have an app, as it’s not in this version.

I’d say it's been OK, not great, but it's determined by the servers. There are so many aspects to the program that if the servers go down, we can't use it.

There are some limitations, but it's used company wide, around 50-60 thousand users. We just need to upgrade because it gets overloaded.

I've not had to use them as we have weekly calls with CA and they provide solutions to any issues or defects.

Use the newer version to get the full support.

• Incidents
• Request management
• Change management
• Asset management

These are the core processes for organization, as we are more focused on them.

When we started, we did not have a proper service catalog or services, and there were many complaints from end users regarding our services.

CA Service Desk Manager has helped us publish our service and provide better service to our users. That’s why our satisfaction rate has increased over the years.

Mobility is one area: There should be improvements in terms of implementations and content.

Also, they have launched Xinterface, which is very good, but it is restricted to only to incidents and requests. It should be used for changes, as well.

I have been using CA Service Desk Manager for eight years.

We have not had any issues related to stability.

We have not had any issues related to scalability.

Pricing and licensing are affordable compared to other IT system management tools.

We evaluated BMC and HPE.

Make sure that you have your processes ready so that the implementation will be easier.