Clarity SM Reviews

For the analyst, the user experience is better. Also, for the demo, it is a good experience for them, because they want to look at a fancy application and forms, and know that it is to easy to use them and create easy tickets.

The value for the clients is that you can save information in the application and get reports with that information.

We are also installing xFlow in our QA environment at the moment.

More user experience in the look and feel of the application. 

The stability is great.

We are working on installing in the production environment.

In some cases, I receive late information. In general, it is good.

It was not simple or complex to set up. It was medium with CA's support.

Its implementation was a little complex. I needed support with the service department of CA to work together to implement the version of the product.

In my work, we only use CA products.

I would recommend this version of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: the customer service and the quality of the product.

We have integrated Service Desk Manager fully from servicing the customer, right down to the network configuration. It's fully integrated. That provides many customer benefits, and enhances our customer experience as well.

Service Desk Manager keeps our customers updated regularly regarding any network outage and aware when we will respond to his request and when it will be repaired. Our customers receive better service and we also have a better experience serving them. The CA tool is actually helping us and we can see drastic improvement from it.

The view we now have of our customer base, and how they link to the network is more of a bottom-up approach. I would like to see it from a top-down approach. We want more visibility into how the network layers are linked. That's the next stage that we are working toward.

I also want to see how we can bring DevOps automation and lifecycle development into the equation, and evaluate how that helps us to mature much faster.

We have been at this more than a year. It's quite performance stable. We're doing more enhancements to our setup. The initial implementation covered 70% of our network. So now, at full capacity, we're adding additional features and have implemented more enhancements. There is deeper integration with our business systems and operating systems that give a fully integrated view regarding how CA Service Desk fits into the bigger service offering.

Currently, we are busy migrating customers to use to Service Desk. We are going to scale up to about 4 to 5 million subscribers. This will allow us to further extend our look at network integration as well. It's going to extend far.

We've got onsite technical support from CA. My impression is that they have improved drastically since we started.

We had a request to scan the market. CA was the best product at that time. They needed to make sure that our service catalog was communicated regularly within our business, so that everybody is briefed on what is new and how CA has evolved.

We needed a product that would integrate with our architecture. This is important, because we were looking for a specific piece, and it fit the puzzle nicely. There were certain features we were also looking for; a set of business requirements that we had to fulfill. That was basically our criteria.

I was involved in the initial setup. The first one was quite complex because we had to integrate into legacy systems. We had to integrate into new solutions with other suppliers and integrate into the integration bus, so it was quite complex.

There were other suppliers that we also looked at and compared. We looked at the Asian companies.

What helped us is that at the beginning is that we had a lot of offshore support. The best is to get CA onshore support. Then they understand the culture of the company. It's not only from a documentation point-of-view. They understand how to interact with different people. I recommend this even if you are based abroad. A local presence for us meant a lot.

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.

• The remote connection part (Support Automation): CA Service Desk has a Support Automation feature which primarily does remote connection. This is an important customer support tool used in connecting to a user’s/customer’s device or machine to help them resolve whatever problems they have. The remote connection also has a chat functionality that you can also use.
• Robust knowledge search via its knowledge base: For knowledge search, CA Service Desk has a robust knowledge base tool where documentation, articles and notes around known incidents and problems are documented for users/administrators or analysts to use. They basically act as a self-service tool where users can go to, search for documents and resolve problems themselves instead of having to always call the IT people. This way the IT people have time to do other productive tasks.
• The simplicity of the tool

All business processes have been built around the service. SLAs are measured promptly and tickets are owned/resolved faster, thereby improving user/customer satisfaction.

The Reporting part (Reports Tab) needs to be more robust and made less complex. CA Service Desk makes use of a BusinessObjects XI tool for reports, which is owned by SAP. This is actually a third-party tool and a bit complex in terms of reliability on the network, mostly. If these reports were in-built, without having to integrate or connect to any third-party tool, then this would be better.

I have been using the product for seven years.

I encountered stability issues in rare cases but stability was good.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Good

Support from CA Technical Support has been brilliant, as far as your SLA is renewed promptly.

It was the same CA solution. The customer started with CA Service Desk 11.2 and they have upgraded to 12.6, 12.9 and 14.1.

I am part of a team that does pre-sales, support, deployments/implementations of CA solutions.

Pricing and licensing is usually a problem. CA solutions are very expensive; hence, only big organizations can afford them.

The customer looked at ManageEngine, HPE Service Manager and others.

CA Service Desk is built around the ITIL methodology and would help to improve all organizational processes starting from incidents/problems/request, knowledge management, CMDB, etc.

• 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.

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.

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.