Clarity SM Reviews

We use it for the collection of tickets, to help our end-users, make sure they're taken care of in a timely manner. We Utilize various aspects of it to provide best customer service for them, to get their problems resolved.

Sending an email, that's the old way of doing things. This system is still relatively new. People still use email, but using the ticket system verifies that no one gets left behind. We're in a world of electronic mail. Some nice people can slip through the cracks. It's kind of how it is. But the ticket system makes sure that everyone gets taken care of, and that makes for a better customer experience. It's something we enjoy and they especially enjoy. We want to make sure that the new IT is not synonymous with, "Eh, don't wanna work with it."

It allows IT to handle users on a personal basis. It allows IT to have a name and a face, and we interact with the end-users, and the ticket system helps us to get them the help they need right away.

The ability to keep track. The work is tracked.

Provides ease of customer interaction. Gives the customer a general sense that they're being helped. Email works, telephone calls work too. But having something that's tracked in this way just makes things easier.

It also allows us to assign different areas, maybe it's a multifaceted problem. Whether it's a problem we have to work on, or another part that needs to be worked on with infrastructure; sometimes they're meshed together. This really lets the IT group and our group shine.

The interface is pretty straightforward, but I think for some end-users a little more simplified user interface would help, perhaps. It's gotten better though. It's a little more streamlined, which we like. But every little bit helps with the end-user for them to get assistance.

We recently upgraded from the older version, 12.1, we went to 14.1, and it has gotten a lot better.

We have a lot of assistance from CA support now. We have some consistent support options with them. They get around to us really quickly. That's the great benefit with this new system, we really like it very much.

We use them many times. If there are some internal problems with the system, it's usually on the server base, server side of it. They've been very helpful in helping us get things resolved, especially since we have the newer version that's within the support frame. We were out of support for a few years, but they still helped the best way they could, gave us a few options. But now they've been quite good in helping us out.

Our servers were upgraded and over time we were noticing that there might be some issues with it because the older system had a few bugs and it but support options were limited. It was decided that we should get a newer, upgraded system to make sure we had the support from CA. Even though they did help us a lot with our older system, they were limited in what they could do. They still helped out. And the new system, now we create tickets, now things are resolved quite well. So any little issues, whether it is tickets not going to a user's email, things like that, are resolved.

I think we are comfortable with CA. We had heard of other options. My colleagues and I have used other ticketing systems as well before, in previous jobs. CA just seems to work for us overall, so that's why we stuck with it.

I was involved in the upgrade. We just recently did that this year. I was working the project management aspect of it to make sure it got implemented. I had a lot of help from other departments, so it was a very big team effort to get things done.

It went quite smoothly actually. We understand that now, with 17.1, it's even easier to upgrade, but the process didn't take that long. Considering the fact we'd been out of support on the older version and went to 14.1, it worked out quite well. And this is on a worldwide scale, it's used worldwide at Novus International, everyone uses it.

We especially like the look of xFlow. That looks very personal, so they can keep track of how things are going with their ticket, if it has been worked on, what the status of it is. It seems to be a little more user friendly. The user can see more from a distance right away.

I do recommend CA. Even though it can be complex, there are a lot of aspects to it that are fairly easy. There's a lot of material, CA has a lot of documentation to assist. Personally, I never knew of CA Service Desk at all, or even the name, before I came to this company five years ago. I adopted the system to help with any problems with it. The previous users who utilized and helped set it up, they weren't there anymore. It became my little project. I was able to get assistance from our group and from CA as well, to make it work out well.

So I would recommend it. From a newbie of that system I was able to help out, and CA was able to help out a lot, so it wasn't a huge learning curve.

We are using Clarity SM mainly for managing IT tickets, such as incident requests, problems, and changes. There is a cloud version available, but we are not ready for this yet.

The most valuable fractures of Clarity SM are its ease of use and security. I have been highly satisfied. We've been able to integrate it with email and an SMS gateway for the purposes of notifications. That works very well.

I have been using Clarity SM for approximately 20 years.

The stability of Clarity SM is very stable.

Clarity SM is highly scalable.

We have approximately 400 analysts that log on to the system and make use of it. This includes both sides, from the customer and the service provider. We now have what we call self-service, it is for people who interact with the system for purposes of logging tickets using self-service. We have approximately 1,700 people using the self-service interface.

We are looking forward to onboarding more clients. We only have two clients but we would like one more.

I have used ServiceNow and BMC Helix previously.

The initial setup of Clarity SM is an area where Broadcom has improved. The previous versions had big problems but with the recent versions, it's very easy to start off the setup. Most of the tasks during the setup are automated, there's not much that you have to do to go through the initial setup. There are a lot of other utilities that you can use to draw data from other sources and import it into the system. Automation of tasks has made it much easier to do the initial deployment of the system.

The deployment of Clarity SM meets all of our expectations. 

We have a team of three that does the implementation and maintenance. There are two of us internally in the company and one additional person from outside that is from CA Technologies who has been assisting us to configure and other aspects.

There is a subscripted needed to use Clarity SM. The price of the solution could be less expensive. ServiceNow is less expensive and BMC Helix is priced similar to Clarity SM.

I would recommend this solution to others. They have improved the solution over the years and there are lots of new features coming out.

I rate Clarity SM an eight out of ten.

We are a solution provider and this is one of the systems that we implement for our clients.

This solution covers most of the IT lifecycle. The emphasis is mainly on incident management, change management, program management, and request fulfillment. We also have the System Management patch for network monitoring. 

As of late, I really like the BI functions. 

The CA products integrate well together but I would like to see better integration with third-party solutions. An example of this is with AIOps, where I prefer Splunk over CASDM, so I would have like to see it opened up so that the integration is straightforward. We like the customer to be able to choose.

I find that there are many modules that offer similar functionality and I would like to see these consolidated. Perhaps it is because CA was acquired by Broadcom and they are still developing, with the intention to bring everything together but as it is now, the vendor has many products that do the same thing.

I have been using CA Service Desk Manager since version 5.5, starting about 15 years ago.

Speaking of stability, there was one version, 12.5, that gave us a lot of pain. However, I think that it was due to our architecture. Out of the box, I think that this is a stable solution.

If properly deployed, I think that the CA Service Desk Manager is scalable. We had our own lessons to learn from the way we did things in the previous versions but with our latest deployment, it has been quite well and scalable.

Two of our enterprise clients have between 900 and 1,000 users.

In my company, we have both CASDM and BMC Helix ITSM, and I have worked with both of them. I find the BMC solution easier to deploy than CASDM. Some of my colleagues regularly support BMC and it seems that their deployment is much quicker.

Our BMC solution is much smaller and it does not cover all of the areas, especially in the systems management space, the AIOps, reporting, and aggregation. BMC does have this functionality but we didn't acquire everything. I expect that eventually, all of our clients will be using CASDM. 

Because there are so many different modules, the initial setup is not that straightforward. There are a lot of things that you need to do to get things to work together, although I'm used to that sort of iterative process. Sometimes, when I look at how other solutions such as BMC are deployed, I find them much easier.

CASDM can take months to deploy, especially if you have data that you've got to take from your previous versions. You may have a lot to do.

We are currently two versions behind but we are in a project to upgrade to the latest version, 17.2. It is appealing to me because I will have access to the AIOps modules. I am also interested in moving to the cloud-based solution because it is easier to deploy. There are better technologies available in the cloud, it is easier to manage, and there is a high availability aspect. I think that it would be much better but we are often restricted by the customer, who cannot always have data on the cloud. For example, two of our customers are state-owned enterprises and their data cannot be on the cloud for any reason.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to use the cloud-based deployment, rather than host it on-premises.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it as our ticketing system, as well as our ability to use CMDB and change management, and for our incident request management.

It has performed very well in these functions. We have been using it for eight years now.

It has helped us to organize a lot of our assets, so we have configuration items to attach to our change management. We can have tickets for change management and set them aside for an approval process. That is something we have never had before, and it is something we have been able to divide up amongst our different campuses for ticketing use. That is something we have not been able to do either.

I would say change management and request management, as well as CMDB. 

We would like to see them revamp, or rework, a lot of their configuration management database structures. We hear that is on the horizon. We are very excited about that. That is something we use a lot. 

We would like to see them integrate more of a service catalog, which is more of an Amazon-type fill in your bucket, then sign in, once you decide what you want. This is something that we would like to see from the product, as opposed to what we have seen in the past, which is login, then go pick. It would be nice to say, "I like this, I like this." Fill up your cart, then go buy it.

There is room for improvement. I think the product is going in a different direction than what is has before, which I think is good. I like that they are looking at things, and they are opening themselves up to the community and allowing for people to bring enhancements to them and ideas. To be able to share those ideas with their management.

Our initial installation of the application was on a different platform. However, since we moved it to Windows, with a Windows database, things have been very stable as far as it is concerned. 

We were using Linux beforehand, and it just was not stable enough. It had way too many problems, and we found out the customer base for Linux was small, so was the support. Therefore, moving into Windows was the better idea for us. It is much more stable now than it ever has been. We did the move in 2010.

We have been able to utilize the system across all our different campuses. We find it to be fairly scalable, as far as bringing it up. We have not done HA yet, or any kind of high availability. That is something we are looking at as a possible future change. Right now, with our user base, we are pretty simple, but we find that it is scalable. It is something we are looking at in the future. Just not right now.

We have three different campuses, serving probably about 700 analysts, 40 different help desks, and about 70,000 possible customers.

They are much better than eight years ago.

We have received much better support. People that really know what they are talking about. They are able to help us better than they were in the past. We have had less breakdowns in how long it takes to respond to us. Their response time has been improved over the last five years, or so. The response to us, as far as making enhancements or changes, has been good. We have had good luck with technical support. I have no problems with it at this point.

I think they are doing rather well, as far as their support. Where I work in the university, we have about 50 different applications that we support within our department, with a wide range of varying support structures and support. They are probably one of the top vendors which we work with that do well in response to us and helping us out. 

Usually, we look for a new solution because most of the group does not like a product, and they go after a different product. It is not usually something we look at as a corporate standpoint, because we are a state entity. There are always those that can get involved and say, "Hey, we want to make a change." It is not always just us that say, "Hey, let's go and do it." 

Right now, the CA Service Desk Manager is a set standard for the university. All three campuses are using it, but there are some other help desks out there that are smaller help desks. Local help desks that are using other tools. Smaller tools. So, it is not like they have to use it from a corporate standpoint, but it is available to them if they want it.

I think we had the Amdocs product, which we had used before. Then, we had what is called Request Tracker, which is an open source tool for consulting. I can't remember some of the other ones. For this one, a lot of it came down to price, and what they could get for us. Then, it came down to the capabilities of making large changes that we could not make. 

At the time, which would of been 2008, it was all web-based. A lot of the stuff that was being brought in was either Microsoft only, or it was client-based technology. This was a web-based technology, so that is kind of why we stuck with it at the time, but things have changed in 10 years. That was the original thought.

Engage with consultants from the vendor at the very beginning. Learn the product, then train yourself to work on it. It is something you can work on yourself with a lot less consultation from the vendor. Also, take small steps before you start beginning with different parts of the tool. Do not try to bite off too much, as a lot of companies will try to do. Start with one, then work your way towards the others. 

We are currently not using xFlow yet, but it is something we are going to take a hard look at as to whether or not it will be useful for us.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: I think a lot of it has to do with where their niche is in the market. 

A lot of the decisions that are made are based upon bringing everybody in to have some sort of a RFP process, where they sit down, and do some sort of bidding. It is usually a bidding war, because were a state entity. I would like to say that we could pick a product based upon whether they are the best, but it doesn't always work that way.

I would personally like to see it where a product is more flexible. A product has the ability to make changes in the different environments, especially from a support standpoint. When you would go and look at different ways that help desks, or support, is structured across corporations, or across higher educations, in this case. There could be a lot of segmentation going on in lots of different places. It is nice if you are able to flexibly change the product to bring it to different customers, so you can support their needs. Flexibility is an important key for different vendors, but for us, it is nice. 

We would also like to see them challenge themselves and not stick with the norms of specific platforms, such as Microsoft or Mac, even though typically businesses will only code to a specific platform like Windows. It is nice to see others do things where it works with different browsers, or it works with different platforms. That helps us out, because in our world it does not work all homogenized with a single platform. It is lots of different platforms.

Our primary use case is mainly for incident problem requests and change management. The overall experience has been pretty good. It is customizable. You can customize it and make it work to the client's needs. Overall, the experience is pretty good.

Since we partnered, we go in and implement this kind of solution outside to other clients or other customers. Overall, depending on the customers' needs, the response is mixed. Some people who are process people, they like to adapt the tool, they like to follow it. They are more happy when we show them the power of incident power change request management. 

Some customers, the adaptability of any ideas in tool, is a little bit harder for them. Over the years, or over a period of time, the acceptance of the tool grows. 

The overall experience is pretty good. I love being in the process management area.

Ability to write macros, which can in turn trigger some condition or could be conditioned to basically trigger notifications, the workflow desk, or web calls. It is huge benefit to customize it.

I would like to see the customization being more flexible. What that means that we do not have to go through a complicated process of applying a custom field to a Service Desk Manager application if it would be easier to do through an interface, which would be nicer.

Some of the scripting parts, especially the spell scripts behind the scenes, if that could somehow be incorporated into the tool that would be helpful.

There are issues. Of course, then there is the CS port and Regal patches. They give us patches and we apply them. 

Overall, the stability is pretty good for the product, but there are gaps that could be fixed.

Solution is scalable. It does work. We can modify it up better to make it the way we want it to work. 

We use it for different clients and each client has a different number of analysts and different number of customers. I have seen some large scale implementations where they have over a 1000 people using it even in the country or outside of the country in multiple countries and even within small organizations as well.

We have implemented it for larger and smaller companies.

The technical support consists of very knowledgeable, helpful people. I know several of them personally.

Our issues are P1 or P2. We do not have the smaller scale issues because of our being on the technical side. We can resolve those issues by ourselves, within our team, or within the contacts that we have. In our organization, they can help us resolve some of those issues. Our technical issues are larger scale issues.

I am a consultant and we implement products for the tools. I only come into the picture once the product has already been sold. I am not part of that decision-making team.

It is not straightforward, but it is not complex since I have only done it about four or five thousand times. It depends on who is installing it if it would be complex.

Compared to some of the other products, I think we are bit behind.

I would highly recommend to install CA. Not only the CA Service Desk Manager tool, but the overall value that CA portfolio products can bring. If you can extend, you can get a grasp of management, you can get into IDCM client management, you can get into more automation and process automation.

The more add-on of the features that you can expand into your internal companies capabilities, the better, because CA has so many products.

The products are there that is why we work with CA's product suite. Other than the great knowledge of skill set available at CA that can help us guide through the project, the success is great.

I feel comfortable working with the tool as I have been working with it for years. 

• Functions related to the ITIL process sets for change management
• Request fulfillment
• Incident management
• Knowledge management database

These elements are the most valuable to the organization because they are the areas that have at least rudimentary corresponding business processes and accountable business owners.

The features that are most valuable to me as an SDM administrator are:

• Extensibility of the interface to allow for schema changes
• Form-level modifications to support the aforementioned business processes

Utilization of change management features allowed us to effectively implement both group- and department-level change advisory boards and coordinate the interaction between the disparate management levels.

All areas of every product have room for improvement.

That being said, this product would benefit by allowing individual users more customization, notably around notifications.

On a per-user basis, the individual user should have the ability to determine what notification types they want to subscribe to and how they want to be notified.

On an individual basis, users should be able to modify their interface to change things like the attributes returned from search results or have the ability to show/hide fields on ticket creation screens to support their own or a team’s workflow.

It would be handy to have an option in the interface to disable large chunks of functionality. For example, we do not utilize the application for problem management.

If there were an option to yank Problems out of menus, screens, this would expedite deployments and limit the need for the creation and maintenance of custom test scripts.

The organization has been utilizing this product line for around 17 years. I’ve been using this product line for 15 years. This specific version of SDM has been in use in our environment for a year.

We periodically run into issues with the stability of the application. It rarely necessitates any action on our part.

We opted to deploy on Microsoft Windows and SQL, and occasionally run into issues based on those decisions. I am not sure if they can be attributed to the application, however.

There have not been any scalability issues.

There are basically two buckets: those that are really competent and those that are lacking.

In my experience, 75% fall into the really competent category, which is much higher than other companies I’ve worked with.

CA, given its size, surprisingly does not have 24/7 US-based technical support. As all of our deployments naturally occur outside of regular US business hours, this means that whenever I’m really having an issue, I’m invariably working with someone in India, France, or elsewhere.

I would like to reiterate that these people are usually very proficient in what they do, but because of language barriers, things do not usually go as smooth as I would prefer.

Our organization has utilized CA ticketing solutions AHD, USD, SDM, and Service Desk since I’ve been here.

The installation was GUI-based, and was pretty standard and straightforward.

I had no input nor purview into pricing or licensing.

The solution was already selected.

Ensure that your organization has robust business processes in place for the feature sets that you would like to implement. Organizations that expect the tool to define the business process can expect a very difficult deployment.

The ticket incidents and requests management are the most valuable features for us. That's really the primary purpose -- tracking our issues and fulfilling our customer requests. Those are the two main pieces that we use.

It mainly helps to track hardware issues and issues with any of our applications for the whole system. Any of our applications that have a problem get called into our help desk using this tool. It's as good of information as you can get, so as a ticketing system it works pretty well.

We use the CMDB to manage our configuration items, devices or assets. We use that to keep track of all of our assets. I think that usability is fine and the interface is pretty customizable as well.

Support. Support is the biggest thing dragging it down, and the fact that it's not all one integrated package. You have to get different pieces and put them together when buying them separately instead of it being just one whole suite.

But again, the level of support is probably the area that needs the biggest improvement. But as for the product itself, there's nothing else I can think of as it does what we need it to do for the most part.

I think we've had unexpected downtime in the last four years. We have downtimes, but when they schedule it, it's fine. We had just one issue, but since the latest upgrade it's been pretty reliable.

As far as tickets go, we probably have about 1300 a month, across at least 80,000 assets. We've got about 300 analysts, and for end users somewhere around 14-15,000. They're mostly just sales service. They enter their tickets and that's it. They don't go into the system a whole lot. As far as active users, probably about 300.

We had problems several years ago, but we upgraded and fixed some architectural parts of the systems.

I would say that's probably the weak point -- support. They take a while to come up with the resolutions. Trying to differentiate between the PPM and service management, but I would say generally we've had tickets that have taken three months to get results. Our issues don't always seem like they should be that complicated, but even on a good turn around, it usually takes at least a week or two. It just seems like it's slow. It's inconsistent; sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not.

No. I was involved in the upgrade, but not before that. It was pretty smooth.

We've looked at quite a few, including ServiceNow and Microsoft Systems Center Service Management. They have a whole suite similar to CA. Citrix as well.

We are primarily using this solution for incident requests. We track our CI CMDB change requests. We are using Service Desk Manager in a wide scope that is not in a single location but across Europe.

The most valuable features are the requests and incident tracking.

When I am reviewing an incident, sometimes there is too much information on the same screen and it is difficult to discern what is of value. The agents generate information that is not important for me and it means that I have to scroll down to the bottom of the issue in order to find what I am looking for. In this regard, the interface is not always clear.

I would like to see charts and more graphical information available in the reporting. As it is now, we have incident data that is put into Power BI so that we can visualize it. We do this because it is easier to read graphical information. It would be nice if this solution had a simple wizard that could generate visualizations based on the data. As it is now, there are lots of reports, but from my perspective, the reporting is a little bit too complex.

I have been working with CA Service Desk Manager for three or four years.

I am not aware of any issues in terms of stability, so I would say that there are no large or obvious bugs.

From my perspective, it is no problem to add on to this solution. I would say that it is very scalable. We have about 1,600 people who actively use it.

I have not had contact with technical support.

We are also using ServiceNow and our developers are using JIRA.

In my opinion, JIRA Service Desk is more oriented to developing software and it covers the topics surrounding that job.

Our setup was performed quite some time ago by a third-party.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to be patient. It is going to take effort and time to properly deploy.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.