Clarity SM Reviews

We use the tool for many processes. Incident problem, change, config, and knowledge. So it's very important for us, and it's used very much and it will increase in importance for us. There are 47,000 employees at Sandvik who do need these systems for IT processes.

It's operated in one company, a supporting IT company. It's in one place and the whole global organization at Sandvik is using this for IT incident problems. It's a central solution for Sandvik.

Right now, we are starting to be dependent on the CMDB a lot. It's increasingly important but, of course, as with many other customers, it's the ticket system that actually helps us a lot. For incidents, of course, that's the biggest use right now.

We get control, and the incidents are actually connected to changes and problems. So we do have a good picture and control.

We talk a lot about the idea that Service Desk Manager should be more "service" oriented, not just ticket oriented. Right now, it's just tickets, tickets, tickets. It could be related to a CMDB topic, but it's the service perspective. We talk a lot about that with CA. That's the main improvement that we need to have in place. There are improvements ongoing in that direction, I should say.

The stability is very good right now. We had some problems, issues, absolutely. The issues were regarding the application that is connected with the servers. It's a lot of configuration, there are a lot of challenges in that. We have virtual servers over there and we have the application on them, so it's been challenging. But right now we have succeeded.

Scalability is quite good I think. Right now we are quite satisfied with the solution.

We are using CA AMS in Prague, they help us with the operational side. They let us focus on the improvements, the future. We can actually relax, we don't need to take care of all the incidents regarding the tools. So we are relieved a bit regarding the operational side.

We had our homegrown solution in Lotus Notes, but we knew that we should grow a lot, be more of a global IT. So we needed one central system that was more generic. What we used before was just a database, very, very simple.

We also picked Service Desk Manager because we saw there could be possibilities to add other products once again.

We installed it in 2001. I was a bit to the side, but yes, I was a bit involved. And we implemented it, perhaps, not in an optimal way. We tried to change it so it suited us. That was, perhaps, a mistake. But we have changed it continuously as well.

In terms of the important criteria when researching products and vendors, I don't know really, because I haven't been involved with that many new products. 

We know that if we want to have another system, it's an advantage to have another module from CA, so that we are increasing the product family from CA. Perhaps this has been an approach. It costs too much if we try to connect to others. But I haven't involved in the other investments in the system, actually.

I give it a six out of 10, but that depends; it is our fault because we are, perhaps, not using the tool as we should. It's not just CA's fault. But it's a six.

As we have other solutions from CA, I would recommend this for others, absolutely, because if you are using this in the right way you have big possibilities.

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.

The following modules are the most valuable:

• Incident
• Request
• Knowledge
• Change Order

Quick capture of ticket info lends itself to easy resolution and/or assignment to other groups.

Reporting and integration to SCCM need improvement.

Service Desk Manager doesn’t integrate to SCCM out of the box. If you’re looking to use SCCM as your source of truth for servers or desktops and to populate a federated CMDB (using Service Desk manager), you’re looking at building a connector manually or buying another tool to do that. In our organization, we’re customizing code to do this in batch mode. Not ideal, but what we have to do. CA had recommended integrating with other tools of theirs that we have but the technology teams are centralized on SCCM. So that’s that one.

Reporting, we’ve had to buy Ivanti Xtraction to do all our dashboard and reporting. Boxi reports really fall short and we don’t use any reports out of the box. Be that as it may, we’re heavily metrics focused, so we’ve had to take that on separately to work with outside tools. Not ideal, but reality.

I have used this solution for thirteen years.

Service Desk Manager doesn’t integrate to SCCM out of the box. If you’re looking to use SCCM as your source of truth for servers or desktops and to populate a federated CMDB (using Service Desk manager), you’re looking at building a connector manually or buying another tool to do that. In our organization, we’re customizing code to do this in batch mode. Not ideal, but what we have to do. CA had recommended integrating with other tools of theirs that we have but the technology teams are centralized on SCCM. So that’s that one.

Reporting, we’ve had to buy Ivanti Xtraction to do all our dashboard and reporting. Boxi reports really fall short and we don’t use any reports out of the box. Be that as it may, we’re heavily metrics focused, so we’ve had to take that on separately to work with outside tools. Not ideal, but reality.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is moderate.

Remedy was the previous solution at my current organization. It was not easy to support or migrate to new versions and was cost prohibitive.

Minimal training is required to get everyone up to speed and using the system.

Negotiate with the vendor.

We evaluated ServiceNow. It costs a fortune and required too much management.

Develop a process first, then apply the tool and minimize customizations.

The customer service portal allows customers to put in their ticket themselves, especially on the application side because sometimes you don't interpret it right when you're on the phone. So it's helpful to be able to to provide and collected that information from the user side.

We do a lot of applications, so we support a lot of applications. When a client or end user calls in, we have to consistently maintain the case number, the information, the client. It's a lot of details on different applications, so to be able to get that into their own terms is a lot easier for as we help troubleshoot the ticket.

The product itself gives you a lot. If you use it correctly and enter the information correctly in the fields, you can get a lot of data out of Service Desk, including trending information, to be able to help us troubleshoot what's going on. It also allows us to be able to determine trends in our issues and to manage those trends to train our end users.

You can always find a pattern with trending data. If you set it up correctly, you're going to find the patterns, and you're going to be able to resolve issues quicker and be able to improve on your services.

Reporting is not the easiest. We just purchase extraction features, but again, people need training. It wouldn't be so bad if you could get more information when you do a query within Service Desk and to be able to drop that information into an Excel spreadsheet.

Right now, you're limited to what is exported, and there's only a certain number of fields, but there's additional fields that I'd like. If I could just add those to export real quickly, it would be a lot easier than have to create a report each time.

We're pretty stable because when we came into it, we knew the number of end users we had. We might start growing it by doing more of our customer-based call center and by adding more of a case management system. That would increase it some, but right now, we've been pretty stable.

Overall, we get pretty good response back from them. When we have issues, we bring it up with our TAM, Mandy McGee, but we also set up monthly meetings, so if we are having any issues, at least she can go and get the research done and get us a resolution right away. It's gotten a lot better than when we first had it, when you wouldn't get anything back. Now, it's a lot better than it was three years ago.

We had Service Desk, and then we went to the cloud version. We tried to do it as SaaS, but then moved it back in-house. We went to the cloud, but some of the other products we wanted to use from CA aren't hosted in the cloud, so to make it an environment to where it's all in one environment, we brought it back in-house. It was working OK in the cloud.

I helped start that project and got it going, but then I moved on to a different job. I was involved in all of it, especially with the pricing and making sure we got enough licenses.

We used a vendor to help with that, and then our infrastructure team. Some of the notes are not really clear. They did run into a few issues when expanding across servers. There was a few little bumps, but it's no different than any other system.

It's more expensive in the cloud because you had to purchase per user, but by bringing it back in-house, we can have concurrent licenses. We have over 800 analysts in the system, so it gets cheaper pricing.

We had Service Desk. When we consolidated the IT departments from all the agencies into OIT, Office of Information Technology, some of them had Remedy, some of them had Heat, some of them had Excel spreadsheet that they were capturing all the stuff on. Since we already had Service Desk in the cloud, and we already had been trained on it, it was more just, "Go ahead and move to that," instead of really trying to move everybody off onto something else.

Just make sure when you are putting the project together, especially on the server side, that you have the right people in the room to ask the right questions because sometimes not required personnel are there. The right people are your server people, specifically, management-level server people.

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.

Right now we have our IT analysts, about 500 users, that use Service Desk Manager primarily. They put in tickets, requests, incidents, and then track changes. Those are our use cases for it right now.

It's a great ticketing, tracking system. 

It also provides the front end for the employees too. It's pretty basic, but it gives them the means to reach out to IT so they don't have to pick up the phones. That's one of the big benefits.

Also, the flexibility in the tickets that are created, and what we can change and modify, is a big benefit.

There is a lot of flexibility in the system. There has not yet been a case where we've had people come to us and say, "Hey, can you guys do this?" and we can't. Some of it is obviously a little bit more complicated at times, but the flexibility in the system provides a lot.

Giving our end users what they need to perform their jobs better is highly valuable.

One thing that I'd like to see is with the Scoreboard usage. Right now, you have to create the Scoreboards individually for roles or users. If they could separate that functionality, and create the scoreboards separately, and then just link scoreboards to roles and users - that way you could reuse the same ones - that would be a huge benefit. I know, because they're a nightmare to manage at times.

Overall, the stability is pretty good. I think we step on our own toes when it comes to stability, more than the stability of the system itself. If you configure it to the specs, it seems to be working perfectly fine.

The scalability is pretty good. We've introduced new environments, new remote offices, into it and are able to incorporate them with pretty small impact.

I like the technical support. I've had pretty good instances with it, and feedback. They're really quick, typically. Even when I have really problematic issues, not just Service Desk related, they stick with me so it works out well.

We were a CA house, and then we outsourced to a company that brought Remedy in for the ticketing system. When we got rid of them, we needed to bring our own ticketing system back, and we brought CA back, we brought Service Desk back. We could have gone elsewhere, but we chose to bring it back into the environment.

I was involved in the upgrade, the most recent upgrade that we did, not the initial setup. MGM Resorts has been on it for a while, but I did do the upgrade.

I was pretty new to it, and we've done patch upgrades since then. There are a lot of steps in it. But what I'm seeing here, at the CA World conference, is that they have new utilities that make it more seamless. I'll be interested to see when we go to '17 what that does for it.

We didn't. Because we had been a CA Service Desk house before, we brought it back in.

Our users access it via the web. We have external and internal sources, and we're now introducing the mobile app portion so our computer engineers can respond to tickets remotely.

We're not currently using xFlow. I'm trying to push my boss to use it because I think there are benefits of having everything right there in your face. Service Desk right now, you have to really get into the tickets in order to get to some of the stuff that xFlow has puts right there.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor is seeing their desire and interest in making sure they understand what we need, and then making sure that they can do that. If they can't do that, see what improvements they can make to give us at least steps forward towards something that we may need.

I would highly recommend Service Desk Manager. The use, from an administrative stance, is pretty simple; and even from an analyst and employee's stances. It's an easy to use system, as far as ticketing systems go, because some of them can be really inundating and complex. Service Desk is pretty straightforward as far as use goes.

We use everything in service desk and each one of them are adding benefit to the company and users. We really benefit from all of the features but if I have to single some features out, it will be:

Major incident tracking: We are able to differentiate between a normal and a major incident and do comprehensive reporting on this to key stakeholders.

SLA management: Each category has it’s own unique SLA linked and this gives us the ability to manage the expectations of end users more effectively.

Provides quicker resolution of all tickets with SLA management; reporting is quick and easy; tickets can be tracked and escalations can be handled by the correct teams.

The old employee interface available in CA had certain features and functions that were not brought over to Unified Self Service. One of the features that we use extensively in our environment is the properties or also known as additional information. This gives us the ability to ask the end user certain questions upfront to assist the back office teams to resolve the ticket faster and more effectively.

We had to do some in-house development to get this functionality working and I am glad to say that we have successfully been able to get this implemented. USS is a huge improvement in terms of the look and feel from an end user point of view but letting out a key functionality like the properties resulted in a longer implementation period.

We have been using CA Service Desk since about 2006 when it was still called CA Unicentre.

When we were still on an Oracle database, we had some stability issues but we have been running on SQL without any major stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Support is a problem area for us. They take too long to respond to tickets logged.

We didn't have anything before this.

I can’t comment on the initial setup.

We don’t have any issues with regards to the licensing module or pricing.

I can’t comment.

Ensure you do an out-of-the-box implementation. We have learned from upgrades that customizations cause a lot of issues during upgrades.

The most valuable features for me are the scalability of it, its ability to bring in everyone at one time, and all the data-related functionalities. It works with products that were not easy to pull in, whether it be the CIs or contact data. So that's really been helpful when we've had to make a lot of bulk changes, bulk uploads, and import/exports of data.

Customizing it is very, very difficult to do. Although I know we're supposed to stay away from the code, we've got a lot of things internally where we can't revamp the processes and we'd rather use the tool than have to create customized things. But when we want to customize something, we can't do it easily and it's not very intuitive.

I'd also like to see a Quick Request function.

It deploys just fine.

It's got a lot of weird, inconsistent behavior.

It's scaled to our needs.

I've used technical support quite often. To rate it, I have to break it down. As far as responsiveness goes, 7/10. Overall knowledgeability of the product, there have been some cases where it's taken three or four weeks for us to get a test fix out. There is no internal support with extraction there; so that one is none. I've had maybe our cases with extraction, and technical support has always had to play the middleman, and then wait until another person is available for assistance. So overall knowledgeability has some work to be done.