Clarity SM Reviews

We primarily use the solution for incident and change management.

The newest customer portal is an improvement on the old one. However, we don't have the possibility to use it as we're on an older version.

The new portal for analysts is supposed to be very good as well.

The in-service catalog is quite useful.

The lack of parameters is limited. It's not possible to customize the solution.

We have issues with adding attachments and screenshots. Copy and paste is not possible on the solution.

Although there are some good features on the latest version, my company decided in the past month to switch solutions and we're moving over to Jira.

The cost of this solution is too high, which is why we're leaving.

I've been working with the solution for ten years, or maybe longer.

The solution is highly stable. We're using the high availability product for our application server and the program server is enough for our organization. We are using the application in over 70 countries because we have many branches abroad. It works well for us.

We have more than 10,000 users using the system across 70 countries. It's quite scalable.

We have a partner in Poland, so we've never contacted technical support directly. If we have issues, we contact the partner, not CA.

We have experience with Jira and have decided to move over to Jira in the coming months.

About 15 years ago, I also worked with an HP product called HP Service Desk. At the time, CA was more flexible and we could create customizations ourselves. On HP this was not possible without external support.

The initial installation was not complicated. It was pretty easy because I had previous experience. Occasionally, however, we did have problems with the environment and the application server would be on standby for a long time. I didn't find this too be too much of an issue though.

The pricing is quite expensive. It's so cost-prohibitive we've decided to move away from it.

We're using an older version of the solution. It's my understanding that in the 17.2 version there is a completely different customer portal.

I would recommend the solution, even though we are leaving it behind. I know another big company in Poland, which is an insurance company. They use this product and they've upgraded to the latest version. They have good knowledge and good experience with this product and they are using also the CMDB and the knowledge database, which is more of the product than we use. They are quite satisfied with the results they get from it.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

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.

There are different products for different purpose. The Service Desk is to take account of incidents and minor requests from the different area of the bank. The PPM is to organize projects. I know that the organization is using Spectrum, but it is out of my scope.

The Service Desk has performed very well. I chose it. It was my selection. I managed the implementation of the product. It is a very good product.

We have a very good relationship with all the users. When users have a problem, they report using Service Desk and it is very useful for this. All the interactions and orchestrations of every problem, we can analyze what happens in the organization and which kind of incident we have. It is a very good tool.

It is simple for me. Simple, and it is robust. It works very well.

We need a mobile solution. We are not using any mobile functionality for the product, but we think that this necessary. This should be provided in the next release.

The product needs to have a better user experience in the interface and mobile functionality.

It is very stable. We have been using it since 2010. We have the usual problems, but no major problems.

Scalability is very good. We have scaled to more users and more functionality. 

The technical support answers your questions and partners with you. They have very good knowledge.

We were using Remedy previously. It was such a complex solution. It was very hard to maintain it. That was its main problem.

The initial setup was straightforward.

CA helped us with the installation.

We work with a lot of vendors, but they did not have this product.

Choose this product. I recommend this product for different companies. CA presents a case with our implementation.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We can trust him and that he will work to help us.

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.

The most valuable features that we're finding right now are the customer service portal and the ability to have a one stop shop experience, and that's what we're using the tool for. Been a lot of upgrades in the last year or so that have let us be much more customer friendly and create a portal that's easier for our citizens and state employees to use.

The benefits are if you go back a year, we'd have 20,000 tickets a month and we were to having to track each ticket individually and using the new integrated portal, we're able to combine those into workflows, and actually track a user's experience from the start to the finish. We were finding that we had to try to look for individual tickets and maybe people were closing tickets when they finish their part, but it didn't give us the whole picture. We've really been able to get out the metrics of a full service experience. That's been our prime focus over the last year.

I like to call what we are establishing is our operating model. I call it our ecosystem and so we really worked with the CA architects to design what that should look like, how it would integrate with other existing software and tools. We built a picture so everyone can understand this is what we're building, just like a real architect plan would be, and it let us have a road map for a few years and go to our state and get money to actually implement something.

I think the stability of the solution is pretty good. We've not had any major issues. I think that it's been stable and consistent and pretty quick response times.

Scalability I think has done a reasonable job for us. We're at the beginning of setting up, we've about 15 workflows and we want to get to 30 or 40. It's not been that challenging for us to make that happen. What we've learned is that the tool can do what we want but you have to make the business process changes and to establish the workflows. Get in the process to finding people to work in the new way has been the real challenge.

We do have access the architecture team specifically and do need to talk to the technical support staff. They've been able to help us through anything that we have challenges with from little problems to bigger issues. What we've really seen is the architect help at the beginning has really helped make our solutions better even before we implement them.

I think that we did use some other vendors to help us implement some of the solution, and some of those groups were not as strong as we might have wanted, but I think everything from CA's perspective has been pretty strong. The one element that we've wanted to see improved and we've really worked with them on is the user interface is what I like to call a little conky and so we are consistently working with them and the product marketing people to make it better.

Mostly it was a financial forecast, looking at how much it was costing us to do that. Also we're working in Colorado to setup our own cloud serves and maybe that we offer to the counties and to other state or other cities inside Colorado. It was just time to put that into our data center and a little bit more in our control, but really it was a cost scenario where it saved us money to convert those licences and better idea for 2 or 3 years and then we can look at where we could be in the future. Maybe the cloud providers were not as advanced we might have wanted at the time.

I think we were a year, year and a half into our big implementation of that whole ecosystem. I think initially we probably had some bumps and it was a little bit slow based on we were in the cloud, and migrated back into our data center so that we could see growth and speed and improvements there.

We really looked for the capabilities of integrating with other systems. There were a lot of interfaces already defined, easy ways to leverage, we had VMware, internal setting infrastructure team already, time keeping systems. We probably had 2 or 3 of their products already, so it was easier to add the others rather than completely change it all together, even though we're completely open to the future looking at what is possible. Right now it makes sense for us to work within the existing suite. In the state government funding models, we have to plan 18 months in advance. You're never really current if that makes sense, so we look for mature tools rather than bleeding end solutions, because we can't take the risk.

I think we were certainly looking at ServiceNow as a possibility, and they would be a good provider and can meet a lot of our potential solutions. We couldn't replace things that we already had with CA, so it was an easier transition to use what we had.

I think it's a 7 or 8/10 given that it certainly does what we needed to do, but I don't know if it's anything spectacular. It seems like it integrates things rather than really operates in more new and modern ways that I think the current population wants. Maybe that's a perfect fit for the state employees or a mixture of that, but I think that we would want to see continual improvement and really think differently in a way that mobility needs to operate.

I think I would really look at the business process first and then what are you willing to do and what are you willing to change. There are a lot of solutions that are possible. I think the CA suite really does work well, but you have to work at it. You have to be willing to bend to any solution's workflows, and so I think you just have to look for the one that's the best fit for your willingness to change.

My involvement with Service Desk Manager is on the administration side as I have a partner who does all the form design and that sort of thing. What I get out of it personally is that it can go beyond out-of-the-box.

In other words, if I need SDM to do something that it doesn't do out-of-the-box, it gives us the tools to expand it, like the events and macros. It empowers me to be a lot more creative in doing things beyond the out-of-the-box scope of SDM.

Right now, we are using it for change management, incident management and service requests. It provides all users with a scoreboard where they can track all the incidents, requests, or change orders that they're responsible for. It provides the user with a tracking of anything they may have submitted.

With the simple notification when somethings being worked on, your Service Desk allows you to be creative with the notifications. Who gets what, when they get it, and it keeps dialogue open between service provisioner and the service requester.

There's always behind-the-scenes notification and tracking of what's going on through the Service Desk incident record or through the change record.

I submitted an enhancement request and I think it actually made it into the product. It was basically enhancements to how it integrates with Process Automation -- if Process Automation is down and Service Desk happened to call Process Automation for external activity type of thing, I want SDM to be more resilient to the interface being down to that component.

Also, instead of throwing an error to the user, I'd suggest maybe a spinning hourglass or something. A message that says, hold on, we're trying to talk to Process Automation or something along those lines.

It's not in a production environment yet, but were moving in there. The environment where we're currently stood up on in production is version 12. I think it's holding up pretty good. I think that version 12.9 will allow us to build on a a more advanced configuration, which means that it will sustain an outage better than version 12.5 because you have multiple user interface servers stood up. If one goes down, it still provides user interface connectivity.

I think 12.9 is going to be a lot better in terms of availability, but I think that SDM does a nice job and isn't buggy. Where it does get bogged down, or it does encounter an error, is that lot of times we're unable to track the error through the error log mechanism, and we then have to figure it out for ourselves.

The scale that we currently use it at is more than sufficient. We have single server with a single database and it holds up very well for over two hundred users. I think it's doing pretty good.

v12.9 does allow us to be more scalable if we have to build it for a greater audience of users, but we haven't got that far yet.

I've had to call them on occasion because I've had integration problems with Process Automation. I might've had an SSL certificate-type issue. The people whom I've dealt with were very knowledgeable about the product and oftentimes resolution comes with in a day or so that I open up an issue. I can't say that I open an issue up every week. It's probably more like once a month.

I think it's pretty easy. The documentation was good for somebody who has a background on it. I can stand it up with my eyes closed. I don't know if someone coming to it for the first time could look through the documentation and make sense of it, though.

Really, really learn the admin functions.

When we selected it, it gave us a framework, a structure in the space of idle, which is real important to our company because understanding how we deliver service in the areas of incident management, request management, and change management in our company are very important. The reason that they're important is because it drives our SLAs for our customers. Service Desk gave us a structure that we sorely needed to be able to deliver reporting and metrics and make sure that we're staying on time and what we promised to our customers.

CA Service Desk benefits come in the fact that it gives you some aspects of automation, which is really key to our operation. We're not a typical help desk like most companies are that use Service Desk, we're a service center. While it is only used internally by our users, it touches our customers. Therefore, it's really important that we had a tool that was going to allow us to do things in a precise manner and do it in a way that gave it the structure and the automation - keeping people on track. Instead of training everybody on thousands of business processes, it's really important that our users be able to walk in, sit down, and know what to do because the tool is driving them to do their job. Versus, the user driving themselves.

One of the biggest things we're talking with CA about is the integration between CA and PAM. PAM is a powerful tool, in fact, CA PAM is the single most important employee in our company because it basically orchestrates well over two hundred thousand operations in a month's time and it has an extremely low failure rate. One of the issues that exists, and I don't know you can really call it an issue, but it's not there yet, it needs to be tighter integration between PAM and Service Desk and they understand that, because the PAM engine for driving business automation and workflows is so critical to our business and keeping us on schedule and doing things.

Very good. Our platform is a Windows based platform. We started off initially on a Linux based platform, but we found that it was best to migrate ourselves over to a Windows based platform. Ever since we have done that our availability, our failover, it's impeccable. It has been running at an average of 99.95 consistently now for the better part of the year.

The tool allows us to adapt to many processes across our company. We have a lot of silos because of our business units. Therefore, the practices or the processes that we use to support our customers or the products differ, they're not all the same. It's very difficult when you have that many type of products to support, to make the business process for one product be the same for another. Fundamentally they might seem like they're the same, but they have all their very distinct differences. Escalation points and so on and so forth and Service Desk has allowed us to do that.

Excellent. I have a wonderful relationship with my account management team. We've had issues just like any other technology company. Nothing unusual, but I can tell you that the people that support me are there every second, every minute that we need them and they make sure that we're doing the things necessary to either get a problem resolved, or if we're doing some type of upgrade to our software, that type of thing, they will go trough every step of the way from a QA, to a dev environment, to our production environment, to make sure we're successful.

First we adopted Idle in our company. The Idle framework. We needed a tool and we chose another company, It was FrontRange. The problem with FrontRange was it didn't have enough structure to it. When you're a young company implementing Idle, and you don't have the right structure in your tracking system, you can go off in fifty million directions and we did. We recognize that, we were having problems reporting. We were having problems telling ourselves how we were doing in delivering our service.

The tool had flexibility, but it gave far too much flexibility for what we needed, so we started to look again. Then, we met with CA, we talked to them about Service Desk and we started to understand what the structure was that CA Service Desk was going to bring to us. Yet give us the flexibility that we need, which is important, but it's not too flexible, it kept you sort of boxed in, and that's not a bad thing when you're doing adopting Idle. Therefore, when we measured CA Service Desk versus the other companies that we looking at and what we already had, we found that it was going to be the best solution.

Actually, no there weren't any other options. When we went through the list, when we were doing all of our due diligence, we measured five other companies against CA and then against what we had with FrontRange and we made the decision that it wasn't even worth the effort of really sitting down and talking negotiations with the other companies.

I give it a 10/10. It's because of the impact that it's had on our business. It now tells us how we should do our work. It now tells us how we can staff. It tells us how we're doing, and it's reliable. That in itself, that's the reason why. If you're truly an adopter of Idle, the reason I would tell you to choose Service Desk is because of the structure that it comes with, and the out of box features that it gives you. Which makes the job easy for implementing Service Desk, because we migrated from FrontRange over to Service Desk.

We looked for, obviously, how does it work within the Idle framework. What kind of information do you get from it? How easy is it to report against? Metrics are key to any IT business. What about the automations, what kind of automations does it have already built in and what automations can you build in. When we were looking at the different companies that were out there, we looked for the company that was going to best meet all those criteria. Price, the cost of it, was important, but it was not the key decision.

We had a very flexible FrontRange system that had lots of data, but we were able to easily migrate all that data into Service Desk and into it's structured environment, which to me was huge. It made the job very, very easy. If you're going to look at a tool and you're going to make a decision, don't make it based upon cost. Make it based upon it's ability to deliver what you need to understanding your business and the service delivery industry.

We drive all of our operations for our enterprise solutions through Service Desk Manager. It has performed really well.

The flexibility and being able to connect to multiple products. It allows to use it the way we want to use it versus the way it came out of the box.

It has given us the ability to automate a lot of tasks, things we couldn't do before.

The flexibility. It allows us to do things, expand it, and integrate with our other solutions. Also, it's pretty easy to use.

• Simplification in the user interface
• Being more expandable
• Better documentation

The user interface is fairly cluttered, and we can update it the way we need to, but it just seems dated, a lot of the things for the full functionality.

Stability is pretty good. We've made strides in making it more available. Switching to the High Availability model helped with that. We had some "growing" issues, upgrades, and the like.

Scalability has been good. We've been able to add new servers when we need to and it's been performing well.

We use tech support a lot. We do things in a lot of non-standard ways, and we end up finding a decent amount of bugs or corner-case kind of things.

I'd like to see things move a little bit faster with it. Sometimes we've had tickets open for a long time, but overall they provide a good service.

Although I wasn't involved in the initial setup I have been involved with upgrades. They have been fairly complex. We've had some issues with upgrades where we had to roll back and get some things fixed. Some things that we ended up tracking back to not following directions right, but then other things we've run into issues.

When selecting a vendor, support is the big one. Also, the capabilities; the fact that it can do what we want it to do. And then expandability, being able to customize it the way we need to.

I think the best advice I'd have is to really use the automation features and expandability to be able to make it do things the way you want it to do them. Simplify the way a user has to interact with things by using a lot of automation.