Clarity SM Reviews

We use the solution primarily for call logging and checking, but we also use it with other products that are related to CA. It's mainly for monitoring and event management from the infrastructure management perspective which integrates or interfaces into CA SDM for ticket logging. We also use it to check the SLA using what is referred to as the embedded service desk. We're about to introduce service catalog. It's one of the CA products that integrate nicely with it so we'll be using the new features of self-service and the xFlow engine. I'm an ITSM specialist and we have a partnership with Clarity SM. 

From a cost perspective, we don't have a very big service desk. We have many service agents because there's a facility that allows people to log onto the system and raise their own tickets. It saves people from having to wait for the service desk. From the company perspective, it saves us resources in the service desk. From a cost perspective, it counts. The fact that xFlow has got the self-service that's linked to knowledge management, means people are also able to solve their own problems without necessarily requiring tickets through the entire life cycle of second line support. From a quick resolution point of view, that has helped a lot.

I like the self-service interface and the fact that people can raise and check their own tickets without necessarily having to call the service desk. They can check progress on their tickets and also have input in the life cycle of the tickets. That's one feature that I think I like most.

We are running a high availability deployment now and I like the architecture because it makes it easy from a maintenance point of view. You hardly have any downtime because of high availability. You just move your servers across to a secondary or primary environment, do your maintenance and bring it back without users even noticing. The nice thing is the feed into the inventory and discovery solutions that work so well. You keep your discovery data somewhere and you verify it before you bring it over to CA SDM. 

We would love to see it integrating with other products like Splunk for log collection, integration to SMS facilities. It requires some effort for developers to get some of the things working because there aren't readily available APIs to interface with those. I'd really like to see Clarity more open to other products for purposes of integration.

I've been using this solution for the past 15 years, before it was renamed Clarity. 

We had some stability issues with earlier versions. Everything now runs on Windows and Microsoft products so it's much more stable. 

The scalability is quite good. We are able to easily accommodate hundreds of analysts that that use the system simultaneously without any performance issues. You can increase it to thousands of users and easily incorporate other clients into the platform without really having to do a lot of work. 

Our environment currently has about 450 analysts and 30,000 self-service employees. That means 30,000 people logging onto the system. In terms of USA, the number of employees that could be logged in at the same time at any given time could be around 500. But in total, we are servicing about 30,000 people who are using their self-service facility. The system has been able to handle that load without problems. 

We plan to onboard all the new clients in their new CA Service Desk solution and we plan to increase usage in the future. 

They have 24-hour support and we have access to support from several countries around the world including South Africa. We know some of the support people because we've had a relationship with CA support for many, many years. They're what we call sustained engineering support. That's the kind of support that requires looking into the code of the application. Most of the issues are mainly troubleshooting issues around technical aspects here and there. We'll know when we go live if there's a problem. 

In terms of initial setup, if it's a totally new deployment and starting from scratch, it would have been much easier. We are basically migrating from an old platform to a new platform. For that reason, it takes a bit longer. It's straightforward if it's a new deployment, but not that straightforward if you want to take into consideration building it from other sources.

In terms of timeline for a new deployment, three months is enough. But, it has taken us more than that to get to where we are now. I think we've been six months on the project and we haven't gone live yet. We're about 80% there. We used CA services for the deployment. 

I'm not so involved on the commercial side of things but I believe the cost could be improved. I'm not sure if it's a currency exchange rate issue but we are in Africa so it's quite expensive.

Although we are also running BMC Remedy and still have some clients hosted on it, I don't have much insight into it. I'm told that the latest version is run on a cloud platform, just like the CA SDM. I believe the BMC deployment is very quick, much quicker than the CA SDM deployment. That's a plus from a deployment point of view. In terms of functionality, it looks like the functionality is pretty much the same across the two products.

Out of all the service desk solutions I know, the one I know the best is CA SDM so I may be biased. I know there are many other options like ServiceNow and ManageEngine. I use Clarity and I would recommend it because it does add value to the business.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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.

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.

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. 

From our perspective, and taking into account that we have a lot of CA products for IT service delivery, the most valuable feature is interconnectivity with other products such as CA Clarity, CA IT Asset Manager, CA Spectrum, CA UIM, CA APM, etc.

• All incidents, requirements, changes and problems are documented in one database.
• It is easy to follow, control and generate reports.
• There is a synergy with other products for incident management, monitoring (infrastructure and applications), asset inventory, etc.

Taking into account the new version 17.0 that CA Technologies has released, issues in terms of the flexibility, ease-of-use, service catalogue improvements, etc. were resolved.

I have used CA Service Desk Manager for three and a half years. Previously, we used the IBM Tivoli Service Desk suite for five years.

No major issues that affect the stability were faced. In the beginning, the issues used to be in the first stages.

We had no scalability issues.

The support provided is very good to excellent.

We were using the IBM Tivoli Service Desk suite solution for many years.

The setup was of the intermediate level in complexity, but there is no need to worry about that.

We experienced no major delays in terms of the migration, configuration and setup tasks.

Taking into account of the strong relation that we have with CA Technologies, and so many others products that we have implemented, price was not an issue.

We looked at IBM and BMC solutions.

It is important to have all the procedures well-documented, have a sponsor for this project and have good relations with CA and a partner. They will help you to define and implement this solution.

The completeness of information on each ticket is one of the most valuable feature of this solution. We are able to gather information either directly from the product interface or from data extraction. Any reports that our analyst users request are available in some fashion.

It is often the center point of reference on discussions of either outages in other applications or planned modifications in hardware or software.

There is nothing major in this product that needs improvement; maybe more documentation is needed for database relationships.

Although, the documentation in the Administration references, is very detailed and complete with respect to the internal/external table names, field definitions and relationships, it is difficult to determine database table inter-relationships, without examining and tracing paths. A person needs to start with a major table, and follow each reference field to the next table.

It would be beneficial, if there were diagrams with basic table interconnections within the major areas, such as Contacts, tables relating to Change Orders and the same for Incidents/Problems. This way, it would be much easier for the support specialists, who are just learning the system, to know where to find ancillary information related to the main tables.

I have used this solution for five years; probably even longer on the previous version, before my time.

I have hardly ever encountered any stability issues. There are very few instances of unplanned outages – at the most 1-2 per year.

We have not had the need for scaling it. This product was configured in a way that we could use it for many years.

CA technical support is outstanding. They are very responsive and always have an answer.

Previously, we used an older version of the CA product that was no longer officially supported.

Since we were not upgrading but installing a new instance, the setup was very complex. We had to define all the configuration items and establish user update routines specific to our installation. However, there were CA support individuals on-site who were very instrumental in a successful installation.

Personally, we did not evaluate any other solutions. We were upgrading an existing product.

You need to plan ahead and talk with the CA installation support in order to define as many of the user areas as possible, prior to beginning the setup. This can help you have an easier method in setting up areas such as ticket categories and workflow steps. Otherwise, there could be a delay in installation while these are defined.

The most valuable feature is the usability of the search when you want to find other tickets that relate to the incident you're working on.

We have all of our different ticket types in one area. There are incidents, requests, and change requests all tied into one application, so you don't need to go to different tools. It makes it easier to find all the data in one spot.

I don't know. There's really nothing that I can think of. Everything always can be improved.

It's really stable. We haven't had much downtime, so it's been a very solid product.

I haven't used technical support personally. My boss uses CA technical support. He handles all the issues.

Our old solution was not meeting our needs. It was very hard to use. It was causing a lot of people issues, so we needed to find something new.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but I heard that it was pretty straightforward. They didn't really have very many issues. The CA people were able to help out with any problems we had.

I don’t think we looked at other vendors before choosing CA.

Have resources available and people who are dedicated to the product.

When we select a vendor, we look for a company that's a leader in their industry, or somebody who has the backing to support the product that they sell.

It allows us to integrate all our processes into one. It allowed us to retire several disjointed custom-built solutions. It helps us to fulfill requests and change orders.

Our key requests are being implemented in the next release. There is a knowledge management portion. It is very cumbersome to create a knowledge management document. That’s one area that could be improved.

The Knowledge Management module in Service Desk Manager is cumbersome and hard to use. It’s not so bad for browsing and viewing knowledge documents, but to create content is extremely time consuming.

The main problem we have is, you can’t simply paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, they first have to be uploaded and then, attached to the document. We would love to have the ability to copy/paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, similar to how you can add images to an email.

The only time we ever have stability problems is when our environment is not stable, so it's a perfectly stable product.

It is very scalable.

They typically get back to you quickly regarding the less complicated requests. For more complicated ones, they obviously take longer; but they're always excellent.

I only got involved a few months after it was implemented.

Try not to bite off more than you can chew. Try not to piecemeal.

We emphasize a partnership with the vendor and their ability to understand our business. The more they understand about our business and our goals, the better aligned we are. It is not always just about the technology or whatever the functionality is.