Clarity SM Reviews

Most of all is the end-user experience. In your company you have IT experienced people and non-IT experienced end-users. They need the ability to reach out, report an issue, or request something that they need to do their job. They need the ability to get that done quickly, utilize different technology other than calling a help desk, and get it done quickly, and get the metrics behind the scenes that we can report on what's going on in the environment.

Service management includes incident problem change and request. From an end-user perspective, it's more around the incident and request area where an end-user can request a service such as needing hardware, software, or accessories that they need to do their job. From an incident perspective, they might need to report an issue, if something's broken and they need it fixed, that could be with something on their workstation, and that could also include something with an application that they use to get their job done. They need the ability to report those issues and get them resolved quickly.

We did have some outages in the beginning when we were deploying the tools into our environment. A lot of it was due to perhaps not having the right hardware that was required, or the memory. You need to get the specific requirements involved to run a good solution. I think it can absolutely grow with our company. We need to look into broadening the services that we have in place today, just keep advancing and improving on those services, adding additional services to the users to make their experience good.

We've had some really good experiences with technical support, and we've had some not so great experiences with technical support, but our direct contact team at CA has been very, very helpful in getting us to the right people that can help resolve our problems quickly.

We have a lot of end-user feedback that can contribute to improvements with the tools. The way that it's designed, we have a lot of recommendations based on end-user experience that can really contribute to improving the tool for an end-user experience. The tools are very IT focused, and we just need to incorporate more of the end-user experience when designing the tool. That input could be very valuable to CA.

I don't think anything is a 10/10, I would give it an 8/10. Best practices would be absolutely involving all of your processes before implementing the tool. You have to design the tool around your processes, and then from an end-user experience you want to make sure that you have viable how-to documents that you can distribute to those customers' end-users on how to use the tools, training, if you're able to provide training to those folks, communication about what's coming, and make sure that they know how to use the tool and be successful using the tool.

Before Service Desk, we were kind of flying a bit blind internally. With it, we're still in the honeymoon phase, but it's provided us many, if not all, of the tools that we're looking to use and implement in our system. And the online community has been excellent as well.

I'd like to see a Quick Request function. I think the reporting has been a little bit lacking as there are some basic dashboards, metrics and reports that we'd like to see that we've struggled to get out of their out-of-the-box system. So I'd say the reporting hasn't been quite as robust as we'd like it to be.

I think many of the good features are outweighed by some of the services and support issues we've had, and so again, we're still in the honeymoon phase, and we've got some struggles that we're trying to resolve. I think we're probably going through some growing pains.

We went live in August, but our implementation lasted longer than the norm, so we had probably almost a two-year implementation.

It's had a lot of weird behavior. It's been stable, but almost a little schizophrenic. A perfect example: We have a solution center that our level-1 analysts are primarily using. If there is a Quick Incident, they perform a Quick Request, but not together, and not consistently one or the other. We've brought this up with CA, saying, "We really need both, because these are people that are putting in 50 and 60 tickets a day, and the steps that they need to go through outside of Quick Request or Incident just take too long. Our metrics are really tanking because of this." And the response was, "Oh, well, you shouldn't have performed Quick Request." "Okay, well, we did, so now we want both." So we've had that discussion with them in development because we've found this inefficiency in the system.

We're not at that stage yet.

The community groups that we've joined have been excellent. We've gotten a lot of information from those.

We came from HP, and it was well past end-of-life to the point where we were pretty much holding our breath on a daily basis as to whether it would stay up all day or not. So we waited, probably, well past the useful life of the HP system, and that's what prompted us to start looking at not only a service desk solution, but we also wanted a more robust solution.

The CA suite has a larger availability of th ose modules that we could work together to get the whole package. We are using monitoring a bit, so we use UIM, and we just went live with SDM. And we, of course, use Service Desk. So the expectation is to implement as much of the suite as we possibly can in a step-wise fashion.

It was not straightforward. We essentially pulled out a legacy system that worked our team to the hilt as we were bringing in not only a new product, we were also bringing in a new process. We were looking at how we could follow a certain methodology, so it was a double whammy for our staff to develop that, so our implementation took a little longer.

We did. We did an analysis that came down to two different vendors, CA and another, and we ended up going with CA for a couple of reasons. We have several people in the organization who had experience with CA. Also, we felt there was less risk because CA was established in the market.

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.

It's our primary ITSM tool for managing problem chains and incident management.

I think it's performed okay. I've been with PenFed for a couple of years. I think one of the drawbacks is that we have adequate support within PenFed.

It has allowed us to be more efficient in our problem and change management processes and procedures.

I think the incident chain and Problem Management modules are key to IT being able to effect change within the organization, and manage that change effectively through ticketing systems and approvals, etc.

I took a breakout session on CA Service Desk here at the CA World conference. We're at version 12.9 and they're on 14 and getting ready to go to 17, so just looking at some of the features that I saw in the breakout session on 14, I would like to see us get to that version so that we can exploit a lot of the functionality that's available with 14.1.

I think it's a pretty stable platform. I think we don't necessarily exploit a lot of the features and functionality within the product because we don't really have a good support network with the company.

For example, right now we're not at the current release. We're back-leveled as far as the releases go. Our internal support doesn't know the product as well as they possibly should or could.

I think the solution is scalable. We just have not leveraged the scalability aspects of it, or the latest versioning of it.

We've used it. Again, our team doesn't really know the product that well so they use technical support when they runs into issues. CA's technical support, is pretty good. Our company reaches out to them frequently because there are things we don't know, so we rely on them. They've bailed us out a few times.

I wasn't there when they made that decision. When I got there they had already implemented it, but I think they didn't have a real viable ITSM tool for effecting problem change and incident management, so they needed a tool to do that.

I think we're probably looking to move to another solution.

The company has invested in ServiceNow for the facilities side of the business, so they're already using that on to manage facilities, ticketing and the like. And ServiceNow is probably the leader in the industry when it come to this ITSM tool.

Personally, my most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• stability
• reliability
• scalability
• good technical support.

I give it a six out of 10 overall, and that's because I haven't really seen us be able to exploit a lot of the functionality that exists within the tool, because of limited resources internally to support it.

Stay current with versioning and make sure that you're exploiting all of the functionality that exists within the tool so that you're getting the most out of the tool for the money that you're paying for it. 

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.

• SLA escalations: The SLA escalation feature is accurate and helps the service management team to manage the services delivered, as well as to monitor the performance of the analysts working on the tickets.
• Multitenancy: This feature allowed multiple logically separated entities to work on the same ticketing system. There was complete data isolation.
• Ease of editing code: The code behind the UI and the functionality is quite easy to edit and does not require much learning time.

Multitenancy has helped to use a single solution for multiple departments. This way, there was a single ticketing system for many departments, which saved a lot of cost and helped the departments with organizing their requests.

There are later versions available that we are not using yet. Many desired improvements have already been included in those versions.

Nonetheless, here are a couple of ways they could improve the product:
- Better reporting: Data specifying which ticket spent how much time in which status should be easily available/stored somewhere.
- Readily available plugins: Plugins should be made available for integration with third-party tools that are commonly used (e.g., Nagios). Such integration needs to be developed externally. This improvement can make the tool really popular.

I have been using it for four years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

No issues with stability. This depends on the level of customization done.

Technical support is 8/10.

I did not previously use a different solution. We have been using this product from the beginning. It was chosen because of the features available at the given cost.

Initial setup was straightforward.

One-time setup was done by a vendor team and later, other implementations were done in-house. The documentation is sufficient to help with the implementation and scalability should be kept in mind when implementing.

For organizations that are beyond the startup phase but are still not very huge, this is the ticketing system to choose.

Our primary use case is for ticketing. I'm a senior engineer.  

The UI is very user-friendly. 

There are some issues regarding the knowledge base and the configuration manager.

I've been using this solution for eight years. 

The solution is stable and used on a daily basis. We have around 400 users. 

The technical support responds quickly and provides a good service. 

Positive

The licensing cost is comparable to other solutions on the market. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

We use it for our incident request processes and also our change-over processes as well as our problem processes. It's our main CMDB.

It's a very flexible platform. 

You can customize your own things and your own processes. You can easily extend the natural processes and you can customize what you need to. 

It's easy and it's not affected by upgrades. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

The user interface is a little bit old and not so mainstream. Nowadays every person is used to an interface that is more user-friendly and this one is not so user-friendly maybe due to the fact that, if you need to let people customize everything, sometimes you lose out on a clean user experience. When you can configure the interface, including all the buttons, all the things, it's hard to keep things streamlined. From my point of view, if you gain a lot of flexibility, you lose a little bit of the overall user experience.

We'd like to have a better overall user experience. 

The workflow design could be better. They have another product with better workflow designs and I would like to see them merge these products together. 

The costs associated with the product are a bit high.

The first level of customer service isn't very knowledgeable. 

They could use a better service portal. 

I've used the solution for more than ten years at this point. 

The stability is quite good. That said, when you start doing so much customization and so much code on your own, you could degrade a little bit of the performance. However, we don't have any performance issues. We have maybe 100 persons using it daily and we don't have any issues.

There might be 20 people who use the solution directly. We have 100 people who use it daily.

The solution is scalable as you can add more front-end servers or more back-end servers. It's an easy process and it's not a complex thing to do it.

Sometimes when we have some problems we have to open a ticket and escalate to the vendor, and also sometimes we use the partner and describe the issue to the partner.

The first lines of support are sometimes not so good. We need to take time to escalate the problem to the second-line or third-line of support. In the 10 years we've used the product, we haven't really had a big problem. That said, sometimes when I open a ticket for small things, sometimes the first line of support is just not great and handling the issue. They could be a bit better and more knowledgeable. 

The initial setup is simple and not so complex. Of course, you have a lot of configurations as all the processes themselves are complex, however, if you use the out-of-the-box features like the SLA and workflows it's more or less easy to implement. 

Sometimes the partner provides maintenance services and sometimes we handle the maintenance ourselves. Usually, we do the maintenance by ourselves. For example, if we need to do an upgrade to a new version, if we have the knowledge, we do it by ourselves, however, most of the time, we prefer to use a partner when it's something big or at least when it's something that we don't know for sure how best to handle things.

Usually, we use some people who help us. Most of the time it's not the vendor itself. Usually, it is the partner as we are a public company and we have some restrictions when we are buying things. Therefore, we sometimes cannot buy directly from the vendor and we buy the product or service through a partner. The partner is one that is in our country and close to us. They would have the same resources the vendor has in order to do the best implementation.

Nowadays, the solution is not so cheap, If can be a bit expensive. When we did some research last year, we noted the pricing was near the top and on the more expensive side. 

We're just customers and end-users.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. Usually, every year we upgrade. However, not the latest one. Still, it's not so far from the latest version.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.