Clarity SM Reviews

Advanced Availability architecture is hands down the key feature. We can make sweeping changes, to the application or database, with a minimal impact on our user base. Most of the time, the users see no downtime at all.

CA SDM has organized the work for our internal groups to run the IT infrastructure in our company. When you add the workflow engine to the mix, the productivity and process adherence both get greatly enhanced.

There are some functions I have seen from its competitors that I would want CA SDM to have. I also find some of the items to be tedious from an admin point of view.

The pdm_publish process, that adds tables and columns to the database, is an unforgiving key stroke of errors.

A “publish” can run to completion, but if a mistake was made, then the system will stay down, until you figure out what mistake was made and correct it.

I would like to see the process just throw away the mistake and continue cleanly. After which time, it could post a report upon completion that you have to redo the offensive work.

Personally, I have been using this product for eight years. However, the company has been using it for about 12 years. We started out with version 11.2.

Currently, we are using version 12.9 and we will be moving to version 14.1, very shortly.

The system is very stable, but there are some instances where instability has been seen. It typically comes from the external influences or from one, turn-off network interruption, causing us to re-establish a database connection.

There were no scalability issues, thus far. We have 28,000 users in the user database within the system, and it seems to chug along fine.

The initial support was wonderful. Over the past three years, I have seen some degradation in the support, both in terms of the response time as well as the resolution time.

CA has been advised of this issue and they have met with us on this subject. So, they have acknowledged the problem and are trying to make adjustments in order to accommodate it.

This is the first tool of its type that is being used in the way that we are using it.

The initial setup was straightforward, but there are many steps involved. I don’t fault the vendor for this. There are many aspects that require attention as the system is very customizable.

Take the implementation class that CA offers. It is key to have certain aspects figured out ahead of time, as they will impact the system heavily, as time goes on.

I handle primarily the back end of the tool. A lot of the benefits that we've seen have been the ease of use, the implementation of it, the actual transition because we had an existing product prior too and we're moving from our vendor product to ITSM. At the time, we were very concerned about how long it was going to take us to actually do the upgrade and it actually turned out to be not a long and arduous process as we thought it was going to be.

The biggest things that we've noticed has been the actual performance of the tool. In Maximo we had a lag and again, it's more or less because it was a shared tool were as we have a dedicated tool now. When we went to the tool that we're now using, SDM, we noticed that the performance was so much more increased than it was in the past. People were noticing pages would maybe take like 10 seconds to come up. It was almost instantaneous as soon as they'd click submit. That's the biggest hurdle that we had to overcome was just to demonstrate how much more of an increase time to resolve an issue we can give our customers

Room for improvement I would say from a back end perspective, I would say they need to streamline a lot of the code that they're using. I think it's very bloated, I think it has a lot of extra things that it doesn't really need. Things like for example, USS and Liferay. I mean, it's a great implementation and I think it can be used together if it was done appropriately but we haven't really seen much of a benefit in the way the tool works for our needs. For other companies I'm sure they've managed to implement the two and find a way to work with it but we've haven't had that kind of luck. I would say in those terms of getting a lot of the stuff in the backend, from my perspective, is to take a lot of the stuff out, look what they actually need, streamline the product, and then push it out forward.

We've had a few outages and a few bugs we've discovered. We've identified them and we've brought it up to CA's attention. They actually were very quick to get us a resolution towards that. We did have to work with our sales team to make sure we did have the right individuals in place but once we did that, we reached out, we did get a fast resolution.

The scalability of the solution has been very good. We think that it could definitely grow with our organization, it's just a matter of dedicating the resources needed to actually get that accomplished. When we first started developing the tool and putting it out there, we didn't actually scale it appropriately where we needed to. For companies looking forward, the biggest hurdle I think they need to do is actually look at how much they plan to use of the tool initially and also gauge in the future how much they think they're going to grow and not over estimate or at the same time, underestimate the usage of it.

There was a couple actual legitimate issues that we had. We started of with 14-1 and we were one of the first customers to implement that so there was definitely going to be some growing pains and some things the we discovered. Once we brought it up to CA's attention, we've had like a mixed bag at first and I think that's probably because the tool was so new and there was not many people on the service side that were really, really intimately familiar with it as they were with the past tools. We were constantly getting the, "Hey, we know version 12-7 or 12 whatever. I think it should still work like that in this new version." Once we started getting into it and it matured a little bit over a couple of months the support got a lot better.

When we first did our development and implementation we didn't scale appropriately so we were not dedicating enough resources to the tool. All those bugs and issues we've been discovering initially were partly self-inflicted wounds that we had to overcome. Once we then worked with CA and said, "Well, it's not really so much of a bug or a problem, it's because you only got one core dedicated to this and you can't do much with just one core." Once we started getting our ducks in a row and start saying, "Well, how much do we really want to dedicate to the tool and how much do we want to see ourselves in the future." Once we started getting those aligned into our business needs things started to work a lot better.

Rating: I would definitely say it's an eight. I'm not going to be super positive and super negative but it's an 8/10.

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.

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. 

Ticket management and the knowledge base are the most valuable features of this solution.

Our managers are able to properly monitor their team activities with CA Service Desk. With knowledge base, the end users are able to fix simple issues.

It could improve in maintainability and customization of features with a better and simpler GUI.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

We were using an intranet website, initially. It was very rudimentary and we couldn’t customize it without relying on outsourcing. We switched over to CA Service Desk Manager.

Do not over-customize it, given the fact that it could directly impact the tool's stability and data reliability.

One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constant needs of the experienced customers, we always have to make changes with the way we are working so as to achieve satisfaction for our clients; this application has many ways to do that.

We have certainly increased our quality level.

First of all, the system is more robust. In this way, we can elaborate on more complex services. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

Secondly, the application has the possibility to integrate with other systems and transforms more solid information.

Lastly, owing to the integration with BI, we now have various possibilities to create reports in which we can see where and when we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the number of open and duplicate tickets.

One area of this product that needs improvement is the user mobile experience. We need to get more solutions on the mobile devices of our clients so that they have the same mobile experience as they have on the computer.

I have been using it for about four years.

Particularly, I didn't have any issues with stability.

None of my clients have reported any scalability issues, neither have I experienced any issues.

CA technical support is one of the best that I've seen.

I have used a different solution before but it wasn’t what my clients really needed; thus I moved over to this product.

The setup was straightforward, i.e., once you have almost everything planned, it is quite straightforward.

It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. The product is worth it.

We had evaluated and looked at the second product in the market.

Plan every step that you need to implement and always look ahead to what your client would need in order to get there.

The process automation component is incredibly valuable. It cuts down on the workload of teams, organizational and clerical work, and allows employees to be more efficient.

I would like to see not having such strict compatibility requirements when working with other applications. This is just limited to certain parts of the application, though, such as email and how it interacts with certain servers.

This solution doesn’t always work in the real world with company and security requirements.

To clarify further, there are some parts of the application that have some inflexible settings, i.e., for the Maileater feature, you can only specify certain ports, encryptions and 1 certificate. This doesn’t always play nice with the email servers. For example, what happens if the settings that CA SDM send, are not the recommended settings that the email server is expecting? Maileater is the biggest issue we’ve had recently, and I’d provide another example, if I could. It is an issue to keep Java up to the latest security level, as it makes working with CA SDM also a little slow, but that seems to be a universal issue with many applications.

The company has had the product for a while. I have only been using it for a year.

They have two setup options. I can only comment about the advanced availability setting, which is stable.

There have been no issues with scalability.

The support staff is amazing and if they weren’t, I would have given this solution a lower rating.

I was only involved in performing a reinstall on our development environment. The setup was easy. The documentation could have been better for a couple steps, but support was able to help.

The product works very well when using all the recommended apps with it. I suggest using the recommended or preferred hardware and OS for the product so your life will be a lot easier.

Non-Functional

1. Highly configurable, scalable and extendable
2. Customizable with almost Hot Deploy except for business logic
3. Quick and has awesome architecture
4. It's robust

Functional

1. Fully fledged Support on Request, Incident, Problem and Change on various scales along with CA PAM and CA SC as well as supporting the classic workflow. It supports Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Single Sign-On through Active Directory and other supported LDAP systems
2. Effective SOA layer supporting both SOAP and REST
3. Good SLA management along with Response measurement. It supports boht a single SLA or multiple SLAs
4. Strong logging mechanism with configurable event, activity notification, email eater. The email eater allows for ticket creation and updates via email without having to log into the application. Also, the Normal survey, and for change management, Risk Survey.
5. From 12.5 onward, it comes with a combined CMDB and visualizer along with Remote Support for taking remote control of end users while working on a ticket.

1. Bundled CA EEM (LDAP Application from CA) has improved, and it supports multiple AD integrations in v12.51.x
2. Up to v12.7, the load balancing feature (Primary and Secondary Server Configuration) was crude and script based, and from v12.9 onward, it is UI based. Apart this, from v12.9 onward CA SDM supports advanced availability which assures fail over along with load balancing
3. Internally lots of schema structures have changed to help improving our performance
4. Knowledge Management becomes smarter and from 12.9 onward it becomes federated Search enabled to capture from heterogeneous sources, Like Google, SharePoint etc.
5. Support community is strong and end users and customers can ask for feature enhancements through the Community after getting it verified by the product engineering team
6. v12.5 onward, Incident, Problem and Request Management can be extensible or customized with CA ITPAM. Initially it used to have CA Workflow which is replaced by CA ITPAM i.e. much stable, robust and high performance process automation engine.
7. v14.1 onward, CA Service Desk Manager gets packaged with CA Service Catalog, EEM, ITPAM, Open Space – a common portal to raise and track ticket for end user (but accessibility is controlled through licenses)
8. Integration documentation has been improved a lot with code snippets and examples since v12.5
9. Role Based Access Control allows user to login to the system with permissions based on their role. Single login and Multi-tenancy, hosting multiple sub-business units in a single instance were introduced in v12.1.

1. Release Management is not supported out of the box
2. SLO Management
3. Cloud, SSL Configuration, Remote Support and Chatting
4. Support for different mailing protocol other than SMTP, POP3/IMAP such as for MS Office 360 exchange
5. Conditional Survey so it doesn’t send a survey on the closing of a Parent Ticket but of the children

I've used it for eight years and have over 20,000 hours of project exposure on it directly and indirectly.

When we upgraded from 11.2 to 12.0, we faced an issue but later found out that it happened due to information discrepancies caused by ineffective data maintenance of CA SDM by our customer.

We have never faced an issue in a supported environment using the out of the box features. If we encounter an issue, we follow the log by increasing Log levels or contact CA Support help resolve it.

It can handle request of around 5000 concurrent end users in an optimum environment.

2008-2011 – 3.5/5

2011-2014 – 3/5

2014-Present – 4/5

They have a very fast turnaround time, strong community, and helpful support team.

We have never worked with another product.

The initial setup is straightforward. One can dump all databases and applications with one primary server into a single box with a minimum 8 GB RAM for applications and 8 GB RAM for databases in a vanilla setup. This allows you to have CA CMDB, Support Automation (Remote Connect to the end user by an analyst) along with a ticketing system and Knowledge Management.

A vanilla setup involve the following three steps, and the times given are adjustable +/-15 minutes -

1. Database setup (10 minutes)
2. Software installation (45 minutes)
3. Configuration (five minutes)

We have never worked with another product.

Understand Requirements and ITSM Processes for the required organization and identify the process stakeholders. Then, schedule a phased deployment, e.g. Asset and Configuration Management first, then Request, Incident, and Problem Management, then finally Change Management. You should consider solution architecting and conduct Training for the end user.