Clarity SM Reviews

The new xFlow interface that was introduced for Level 1 analysts really helps the them to achieve the best and fastest result for their users/customers.

First, based on certain ticket attributes, the heat of tickets is calculated and the list is sorted so the analyst can always continue to work on the ticket with the highest priority.

Then, ticket data is analyzed by the system to give analysts hints on experts or similar tickets/solutions.

Last but not least, the research tool is great to search the internet for solutions and get information back to the ticket.

The intelligence introduced into the product keeps getting better the longer you use it. Unified Self Service gives our end users an interface that attracts people and which they want to use, as it looks great and the offerings we provide makes their work life easier.

The methodology introduced for Level 1 analysts needs to be taken to Change Management Process. It would be useful to be able to look in Change Management and see the current status of the process. For example, it could show that this change has five steps and the analyst is performing step three. Also, end users would benefit from this step view.

Change Management is the most complex ITIL Process. Here a clear guidance for the person in action or all actors are important. Currently, there is room for improvement.The change process has a variable amount of steps to complete, depending on several attributes. If you look into a change, you should directly see that you are on step three out of seven, so you have a clear idea of how many steps have to be completed and how many are already completed. It gives you a good understanding of where you are in the process.

We have been using the solution now for eight years. It has given us a huge benefit in our daily work.

We have not had any problems with stability. We run the system for multiple customers and as a SaaS offering with very good stability.

The solution scales very well. A greatly improved version was introduced 3 years ago and since then, we have not had any issues with scalability or stability.

the SLAs provided are real life proven, we faced some priority 1 issues and got quick solutions and it works throughout their support centers.

We have experienced very good technical support. When you prepare for a go-live, you can engage with a dedicated technical support engineer in advance to get priority support in case issues occur during, or shortly after, an upgrade.

We used in-house solutions and it did not give us the coverage over all the ITIL processes to provide professional service/support.

Setup and integration went smooth. After installation, we were able to import ITIL content to get started modifying the processes to our needs.

we did a in house implementation only for difficult integrations/customizations we involved the vendor. They have professionals that know the software very well.

Pricing is simple, as it’s per concurrent analysts.

We looked into other vendors too, such as Cherwell. But this is already 7 years ago. Since then, we observe the market and review our decision every two years to make sure that our decision is still right.

It provides great possibilities. To get the most value out of the solution, make sure to get your people in service management and administrators trained.

The important part for me is not related to any of the features the product offers as such as it doesn't offer anything some other product wouldn't offer. What I find comforting is that CA has been around for decades and therefore it is seen as a reliable partner, so companies buy their software even when there would be possibly better alternatives available. If I'd have to name one feature that makes it a viable option for some, I'd say it is the on-site installation instead of having your possibly sensitive data in the cloud.

I've worked as an employee and as an independent consultant for a number clients so I can't really speak to how this product has improved my organization. Usually, the organizations that decided to buy CA's service management solution had a very poor incident/request/change management system and process implemented, and this is what they got the product for. For some customers, it was way overkill when they would've been better off with some other commercial or open source solution. For some customers, it was scalable and robust enough to take the load the customer's use required.

The product has traditionally lacked the tools to support data migration from development to QA and then to production. CA has made a tool for this on the latest release but I haven't laid my hands on it yet. Also, data manipulation outside the UI - the parts that aren't modifiable through the UI by default and where the effort to enable it would be disproportional to the gained benefit - really lacks support from CA. They do ship tools that can achieve this but they're clunky, counterintuitive and prone to errors. Additionally, they bypass all the checks the system has in place for ensuring data integrity. Therefore, no, I'm not a big fan of those, and I've written my own tools to handle the data manipulation in a way that all the checks are made. Luckily, CA provides a couple of APIs for this. Also, the UI is a bit outdated and, while CA is working on bringing it to this century, they're still far away from it. The good part is it's pretty much just good old HTML and JavaScript, with just a hint of syntactic sugar from CA and you're golden.

The product has potential and if your business is flexible enough so that you can adjust the way of working to what the product offers out of the box, then it might be a good solution. However, I'm cutting down the score because of bad design decisions and outright bad implementation on some specific areas. Also, customizing the product to your needs beyond the basic UI changes means you'll have to hire either CA's professional services or an external consultant. Luckily, that's what pays my salary, so I'm not complaining too loudly. CA does offer training for this but they don't tell you the juicy bits. You'll have to reverse engineer and hack your way around to get to them.

I've worked with the product since 2008.

Deployment is more or less point-and-click.

Stability is usually ok, but sometimes you encounter issues that are sporadic and you have no way of reproducing those. Therefore, in the end, you just learn to live with them and find either a workaround or a quick-and-dirty fix that will hide the issue until it resurfaces. Since version r12.7, there has been fault tolerancy and high availability features built into the product, but it could've been done better. Officially the load balancer only supports F5 load balancers. However, with the price tag they have, I don't see too many medium or even large organizations going with that. They cook up their own solution, trading off some of the capabilities that make the system fault tolerant or HA in the first place.

Customer service is fine and their customer service manager actually follows through if you give them not-so-positive feedback on the case review you get after every case is closed.

Tech support is very courteous and it has some of the sharpest minds I've seen in CS that just enjoy the first line support and they really know the product inside out. Then there's a bunch of adequately competent people who can get you past the first line and you'll get your case handled even when it takes a bit more explaining.

Apart from the user perspective, I have no experience in the design and implementation of alternative products beyond the basic installation.

The initial setup is pretty much next-next-next-next-ok, if you just need to get it running to play with it. After you start thinking about security or fault tolerance and scalability, it becomes more complex. However, just to evaluate it a blunt tool from the shed will be enough to ram it in and get it running.

This is not relevant, as I'm working as an independent consultant doing the implementations. But if you want my advice, for the design, try to get someone who knows the product but is not in CA's pocket already. That way, you'll get honest opinions and options given to you. For the implementation, it doesn't matter, as long as the designer is supporting the implementation phase, has some stake in it and is technically able to do it in case the implementation team lacks the skills.

I'll say this: This is not cheap. However, with the rather hefty price tag, you do get the support from CA and for the alternative commercial products designed for same scale use, the price is still competitive.

Contact CA and get a 30-day trial license. You'll get to see the product and play around it. It will not be enough to implement any custom features you want apart from the very basic ones, but at least you can get a feel of it. Additionally, you could hire a consultant to evaluate the suitability for your business, assuming you have the service management processes mapped out already. If you have no established processes and you can implement whatever process the tool can support, then you're good to go and it's only a matter of comparing the prices.

The most valuable features for us was the ability to calculate service levels for different time periods as well as the ability to store and archive contracts. BSI has templates for calculating key services levels as well as the capability to allowing coding for more complicated, unique measurements. Data for key metrics in individual contracts can be used to creat

It's given us the ability to allow for automation of service-level reporting.

It needs better report-generation features and allow for different types of data.

I've used it for six years.

There have been no issues with deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Technical support is excellent. I give them a 9/10.

The initial setup was straightforward and was done by a third-party installer. I'd recommend using the three-tier solution rather than the two-tier solution for installation.

The implementation was done with a combination of in-house and vendor reams. Be sure that your hardware and storage capabilities are adequate prior to doing so.

Licensing costs can be high as they're based on the number of service-level metrics rather than by user. For a large number of users, try to get the enterprise license rather than individual licenses for each metric.

Plan what information is needed for reporting before entering contracts and metrics for calculation. Have a visual basic developer on your team to script business logics used for metric calculations.

Compared to others, I like the ease of Service Desk. It's easy to maneuver around in. It's very user friendly. Things make sense where some other products we looked at, they were very confusing.

We found that there's plenty of things that this tool does that we frankly aren't utilizing. Other tools looked neat, but when we got to really looking at it we just have it. We're not using it to it's potential to be honest with you. We do have the CMDB, but we're not utilizing a lot of the integrations to the potential like the IT workflow. A lot of the automated processes we're just not using and I'm sitting here looking at this stuff going, "We are barley using this tool."

We could be doing a better job, but unfortunately out hands are tied because it takes our system administrators time and effort to implement these things for us. Whether we want them or not, it's whether their team has time.

The thing that gets me is they sell it as a customizable tool, but the more customizations you add to it, the less stable it becomes. So over the last few upgrades, we've tried to come out of box as much as possible, and that has worked for us. Sometimes, people want and want and want and change and change and change and we find you really can live without all those customizations and it works just as well, I mean, works better. We're getting ready to upgrade to 14.1 and we were talking about that. Really, the last few years, we haven't really had to use the word outage very often.

I've suggested a couple of improvements. It might not mean anything to you specifically, but I have joined one of their communities and suggested that, when it comes to groups, they need to have a separation of groups so that you can have a separate group for work flow tasks in the change side than you do on the other side. The problem is, we have business people and different approvals on the change side that need to approve change orders, but they don't need to be involved on the ticket. But what happens on the incident problem request side, when people are playing hot potato trying to get the ticket out of their queue, they're looking for a group and they're picking it whether it's a my work flow group or not. We've tried to creatively name them so people won't use them, but there needs to be a separation. You ought to be able to select what modules you want that to be available in.

One other thing I can think of. I've noticed with this latest upgrade they're starting to change their terminology. They're calling incidents issues in the service catalog and I'm really curious to go talk to someone about that. We have what we call an issue module for our business side and that is for our external customers. When we plan to bring about the service catalog, they're going to be really confused when it says open an issue. Why did they do that? Why did they change that terminology and I've heard them use it in here. You know, "When you go to open your issue." I'm like, that's an incident. That's not an issue. That's two different worlds.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's reliable.

It's scalable.

That would be the tier above me, so I haven't had to deal with them.

ServiceNow we also looked at. I would have been okay either way. In all honesty, it was more of a cloud solution and we wouldn't have needed our system administrators for as much as the upgrade work. That was kind of one of our driving things that did lean us towards that. The other tools were way too expensive compared to what we had. When we did the comparison, again, the new tools looked tiny and new, but we weren't utilizing what we have. We have some of the same features. We just haven't used them.

You don't have to go for the newest item out there. There's reliability, stability in maybe some of the older tools as well.

For me, personally, the ease of interface is the most valuable feature. It's easy to look up tickets, requiring less clicks compared to CSM. The functionality is more robust than CSM.

It wasn't really rolled out to the organization, it was more of an IT tool, because we didn't fully utilize the tool, as we expected to do work in a mature state within the organization.

SDM could be improved. I don't know if it was in the infrastructure where it crashed a lot, or if it was with the tool. I think maybe I got used to it and then it sort of wasn't an issue anymore.

No issues with deployment.

I noticed more crashing for some strange reason, being that it's on our on servers and we don't know why.

I think the issue, though, goes back to if you use the full functionality of SDM. So, we were on it for two years and we moved it over to the cloud. There were probably a lot of factors why we couldn't optimize SDM to its potential. It’s more of an organizational type of factor.

I wasn't involved in the SDM portion of support tickets, so I can't say.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

Seeing all the demos at CA World, it has a lot of potential, that we, again, did not make use of. So, it's like, oh, it could do that, really? From what I saw with the demos is that there are a lot of functionalities out there. For example, the new 14.1 version seems to scale more with customers. So, if you're looking for more customer-facing input, I would say that it would probably do it.

The main purpose is for service desk use. It is a repository of information.

It helps when you have an incident or performing a problem change management process. You can view what all the relationships are between the CI that you are changing or using. It helps the engineers to better understand what they are facing.

It has all our configurations. All our infrastructure configurations are on a single pane of glass to view, allowing for one single point of information.

• We would like more information about all the configurations that we have on our infrastructure side.
• The interface for the users is a bit old-fashioned and not user-friendly.
• We would like the CMDB to be populated automatically. At the moment, everything is manually created.

It's very stable. I don't have any problems regarding to it. 

There are no issues with the scalability. It is fully supported.

All support for CA products is quite good. It is not the best support, but all our problems have been solved.

I was not involved. It was already implemented when I joined the company. It was migrated from another company, and I understand the migration process was not difficult nor complex. 

It is quite a good product, and it's stable. They have a lot of features that you can customize to your organization. 

Everything should be automated, because if you are trusting on users to create their information, it will be not the truth on the moment. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability of the vendor
• Support
• How the vendor is positioned in the market.

Incident request, problem, and change management.

It's a solution. It needs a facelift, but it works. It improves our service delivery process. We're more efficient. We're leveraging the ticketing system, which is always more efficient, so we can measure and improve.

Extraction, the reporting tool that I tied into it. It's real-time reporting that's easy to use.

The user interface is just boring. I'd like to see a more interactive UI, from the end-user perspective, and from the analyst's perspective. I would like a product that looks like it was developed maybe in 2015, or at least 2012. Right now you see it, it's very flat.

It's pretty stable.

Scalability is good. All I have to do is buy more licenses and I can scale up as big as I want - maybe stand up another server and get a bigger database - but I'm okay.

They already had this stood up when I came to this company. But I own the system now. We just upgraded about a year and half ago and it was painful.

First of all it cost me a think $70,000 to pay my consultant. We had the testing of the dev environment, and then testing of the production environment, so it was two weekends out of my life. And stuff broke. 

For me the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is quality, because if the quality's not there then it's my time; quality of the vendor's service that they provide. If they're going to upgrade, I expect them to do the testing. Cost is a concern, but I'm already paying out the nose.

I heard an industry analyst say this once, and this is very true: No one likes their ticketing system. Everybody wants another one. It's just a difficult space. However, I would look for something that users want to use, and if you can get that amount of self-service tickets to rise, your cost of support goes down. So a good user interface is important.

This product has so many adjustment possibilities for many different clients.

One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constantly increasing needs of the customers experience, we always have to make changes in the way we are working to provide satisfaction to our clients. Thus, this application has many thousands of ways to do that.

• We certainly increased the quality of our work.

• The system is more robust. We can elaborate on a better and complex service. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

• The application has the possibility to integrate with other systems. This, in turn, transformed the information to be more solid.

• Due to the integration with Business Intelligence (BI), we had possibilities to create reports. In these reports, we can see, in-depth, about where and when exactly we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the count of open and duplicate tickets.

One area that this product can improve is in the mobile user aspect. We need to get more solutions to our client's mobile, so they will have the same mobile experience that they have on their computer.

I have been using it for about five years. I started to use this system as a customer and after a short time, i.e., within a three month period, I specialized in it. Now I am working as an administrator.

I didn't particularly have any issues with the stability.

None of my clients have reported any scalability issues. I didn't find any such issues either.

The technical support is the best support that I've seen. They are very fast and provide security, in terms of responding to my tickets. Even if they don't know the answer immediately, I don't need to wait so long to receive their response back. They are always positive.

I have used a different solution before, but it wasn’t what my clients really needed. The other systems don't have a variety of services that CA SDM has included under only one system. If CA SDM doesn't have a particular feature, then CA has facility integration with its other systems.

The setup was straightforward, once you have almost all the things planned.

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

Plan every step you need for implementation. Always look forward to every step that your client would need in order to get there.