Clarity SM Reviews

Incident management

Adoption of ITIL incident management for business process re-engineering was very easy to fit into the CA Service Desk Manager Incident Management module. It allowed IT operation support to easily identify, track and monitor incidents with data in 45 days that was analyzed. Within the first calendar year of deploy, the incident manager was able to strategically set and meet the field support goal of responding and resolving 25% of incidents remotely.

Ticket event and notification creation/management is cumbersome and has not improved over the many versions I've worked with. Workflow design and management requires knowledgeable administrators with programming experience.

I have used it for 9+ years.

I have encountered stability issues, although the tool is relatively stable in smaller to mid-sized environments and has gotten better with newer versions. Complex client environments can severely impact stability. When there are network hiccups, the system does not recover easily without manual interaction.

The tool can be load balanced and clustered, which makes it very scalable. The architecture can be designed to segment the Service Desk support team and the regular users. This is helpful as the Service Desk can continue to work efficiently when other users are experiencing performance degradation.

Vendor support meets customer SLAs. First-level technical support is very good at escalating as appropriate.

I have used many different solutions. My role is a consultant that helps design and enhance service management solutions. The customers mainly switch as they adopt the ITIL framework and move away from non-ITIL products that cannot be (easily) modified/adapted to fit the new IT operations strategic model.

Installation is straight forward for conventional configuration following CA-recommended specifications. Advanced Availability configuration is more complex and requires good planning.

As a technical consultant, I'm usually brought in after tool selection is decided on.

The tool supports several of the ITIL processes. Plan the implementation such that when other functions/processes (inter-related as well as non-interrelated such as ITAM, CMDB) are to be brought online, the initial implementation solution does not need to be re-engineered.

We use this solution for request and incident management, as well as configuration.

Initially, CA Service Desk Manager was used by two divisions within the organization. In the past two years was rolled out to two more divisions.

The most valuable features of this solution are reporting, configuration monitoring, and the Request and Incidents workflow.

The monitoring tool is in need of improvement.

We use it in our IT department to connect with our customers.

The performance has been excellent.

By connecting us with our customers.

It enables our coordinators to connect to our customers, and our customers are number one.

It adds tons of value. It gives us one central location to know, not only who is contacting us, but what they're contacting us for, what application they're contacting us for.

The new chat feature, I love that. They are always one step ahead of what we need. Usually, if I need something, I contact my rep and they tell us you have it.

In general, in terms of improvement, I would say our reps need to be a little more one on one. In the past we've had issues with that. But our current rep we love. 

Maybe training could be better.

Just little technical tweaks here and there. Like more options. For example "Organization." We wanted that to be available inside the change order, as well as the ticket and the request. And that's not available.

It's always on and it's always there. We've never had any issues with it being unstable.

Scalability is great. We can use it in our company from our IT department to our sales department. It works for everyone.

Tech support is fast. Fast, knowledgeable. I like that. I don't have to contact them often, just whenever I have a question.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I was involved in the upgrade. The solution was already there. But when I started, I knew that there were new features that we needed, so we upgraded.

We went from 12.1 to 14, so there was a lot involved in it. But from what I hear, the upgrade from 14 to 17 is way easier. So I look forward to that.

The issues we had were migration issues, getting our information from one place to the next and making sure everything was as everyone needed.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is communication. I like them to be upfront, honest, and transparent. Transparency means, when I call them they're honest about what they have available and what they can do, and not beating around the bush.

We use it as a help desk ticket. Anytime users have a problem, they can go in, put the ticket in, and we are able to track what the technicians do.

Its benefits. Going back to the ticketing part, we are benefiting by being able to put time to what our technicians are doing. Without the ticket there, without them having something that says, "Hey, I worked for this user to do this." We do not have anyway of tracking without the software of how much time they are spending on different things that they are working on.

The ticketing aspect. Knowing that there is a ticket there. Something that we can justify what our users have done for our end users.

I come from a ticket background. I have been with this company for about a year, but I have been in the ticketing system with my previous company for the last six. The big thing, or the problem, that I have is not being able to see tickets on a bigger scale. I can see the request, or if it is the way they categorize them, but I can't see the overall bigger picture. 

Let us say, for example, I have a technician that is out for a week, and I want to go into all of his open tickets regardless whether it is a request incident or a change order. I can't do that very easily. I have to go through and look at the request. I have go through and look at the instance. I have to go through and look at change orders individually. Instead of being able to say okay what is on this technician's docket across the board. I have no way of doing that.

We are still working towards integration with the hardware as well, where I have seen others products more tightly integrated with hardware. For example, with Quest KACE (formerly Dell), the hardware is right there. I can easily add hardware for a user to a ticket. I know you can do that in this, but it is not as easy.

The stability seems stable and robust enough. There are parts inside, which I could see being done differently.

The scalability is good. As far as it goes, we are not that big of a company, but it seems to do well for us in this area.

Not being part of the process when we choose this product, because I have only been with the company for a year. In any kind of software like this, if you can take it for a test drive, because we did change software at my old job, that is a real good key or determining factor as to whether or not you like the software. Take the software for a test drive in your work environment.

• We have our AT side, which we use for our service desk. 
• We use it for our software development lifecycle. 
• We use it for our CIS Admin change, so any kind of changes that are happening. 
• We also have a CRM system that was built a hundred years ago. 
• It is used to manage our resorts, and our resort operations, and then also our call centers.

The database. The front-end is a little dated. They are working on it, but it is a little dated. So, the database and the power that is driven behind the database.

It has made us a lot more organized, and a lot more aware of what needs to happen. Just now, some of our teams are really adopting the managed change, such as using the product instead of emails back and forth. 

The UI needs to be upgraded.

It is pretty stable. I have had a few problems with stability, but I do not think it is actually the fault of the product as much as it was the vendor that installed it for us.

I can do whatever I want on it. I have it customized.

Technical support is sketchy at best. I have an open ticket right now that has been open for a few weeks. They are a challenge to work with. It took three weeks to get it escalated up to where it probably needed to be in the first place. I do not call support unless something is really broken and I don't know how to fix it.

I was involved in the upgrades. From the old database to the new database, I did that upgrade, and actually a fresh install, which was very straightforward. That was version 11 though. The newer versions have become a little bit more complicated to do a fresh install on, rather than doing an upgrade. They are a little bit easier to upgrade versus doing a fresh install.

A vendor team.

Give it a shot, but go through a partner.

It does what it is supposed to do. I can make it do more than it is supposed to do. I can customize it as I want. Most of the time the customizations will upgrade, but if they do not, I can reach out to people and find a different solution. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Whether or not they are going to help me.

The most valuable feature is the ability to integrate many processes – like change management, incident management, problem management, CMDB, all of them – in the same tool.

The benefits that we are seeing from the service management is since you can integrate the products, you can make correlations of which changes cause incidents, or which configuration updates have changes or have many incidents over a certain period, and from that, gather more data to work with it.

From the implementation side, it's a tool that you can customize a lot. This customization sometimes, on upgrades and so on, it gives you a really hard time, so I would suggest trying to build a solution that you can operate with the customizations that the product allows you to do.

I would like to see a new UI, and stuff that will keep customizations going on so you don't have to do all of the reworking all over again to keep up with the next product version.

The stability just depends. In small shops, it's very stable, but once you go into big shops, such as banking infrastructure, that have many policies, sometimes there are some challenges there.

It gives the opportunity for growth. If you have more services and more users, you just keep growing and scaling the hardware and the software, and you still get the same response.

The initial setup just depends whether you have training or not. Usually, you just need the first training. After that, you can just follow up with the guidelines that CA has given to you and you can pretty much go through them.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor like CA is just the recognition; the support provided for it. I want to have support from a company and CA just delivers that.

My rating is basically based mostly on the integration; to try out a new solution, and we chose service management; the process integration. How many solutions can give you that process integration together in just one tool? Most of the tools are just for tickets, incidents, or problems, but they don't give you the whole package together.

The most valuable features of this product are security, scalability and the possibilities for customization.

We can’t compete with the price against small local vendors. Demanding customers are our market.

We have mainly made money by selling our consultant services around it.

Some the features that can be improved are:

• Usability: xFlow is a great step forward, but further steps are needed. Public bids in Finland often require HTML5 UI. xFlow fulfills that requirement.

• Public bids in Finland often do not permit browser plugins: Java or Adobe Flash Player. In such cases, we just have to offer other solutions since Visualizer requires Flash. Thus, there is a need to get rid of Flash.

• Internalization: Check out language plugin in ServiceNow. CA is quite far behind in this area.

I have used this solution since the year 2009.

Some bugs have been found during the years, but they have been resolved.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

It’s okay. We have had issues while getting fixes for a few older releases.

We had tried a local competing solution in the years 2014-2015. Their UI is much more suitable for sales presentations. However, they have too many issues with stability and their technical support is at a very poor level.

ITSM deployment projects are always quite difficult.

CA is competitive, i.e., if there are a lot of end users compared to number of analysts. However, that is not always the case.

We considered both global and local vendors.

A customer comment after our sales presentation (CA Service Desk Manager + CA Control Minder): "We have finally found a vendor who is serious about security."

I would say the integration to our monitoring products and to other products that we use, that's really key for us. Ease of use, it’s very easy to train. We don't have any issues with people getting in or having access problems. That's been the greatest part - it's easy to administer. Our stability has been really great. We are currently in the process of upgrading to a newer version. We have not run into any issues. We've had a great work with CA.

I would like to see probably not so many individual modules where it kind of wraps it all together. I would like to see like asset management be part of Service Desk so that I don't have to keep buying more modules, I can have everything in one.

Integration is probably one of the biggest for us. We want it to be able to integrate with everything we use so we don't have to rip and replace everything.

I would say it’s pretty good. Like I said all the integration and stuff like that really gives us the ability to scale it to whatever we need. The CA technical support has been amazing. We have had really good luck with every issue that we run into, has been resolved within probably three days. Communication has been amazing. It’s definitely top notch.

We were on a very old version of Remedy, lots of issues. Moving to CA was a pretty easy choice, cost and everything came into play. CA was definitely the right choice for us.

It’s the integration between all the different tools we currently use. Really ServiceNow was the only other. There was a lot of things that CA could do over ServiceNow that we liked. 

I would probably rate it a nine and mainly just because the fact that I would like to see more modules included in service desk. Again I keep going back to integration.

Really look at everything you use and how you can integrate those together, really evaluating that and how easy it is because everybody will tell you they can integrate and for the right amount of money, everybody can. You really want the ease of integration. We were already using Spectrum. It was an easy option there because of the fact the integration was so easy. The integration with X matters that we were already using made sense. It’s very simple and easy to do those integrations compared to having to build new APIs and stuff in order to have those integration.