Infrastructure monitoring. Right now, we do not have an application monitoring setup. That is something that we are looking to get, so at the moment we are just using it to monitor the infrastructure.

We just got it set up a year ago, and then had a company move in between. So, we just started using it, technically, probably like three months ago.

Diagnosing issues is a lot faster. We can pinpoint what is going on more quickly than trying to figure it out. Trying to drill in it in other ways, especially with our teams being kind of split. We can all access it all at the same time.

It allows all of us to be able to see what we need to see very quickly and easily.

It notifies us quickly and easily on the 3D view. We can see when the monitoring lights show up over the racks. It is nice to be able to just see that at a blink of an eye if an alarm is going off, then we can just dial in from there.

It has been very stable. I love it so far.

We have not run into any issues. I will not know until we deep dive into it later, when we get everything up and running. We only have a few racks online right now. Until we get it fully deployed, I will not really know if we would be able to easily add or remove devices as needed.

We have run into a couple of issues, but our rep has been very readily available and responsive. So the issues were fixed right away. It has been great.

My co-worker, who is involved in the initial setup, says that, "Everything has been great so far." Straightforward.

From what I have seen, version 9 looks great.

Basically, the most valuable feature is the ability to scale and quickly allow us to deploy an infrastructure management solution to our clients in a very timely manner, across the board, using many different technologies; so, storage, databases, OSs, and synthetic monitoring, things like that.

It allows us to create a baseline template for each of the different technologies. That allows to quickly deploy our solution set for that particular technology base to each different client. So, across the board, we have a baseline of measurable, simple deployment mechanisms.

I would probably like to see more out-of-the-box solutions that I don't have to individually go into, configure and set up myself.

With every new probe that is released, we have to come up with a good monitoring template to accurately identify the key metrics for that specific technology to monitor it correctly. We have to find SME’s for that technology, sit down with them, show them all the metrics that we can collect then ask what are the key important metrics that if this breaches a threshold, should we alert. This is very time consuming for all parties.

I've been using it for two and a half years.

It is very stable, I would say. Maybe, we had issues during upgrades, but it's been relatively very stable.

It's very scalable. We have no issue adding on additional clients because of just the way the product has been designed, it allows us to scale very heavily.

Technical support is excellent. I've been working with them for 10+ years. I have a good relationship with the support company. I know every support individual there and it is run in a very professional, friendly manner.

Upgrades are very straightforward. You have the wiki site, which tells you step by step. I do run through the upgrade in a test environment first before actually implementing in production.

I was able to quickly learn it and use it, deploy it, modify it to our specific needs, and it's been very reliable since.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the history of the company, how long it's been in business, what offerings in terms of support it offers, and really other customer feedback based on their personal experiences.

1. Scheduled maintenance - it gives a good backbone to CA UIM as a product because we do not have to rely on another Event Management tool to do that.
2. Logmon - this probe is sophisticated in the sense that it offers you options as to how to monitor the log - from the start, from last resumed etc. It also has options to execute commands when a log is found.
3. Adding third-party widgets onto the dashboard - you have the liberty to freely exaggerate your UI on the UMP Portal.
4. URL_Response - This probe has SSL monitoring available, which is pro-actively calculating in how many days the certificate is going to expire! It is pretty cool.

It had been suggested that we should look for other tools in order to ensure Application Monitoring. We managed to convince our client to use CA UIM as it individually ensures monitoring of all the aspects of an application, be it processes, event logs, URLs, ping availability, server response time, log monitoring, database monitoring, clusters, and what not.

If it had solid capabilities to ensure complete network infrastructure monitoring is performed that would be good. Everything in a single platform for the complete IT infrastructure will be a boon for every customer. In addition to that, telephony, and VoIP monitoring is also an aspect that can be looked at. Transaction monitoring will be yet another field of research and innovativeness.

It has been close to three years that the product has been deployed in our environment and serving us well in order to monitor the complete server based infrastructure. We recently upgraded from v6.5, and have had no issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Support from the vendor has generally been rather slow and ineffective, at least in our case. This should be a key area for CA to dig deep.

We had been using BMC Patrol and BPPM for infrastructure monitoring. However, we switched to CA UIM as it promised to be equally competent. And we have not found ourselves complaining since then.

It is a bit tedious architecture as of now, a one-server-per-component set-up. It still does not qualify to be called user-friendly.

We have had vendors responsible for completed deployment. Before proceeding for implementation, prerequisites should be gauged effectively, it helps ease the whole implementation.

It provides a wide variety of monitoring options to the user. In addition to that, the reporting has good features like trend reports, customized dashboards, etc. It still has a way forward to strengthen the network as well as application monitoring and newer versions might have that in scope.

The product promises an overall good experience to users. Users will find it easy to access, without being highly technical or thoroughly well versed with the product.

Their concept of probes, where you have a lot of predefined items that you collect. Also, their baseline thresholds that speed up a lot the implementation, and the evolution of the monitoring system.

For example, once you have applied the SQL Server Probe, it collects all sorts of data -- from the log size to the time that each query is taken to execute on the database -- with the same click.

In terms of features, it is easy to use and implement, and CA provide solid support.

In the past we would spend months in meetings with a new customer, defining what they wanted to monitor, and most of the time we would come back home to see if that was possible to do. However, with CA UIM, we can provide our clients with a predefined menu of items to collect, and we can select those faster and more efficiently.

We have been able to automate the Active Directory user provisioning integrated with the HR systems. This means that was can provide users with a self-service password reset tool. Also, it has given us Log Management for our daily routines.

They need to improve in their mobile interface to enable access to the dashboards through that channel. Their application requires a lot of servers to run, so that architecture is also something that requires attention.

A module for keyboard and mouse actions would be very interesting, for actions that cannot be performed differently. Also, it would be interesting for them to enable SAP integration in the future.

We have been using UIM/Nimsoft for about two years now.

It requires a very skilled team to be able to deploy that application, and if you don’t invest in training and don’t go over a long training period, you might find it difficult to deploy.

The application requires a lot of capacity to run and grow, so it’s important that you be aware of the impact of the growth of your IT infrastructure on the monitoring system.

Capacity management must be done on a regular basis if your IT environment grows too quickly.

6/10.

7/10.

We used to use a Nagios-based solution that was cheaper, but the problem was that we didn’t have the proper support, especially for application management such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix, Amazon, etc. With CA UIM we were able to start monitoring those applications out of the box.

The initial setup was complex due to the training hours, as the technical team had to go through it to be able to use the application to its full potential.

We did it in-house.

I think that’s always something harder to measure, but I would say that we were able to gain some clients due to this change to CA UIM.

Since we provide services using the CA UIM platform, I would say that for a partner they have a very strong pricing approach.

We evaluated SolarWinds and Nagios.

First of all design do a analysis of what kind of process you can automate in your company, that way will be easier for you to capture value from a solution like this. It's important to pay attention to the infrastructure requirements.

There is a large selection of Application specific probes available. We are primarily a Microsoft shop, and most all of our needs are covered with what is offered. This relies on backend sources such as PerfMon counters, event viewer, services and similar. It covers our basic monitoring needs in this regard.

We use this in a Multi-Tenant environment as an MSP. Prior to UIM deployment, we were using SCOM which was overly complicated and difficult to manage. UIM fulfilled our needs at the time by allowing simpler deployment and management.

Although it is better than SCOM, it still needs major improvements to usability. If you need a rapid deployment solution, this is not the best tool for that job. You can create Super Packages which allow you to pre-configure Probes, but it still requires a lot of invested time to set up and still needs customized to each environment if they are not identical. UIM and its agent/probes rely on JRE7u45. Support is not offered for any newer versions at this time. I would like to see better rapid deployment options, interface updates, and less reliance on Java.

We have been using this solution since before CA bought it from Nimsoft. I have been using it for about a year.

We have run into instances where probes are no longer supported and are integral to our monitoring, and there is not a bulk solution for replacing with the new supported probe. If you are using the SSL Tunneling in the Hub Probe, Support has been unable to identify a method to monitor the tunnel status which is built into the Windows Service. Many times, the tunnel will experience communication issues and being queueing thousands of alarms, alerts, qos but we have no way of being notified until we notice we are no longer getting metrics. The Hub probe has not been reliable for us in the past several versions across various sites and we often need to work with their developers to resolve issues. SAN and Networking appliance compatibly is severely lacking (Dell EQL, Nimble, StorSimple, Cisco ASA, and more all have issues or have no support). You can custom create via SNMP MIBs, but this requires manual implementation.

Support has been very responsive to our requests. They understand the limitations of the software and do their best to accommodate our needs and issues, but the software just doesn’t seem to be meant for smaller businesses and needs a lot of hands on attention.

We previously used SCOM which is similar in many regards. This was the first product we evaluated and chose it mainly because they offered to customize it to fit our needs. Other vendors were not as responsive to our requests, although I feel they may have been a better fit overall.

It was not straightforward. There are many modifications you need to make to text based configuration files that are not well documented is deployment instructions. We have multiple CA solutions that were not easy to integrate. This required and still requires time with their developers to resolve issues.

We had an outside company assist with the installation. I would recommend getting as much hands on time as possible with an expert. UIM is not intuitive, there is a high learning curve.

If you have a large scale deployment or resell services and have a dedicated administrator with java dev experience, pricing may be suitable for you. CA is one of the more expensive solutions, and not one of the best in its category.

UIM is showing its age, and need a major overhaul to keep up with competitors. I would recommend using other solutions.

What's most valuable to me is the fact that it is very customizable, allowing me to play around with the configuration and thresholds. Also, I enjoy the simple GUI which makes it easy to use.

It has allowed us to monitor the crucial parts of our network, minimizing downtime and issues. Also, it alerts the relevant teams as soon as we have breaks in network connectivity, high load on hardware, etc.

There are a few areas for improvement, but I would have to say some of the Java content is a little buggy and would definitely like to see continued upgrades and improvements in the GUI. I know some of the stuff is preferred to be set on the controllers, however accessing the console from GUI is a more efficient way as you can control your user accounts there and it makes it safer than giving someone access to the controllers. The problem is sometimes you have to access the controllers in order to do certain tasks.

I've used it for one year.

There were no issues with deploying it.

There were a few instances when Nimsoft agents would crash on hosts. However, this was not too serious and it boiled down to some minor external factors that were solved quickly with customer support.

There have been no issues scaling it out.

We had meetings with CA's customer quality once a week and, overall, the communication was pretty good and reliable.

No other solution was used.

The setup was fairly simple and straightforward, and we had some decent training initially that made it smooth sailing.

Implementation was done in-house. As long as you take the training and follow the instructions, you can't go wrong, but if you do, customer support is very helpful.

As a simple solution for monitoring it's pretty handy, simple to use, very customizable, and integrates with Salesforce.

The most valuable features are the alerts that go to the service desk and the application-level monitoring.

Having a monitoring tool allows us to preempt disasters. When it hits thresholds, then an alert is triggered and we can act, reducing user impact. That reduces service interruption.

It seems clunky, not as user friendly as Spectrum, for example. When setting up monitoring you can have Nimsoft agents installed on some servers but not others, so maybe it’s a bit more complex than it needs to be. It’s not as straightforward or easy to implement as Spectrum was.

It serves its purpose. We only seem to be able to have one threshold per server at this stage instead of multiple; it’s not clear whether that’s a limitation of the software. They have a whole bunch of different groups – for example one group has a threshold of a certain value, and another group with another threshold. So many groups can quickly get out of hand; managing that many different groups can be difficult.

We just have to watch the group sprawl.

Our networks team have, so I can’t comment on what that support is like. We’ve had the support, but I think it’s a combination – they’ve advised on best practices and how we should do things so they’ve done their job to a certain extent. But we haven’t had a CA resource for implementing those best practices.

It was already in production when I joined.