DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Scalability
• High availability
• Distributed architecture
• Supported platforms

It has simplified our architecture when compared to our previous solution. We now have less servers, and just one solution to monitor all environments (LAN, DMZ).

Administration interface, in particular the infrastructure manager. The event console could also use a make-over.

I've been using it for two years, including Nimsoft v7.

There are no issues if you are well prepared.

No issues were encountered.

No issues were encountered.

It's very good.

It's very good.

We previously used CA Unicenter NSM, but we switched to UIM because NSM was an end of life product and CA no longer supported some common platforms (like RH64bit agents).

It's relatively straightforward, as we spent lots of time on the assessment and architecture analysis.

We implemented it in-house.

• SCOM
• Spectrum
• Tivoli

If you have a highly heterogeneous environment, CA UIM has the best chance of supporting all of your platforms (including probes for more exotic ones). The ease of scaling out your initial setup, the distributed architecture (Nimsoft has its roots in the service provider world) as well as the high availability are all differentiators.

UIM is easy to use and configure and easy to implement and to get up and running “out of the box”. It is also open with its SDK and services.

• UIM helps us go from visions and ideas to concepts and services.
• UIM helps us automate monitoring and implement customers faster.

The SLA module could be improve to be more robust and configurable the same goes for the HUB tunneling.

We’ve been using the solution for 4-5 years. Personally I’ve been using the product for almost 9 years.

No issues installing the product.

Some versions of the UIM HUB probe are unstable and causes the HUB tunneling to stop responding.

There are limitations on how many queues you can use inside the HUB probe. This limitation causes you to add frontend HUBs as a solution.

The customer service is good.

The technical support has improved over the last years and are we are getting better and faster support.

We’ve only used UIM but looked at other tools.

The initial setup is straight forward and easy.

We implement UIM ourselves.

We free up hours for our staff by automating the monitoring and we can provide services to our customers.

The setup cost was quite low because we started with few customers and then we’ve built our services and customer base from that.

Yes, we looked at other products.

We’ve looked at HP, Halcyon and OP5 in the initial phase.

Just look into the prereqs before installing so you’ve got the HW for building your environment. Other than that it is straight forward and by the book.

We find UIM's valuable features to be its flexibility, the fact that it’s easy to expand, and it supports multi-tenancy. There are not many systems focused on managed-service providers and this is one of them, which is a great help to us as it’s difficult to find.

Its flexibility allows us to quickly monitor and manage new technologies and to have the ability to create customer probes.

A lot of the admin is web-based. Having the web-admin portal be a bit more scalable and adding the feature of responsive decision-making process, it would be of benefit to us and I’m sure to others as well.

We've used it for the last two and half years.

We'd had no issues with deployment.

It’s very stable, and more importantly, it supports failover components, which is a great feature.

It does scale very well; we have had no issues here at all.

Technical support seems to be getting better and better. There's also a great forum with community members, which we use and which is an excellent resource.

We're a startup, and this was the first system we put in. With the price point and the support of multi-tenancy, those were the decisive factors.

The initial setup was straightforward and the implementation was rather simple.

My advice would be to thoroughly identify your business objectives. With managed service providers, understand the product and have adequate resources, knowledge, and skills in order to make a smart decision for the company.

• Base set of probes cdm, ntservices, and ntevl processes
• NAS feature which handles all alarm processing
• Hub which handles all the inner message traffic of the product
• UMP which provides ability to visually see what we are monitoring.

It gives a good baseline as to how we go about monitoring our clients, as each one is different but can fall into a specific category of infrastructure monitoring. Our organization knows how to get started with each and every client.

The company has used it for five years, and I've used it for one and a half years.

Certain sites have very secure environments, and you must then setup rules so that the product can still communicate and function in the customized environment.

Certain probes require heavy knowledge on a specific technology before it can start working.

Every product has issues.`

No issues encountered.

I've never had to deal with customer service.

The UIM support team is excellent.

We were using a previous CA solution but it was EOL’d and UIM is the new strategic CA IM product, so we switched.

UIM does have a large initial learning curve for new users, and you must learn the basic architecture. Once understood, the initial setup is then pretty straightforward if you understand the overall big picture.

Initially we attempted to use a vendor, but in the end we did full implementation in house. The vendor was very experienced, but our environment was very tricky and after three attempts we decided to rollout ourselves.

• Ease of deployment
• Number of platforms you are able to monitor
• Collection of both long term reporting data and immediate alert data
• Depth of configuration of the alarm processor

UIM supports AS400, but it is somewhat limited.

I've used it for 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues with the recent versions, and v8.2 is very stable.

Only in database configuration. It needs a lot of planning before the initial install, and our database is over 2TB in size, and was not installed correctly, although this was my fault, and not that of CA.

10/10.

5/10.

We used Nagios in our early years, and we switched because of the power.

It was very simple.

It was done in-house.

I don’t love UIM, but it is the best selection for a multi-tenant infrastructure where SLA’s are a must. The original deployment was very successful, but this is not plug & play. At least one full time administrator is needed. With acquired experience, the product can do almost everything a monitoring product should do, but it is not all “out of the box”

The stability and flexibility of customizing the dashboard and monitoring.

The solution allow us to perform monitoring based on base line monitoring of trends instead of the traditional monitoring based on hard thresholds which is rigid when it comes to flagging alerts.

Its integration to CA's SOI (manager of manager), the out of the box connector release by CA is disappointing.

3 years.

Yes we did but its part and parcel of monitoring products but by far its the most stable one i have come across.

Same answer as deployment.

No. This is one of the best designed products for stability due to its message bus concept design which makes its hub lite in processing.

It depends but definitely the L2 support onwards know their stuff.

Yes, we have used SMARTS and TIVOLI. We switched due to the CA full suit of solution which include netqos, APM and CEM. Nimsoft is part of the suite to allow use to complete the integration with CA SOI.

It is very complex, because this was the first time CA tried to sell the full suite with SOI, netqos, APM, CEM and tried to integrate into a full impact analysis solution.

It was from a vendor team, and to be honest I was not very convinced of their skill set, only the Nimsoft team was up to par with our expectations.

We really don't have a quantitative measurement on this.

No.

We use this solution for monitoring our infrastructure environment; servers, storage, database, and applications. This is an infrastructure monitoring tool. I'm a solutions consultant and we are customers of DX. 

The value of UIM is that we are not only monitoring the infrastructure asset but also monitoring it as an IT service. 

I would like to have the option to monitor via mobile phone so it would be helpful if DX would develop a mobile application. I'd like to see a single dashboard and automation implemented as part of the solution.

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The environment around UIM is sometimes complex and can cause some instability. We have good support to resolve issues when this happens. 

In terms of the knowledge base of the technical staff, they are average. 

Positive

SolarWinds and ManageEngine are both good tools with good technology in this sphere but for our purposes they are unlikely to be able to scale and provide the information we need in our environment. It might work for other companies that have a different environment from ours. It's difficult to compare these solutions head to head because it all depends on an environment's requirements.

The initial setup is easy. Deployment time depends on the number of devices to be monitored and the metrics that are going to be collected. We have 15 users and the solution is used on a daily basis. 

Licensing costs are reasonable and affordable. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We offer products from Broadcom to our customers. We are only offering DX Spectrum, DX Infrastructure Manager, APM, and CA Assets and Liabilities Management in our country. 

It is used for network management. Our clients have a large and complex network, and they needed a solution that gives them the ability to look into and manage the network. They are able to detect the events that happened and fix them on-prem. We have around four customers of this solution. One of the top banks here in Nigeria is using DX Infrastructure Manager. A government agency is also using this solution.

One of the things that I like about DX Infrastructure is that the topology is good enough to see what is happening in the infrastructure. You also get alerts if something is happening in the network.

There are many features and benefits. It is serving our customers in knowing exactly how their network is performing in terms of reliability. It also helps them in planning the capacity. They know how much bandwidth the branches are consuming.

The only challenge that I have with this solution is the reporting part. The users are not really comfortable with the kind of reports they are getting. Sometimes, they want to see reports in their own format. Customizing those reports with Jasper is not very easy. It could be because of the knowledge gap. If you have the knowledge of how Jasper can be configured to suit customer requirements in terms of reporting, it is good.

There was a time a customer complained about one issue related to Netflow analysis. Broadcom has a separate model for that, but the customer wanted everything bundled together. It could also have IP management so that I am able to see or analyze IPs so that the IPs that are already in use don't get assigned.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

It is a stable product.

It is scalable.

Broadcom acquired CA. When they were CA, their technical support was okay, but since the acquisition, they are kind of slow in terms of support. Being one of their partners, we need their support in terms of selling this product to other customers. There is a knowledge gap between me as a partner and OEM. OEM needs to come and position themselves very well in the market and help us with some of the opportunities that we are trying to drive for these solutions.

It is a very straightforward solution. Its deployment doesn't take more than 30 minutes in terms of the server and the network, but it also depends on the architecture of the deployment. Some people have a large or complex network.

Customers pay for the license and the support.

I would recommend this solution to others. We currently have engagement with two banks for this solution. We are trying to pitch this solution to them.

I would rate DX Infrastructure Manager a nine out of ten. I have not really compared it with other solutions to see what are the differences. Based on my usage, it is serving, and it is okay. Customers are not complaining.