DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Monitoring the level of services
• Trend charts
• Management dashboards

This product has helped all my clients have a managed view of the data center and be proactive in preventing the most common problems.

Integration with other tools.

I've used UIM for five years.

No. There was not too much trouble during deployment. The solution is segregated into three layers: application, web portal, and database.

The stability is totally proportional to the defined architecture.

No issues but the architecture must be well designed.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is fine.

No previous solution. CA Nimsoft meets all of mine and my customers needs.

It's a simple set-up however it depends on architectural planning for good performance.

I implement it for customers as an expert consultant.

The ROI is very quick. The information is extremely valuable for businesses.

I did not see the need to evaluate other solutions. To date I do not know of any product that has the intelligence and functionality when compared to Nimsoft.

Search for an expert to get the deployment right.

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.

We deploy these solutions to customers like big banks, here in Nigeria, as well as in some government agencies. We liaise with the OEM of the product to deploy the solution for the customer. We do infrastructure management projects, all with CA products.

We use it for infrastructure monitoring across the board. We monitor our clients' infrastructure from a central location: their servers, applications, etc., from end-to-end.

It used to take longer to identify issues and to resolve them. But with this solution, we are able to know exactly where an issue is coming from and to tackle it. It helps us to reduce the time and cost involved and the number of employees involved. That's where it gives us added value.

It gives us visibility inside applications. It helps us to dig down and find the root cause of any issue within the network. It flags issues and sends an alert or SMS so we can dive down and know exactly where an issue is coming from, and resolve it as quickly as possible.

One issue I'm having with CA now is the complexity of the solution. They have APM now, Application Performance Manager, as part of it. I think they are still trying to understand how the application works. In terms of deployment, it's not straightforward. We are having issues with that. APM is not really user-friendly, in terms of the dashboard. People want to see a dashboard on the screen, to understand in real-time what is happening.

Also, there is something a customer requested from us. They wanted to know if we could manipulate the script to do the following. If an alarm is sent by the product they want to see it scrolling on the NOC monitor, instead of them having to click it.

There is also room for improvement in the reporting. It is not really good enough, according to our customers. So what we now usually do is use Power BI to get them the kinds of reports they want.

Sometimes we contact CA itself. They log in and help us to resolve some of the issues. I would give them 8.5 out of ten.

We did not have a previous solution. I have tried other solutions, such as Microsoft SSCM and SolarWinds. I've played around with them, but I have not really used them.

First of all, we get the stakeholders together and gather their requirements, exactly what they want to do. We can then provide them with the tech for the solution. We engage their different units to understand their processes. So, by the time we present the concept for approval, they will sign off and we can commence implementation.

We use an in-house consultant to gather the information. There is also a company called Feedware, a foreign company we partner with. They are quite good, but in terms of response time they do respond on time. In all other ways they are okay.

CA is a very nice solution. Before you make a final decision though, make sure all the stakeholders understand the solution and how it works. If they don't understand how it works they might not be able to appreciate it. It's a powerful solution, but give them some visibility into it, its capabilities and what they can do with it, before implementing it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It's not a ten because of the reporting aspect. Apart from that, the solution is okay. It's the reporting that users complain about.

I really value the underlying Java framework for development of custom probes.
The product has an API that allows heavy customization. This has allowed me to add functionality by designing my own metric gathering routines.

This product has one foot in the past and another foot in the future. As a result, the approaches to managing components are not unified; leading to added complexity to management.

Open source and acquired components are often bolted on and integrated poorly.

Out of the box, there were no scalability issues. However, this product has poor integration with ServiceNow; introducing unacceptable bottlenecks.

I would give technical support a score of 6/10.

We did not use a previous solution but we are architecting an alternative presently.

Licensing has a lot of wiggle-room.

Please investigate other solutions so you can make an informed choice. CA adds technical debt to your organization.

We mainly monitor services around the database applications, and things like that. The most valuable features of UIM are that it's scalable and it's relatively easy to set up monitoring on the servers.

The reporting part could be improved. We’re using other tools for that. Maybe we’ll continue to do that, but that is one thing we are missing; and the SLA, and what you can do there.

As I cannot compare it with others, it's a bit difficult to say.

It's very stable.

It is scalable. In production, we have about 600-700 servers.

It's mainly my colleague who is in contact with CA technical support. Things take time.

I think you should set it up the way that CA says you should set it up.

The ability to scale a single monitoring ecosystem across the world with relative ease, and the wide range of monitoring probes available.

Provides a single ecosystem for monitoring globally across PaaS, IaaS, legacy and hybrid infrastructure.

Customer support. Not up to the usual standard I am used to with CA. There is a huge amount of value support could add if they would give me more access to the right people, which is a relationship I am used to having with CA SMEs.

Three years

Various low level issues with scaling. Not a topic that CA offer much assistance or real-world experience on.

Yes but mostly related to the chosen architecture, rather than the application itself.

Yes, we addressed them internally, again due to lack of vendor support.

Poor when compared to other CA groups I have worked with.

First line - excellent. Getting beyond first line - a battle.

Personally yes, but in this case it is the only solution capable of meeting the business needs - massive scalability, highly distributed architecture.

Relatively simple, similar to other enterprise monitoring products. Most of the challenges are in matching your architecture to suit your monitoring needs.

In house. I have had a single experience with a Nimsoft developer and they were clearly an expert in their field.

If you have a highly disparate estate across old and new technologies, Nimsoft is the only realistic in-house answer, prior to considering the customisation of open source alternatives.

The benefit is easy installation. Thus, the model approach of the product and out-of-the-box probes, which deliver direct value.

You can integrate clouds, hybrid infrastructure, and on-premise infrastructure into one product. You have also a big range of application probes, which is needed on our side.

We want to see more investment in the UI and the dashboard (from what we have seen here at CA World, that is the case). We want to see this because usability and ease of use of the product is becoming more important for our customers. 

The stability is really great, because it works on the big scale. We do not have fails.

It is one of the only products, which you can do multiple tiers or multiple proxies. No other product can do this. You can monitor it on a high scale of devices. 

We use a lot of solutions. However, we found out that UIM is the best selection for the customer, which is why we selected to use UIM, also coming from the public sector, an insurance sector, and so on. 

I can use the Drag and Drop feature to build dashboards within minutes.

CA UIM needs some improvement with performance reporting (if we compare it to CA eHealth).

I have been using it since 2014.

No problems; it’s easy to deploy and manage.

CA’s technical support team is very supportive.

My customers were happy with CA eHealth. However, CA announced it would stop selling eHealth to new customers, so we did not have any other option but to sell CA UIM.

Installation is easy and straightforward.

I implemented this product. As I’ve written, this product’s installation is easy and straightforward, so I don’t have any implementation advice.

This product is expensive compared to other vendors (SolarWinds, ManageEngine).

Just follow the prerequisites, and a step-by-step installation guide is available on wiki.ca.com.