DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Server reporting
• Server monitoring

These are the most valuable features for us, but I think this is probably the wrong way to talk about it. There's some depth into what we can watch from processes, logs, as well as URLs, and synthetics. So, we have the overall ability to manage everything with UIM.

I don't think that at this stage it's mature enough to have improved the way our organization functions. It's going to get there, but right now there's scalability, performance, and ease-of-use issues that need to be addressed. It will eventually provide us with what we want, but right now we have some challenges with these issues.

One of the things I would like to see an improvement on is the ability to do mass deployment with this solution.

Also, it should allow for federation where I can give our users their login and they can choose whatever thresholds they wish to have.

Even better, I would like to see from synthetic transaction reports the ability for our business units to record their transactions and then provide it back to us. That would save us a lot of time.

We've had no issues with deployment.

The stability is great, but I just find the ease-of-use to be lacking.

There are potential issues with the flexibility for the number of devices that we have because the scalability-performance issue is not fully vetted. CA needs to work on a better API model for us to manage those devices in a larger enterprise.

We have over 20,000 servers, and I don't believe that the ease-of-use to deliver 20,000 should requires a lot of manual processing. Nevertheless, we've wasted a lot of hours doing manual processes to deliver the solution. So, there's an issue with scalability from that perspective.

Technical support has been challenging. I have to go create a new login in MSoft so that I can start opening tickets, instead of going through the traditional CA support. So it causes delays, and I'm hopefully looking for a better response from that team. I can give 9's and 10's throughout the rest of the CA, but there I'd probably give them a 2.

I would suggest that you verify the growth, basically the scalability that you're planning, to utilize its solution. Make sure that's within the grasp of the solution when you're purchasing UIM.

• Open framework provides the ability to go outside the GUI and automate tasks and functions for reliability without being in the GUI all the time.
• It gives us the flexibility to create our own modules.

• From a business perspective, it reduces head count by automating tasks, whether its deployment, maintenance, recovery.
• We have the flexibility to be able to have a customized solution for an end customer that it wasn’t necessarily designed for, and the ability to turn it around quickly.
• For example, one of our clients had the ability to do per-message routing to various groups. We took the message stream and automated tickets generations, notices, and recoveries

The biggest concern stability wise falls under UMP, the management protocol. We’ve had a hard time bringing it up and keeping it stable. It runs, but it keeps losing components. We opened several tickets, but we’ve not had things refresh (charts don’t update) and have had lost data (such as some reporting that we can’t get to). Unified Reporter went offline altogether on v.8.31. It was OK on 8.2.

No problems with scalability right now, but I have a fundamental design concern—everything comes back to a central point, and while I haven’t seen it become a major problem yet, I can see that once you get over around 20,000 devices, it can become a problem, or if you increase your data too much, data just backs up and the system slows.

Right now, both processes of Linux-to-Oracle and Windows-to-SQL backend are similar at 2700 messages/minute, which is OK, and they go up to 4500, but I can see where that will eventually get to a point where the central point can’t handle.

NAS, single point – it allows for a lot of customization, but there are limitations in terms of scalability. You can distribute the NAS, but it adds a lot more complexity.

Good tech support. Like every tech support, you can get new techies, and there are veterans, but I don’t have any fundamental complaints. They’re fairly good and quick. Follow up is a little slow, but not bad enough that it’s a huge problem.

I was not involved, but I rebuilt it, and that was fairly easy and straightforward. I don’t see it as being challenging, but what is lacking from my perspective is an overall flow. They do good a job of explaining the details and specifics, but they lack the general overall architecture mentality of how things work together.

I’ve actually pointed people to UIM because it can be simple. It can be as simple or complicated as you want. The simplicity helps a lot of places get up and running. The ability to drop a module on a server and click a couple things helps and is a lot easier. Pretty straightforward to set up and can be basic if you want. It allows you to get far more complicated as well.

Flexibility – in the sense that it allows me to monitor our IT infrastructure and application in a very holistic manner. It checks everything, there’s a lot of probes -over 150- to handle various monitoring needs. If it's not already there, you can build a probe.

Single solution between Windows, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, and Linux servers, and there are many. The logmon (log monitoring) probe is especially useful, particularly because it offers such flexibility. It also allows for a number of customizations – in terms of both infrastructure and application monitoring.

Very specifically, we want HTML 5 web administration instead of Flash for UMP. HTML 5 web admin is essential for a lightweight web-client administration solution.

Additionally, an HTML 5 web-based alarm console would be a must-have feature as it would allow me to manage it from anywhere.

It still needs a lot of work. An HTML 5 web admin solution is needed badly. Also, the thick client administration tool is archaic, slow, and cumbersome.

It's been around a year since we started as a proof of concept, with implementation in March.

It's pretty stable. Haven't had any problems.

We're monitoring our entire server environment using UIM, so that’s 5000+ servers, and over 300 applications, across the world.

We couldn’t have survived without them. They’ve helped with technical problems. They don’t help with feature requests because they’re tech support; however, they've directed us to the right people. We haven't had a lot of issues though.

We were using IBM Tivoli solutions that did not meet monitoring requirements for numerous reasons, like the lack of scalability and technology.

It’s straightforward. We followed the documentation closely and that helped. Also, we had the help of CA services for implementation. The only issues we had were related to our Oracle database, but it was resolved.

We looked for two things: meeting monitoring requirements and meeting support requirements. We also looked at solutions from BMC and IBM, and although the tools are fairly similar, CA's support and partnership made a difference.

You should nail down your requirements and understand that input from outside teams is important because your monitoring the whole environment. Also, ask CA for help as they’ve done this before.

CA UIM (AKA Nimsoft Monitor) - I give the monitoring application a 5 compared to other products such as HP SIM, Nagios,spiceworks, SolarWinds and WhatsUpGold

+

CA CSM (AKA Nimsoft Service Desk) - Initially I thought the ticket product was a 2-3 star product. After working with it for the past 6 months though I would have to give it a 5. I have used other systems like Remedy and Footprints and this is far superior to those products. With CSM you are given a blank canvas and can use the system and its modules for everything from a ticketing system or a workflow and process automation tool.

The discovery tools and the ease of initial setup are very good and the way that probes are deployed makes the setup and day to day functions very simple to use.

The application allows our NOC operators a very fast response time for issues on our clients systems. By utilizing the alarm and ticketing system we are able to validate the alarm and begin working on the issue sometime before the client even knows there is a situation.

The automated discovery tools have come a long way in the past few years, but it would be nice if that same tool could also pull systems configuration information as well.

I have worked with NMS and ticketing solutions for approximately 10 years now, utilizing the CA Nimsoft products for the past 5+ years.

I have deployed the product in multiple environments and across multiple OS types without issue. The deployment can be as small as one or two servers, or can scale up very well for large distributed deployments.

Issues seen with stability of the product were wiped out years ago, the product has been rock solid since then.

As I said above, scalability is one of the key parts to my deployments. I have had no issues in the past, but you must have an understanding of the systems bus and response metrics to really scale the product up to its full potential.

Customer service and technical support have been great and I feel like they actually listen when a bug or improvement is brought to their attention.

A+ support for both products

Yes I have used multiple products in the past. The switch to Nimsoft was due to a executive level decision for cost savings. If setup properly this solution is not as expensive as some of its competitors.

I have never had CA professional services involved. I was able to do my first deployment without issues out of the box. About a year into working with the product I went to official CA training for certification as a Nimsoft Engineer in their level 101, 201 and 301 courses at their MA campus just outside of Boston.

The documentation is great and so are the forums. The included documentation and wiki gives you more than enough data to get through the day to day monitoring. The forums and support are there if you have something more complex.

We're a managed service provider so we monitor customers and their networks and infrastructure and we're their support. We're a customer of DX and I'm a services infrastructure architect. 

Prior to using this solution, we had three point solutions in place; one for voice infrastructure, one for servers, and one for networks. This tool meant we were actually able to collapse everything into a single interface which made my team's life easier, but it also meant that our first line staff then just had one view of the customer's entire infrastructure.

The big attraction of this product is its out-of-the-box capability. It means that there is not a lot of custom development required. 

The product could be improved if the company kept up with service developments, in particular from the cloud vendors. As Azure, AWS and Google are rapidly adding features and functions to their own public cloud offerings, UIM has not necessarily kept pace with that development. In particular, it was the platform as a service capabilities. The infrastructure as a service capabilities were quite good, but the platform as a service was lacking significantly, along with a lot of the serverless capability as well. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The stability is pretty good although it still has some quirks. It is a legacy tool and as such, there's been a lot of angst in the development of it. Once you've been through years and years of bug fixes it's quite stable. Some of the newer components are still rough around the edges.

In our initial roll-outs in the early years, the product proved to be quite effective in its scalability, but as we continued to grow, we have seen scaling limits. My team, the infrastructure team, are primarily the administrators of the solution. There are six of us in the team. Then there's our level one in our team with about 20 people, and then there's some SMEs that handle specific components within the system and there's probably 70 or 80 of them.

They're pretty knowledgeable and they rely heavily on documentation. I don't know if they have a lot of direct hands-on field experience, but their knowledge of the documentation is pretty good.

The initial setup, which I carried out, was complex. That is primarily because it was a significant learning curve at the time. I was also supporting the existing infrastructure and trying to learn the new tool as well. We didn't have an implementation strategy. We piloted it with one customer and then expanded that to two more, and then expanded out to the rest. At the time, it would have been about 30 odd customers. In total, I think it took about a year as the customers cycle through their contracts, we flipped them over to the new tool. Once we got a feel for the tool, it was much easier. 

 I believe we pay around CAD $400,000 per year. It's a pay per consumption fee. 

We're currently evaluating other options. I'm looking for an MSP friendly tool. We have to be able to differentiate between different customers. I'm looking for a tool that has a good degree of scalability, more than what we have now. A tool that, if it doesn't have capability in the box, provides a means to extend the tool for our custom purposes and also a better price point than we have now.

Cloud vendors have expanded their services and features and functions within their own platforms. Having to rely on a third-party to keep pace with that development cycle has proven rather disappointing. That's why we're looking for a tool that has the capability to enable us to extend the tool on our own, if we choose to.

I don't think I would recommend this product. My issues stem from the turnover between companies that we've experienced in the last 10 years. The continued development of the tool has not been great. I think they've become lost in their tracks.

I would rate this solution a six out of 10. 

• Ease of setup - install is quick and easy. For small environments, all components can be installed on a single server. Even larger, more-distributed environments are easy to install, given all required network ports are open.
• Automated robot deployment makes it easy to select targets for performance management.
• Justifiably, local and remote options are available for agent-based and touchless monitoring.
• Most probe configurations are OOTB best practices. The probe GUI is easy to navigate.
• A new feature, MCS, allows for monitoring policies to be created for groups of devices. You can monitor just about anything.

We are a managed services organization. Knowing about performance issues before our customers is key. To have reports ready at the beginning of the day is even better. Report scheduling is priceless.

I would like to see enhancements to core probes for bulk uploads. Some probes have the capability to monitor multiple targets. You either must enter them one by one or use scripting to bulk load the targets. I would like to see that functionality built into the probes.

We have been using this product for about seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent. 24 x 7 support is awesome, not to mention that their support staff really knows the product. What makes it better is that support and development work close together so that turnaround on bug fixes is expedient.

We previously used Solarwinds NPM but it wasn't as scalable.

Setup was easy.

Buy what you need. The product is worth every bit of its cost.

We did not evaluate any other products beforehand.

Plan and commit people and processes. Build a service, don't just implement a tool.

I would say the most valuable feature is the consolidation of multiple data sources into one centralized repository for ease of administration and data analytics. For example, we have net-flow analysis, we have performance management and then we also have CA ADA (Application Delivery Analysis). Prior to CA UIM and CA Performance Center coming along, we had to look at all these systems individually. Even though when you look at it from the application layer, the network layer, and the system layer, all of these layers talk and rely on one another to provide a service. So, if one of them is having abnormalities, it's difficult for engineers to identity the root cause. This now gives us a single pane of glass to identify the root cause a lot quicker.

We are monitoring your typical router switches like Cisco and Juniper. We are also monitoring firewalls of various sources, VMware and all sorts of appliances. Also, we actually monitor applications, systems and services on the infrastructure as well.

The biggest thing is taking care of business. So, we’re good as long as business is happy and we can keep business doing what it needs to be doing. That means they can support the customers by cutting down on outage times or forecasting peak demand seasons with data analytics and stuff like that. Prior to technologies like this coming along we found ourselves being reactionary. With technologies like this, we can be proactive and begin to prevent failures before they happen. It's almost like looking into the future to a degree.

I would like to see integration into more data sources. For example, integrating facilities information such as temperature and other environmental variables, because heat can actually impact server routers. For example, environmental wouldn’t necessary align with an OSI layer, but it impacts all of those particular layers. So it'll be just like security would be another layer.

No technology is perfect, but CA is doing a really wonderful job of providing products that are reliable, scalable, and dependable to entities all over the world. People have to pay for this as well. If CA was not doing something right, I would not have seen 20,000 users at CA World.

In regards to scalability, I think that's a tough question. You really have to look at the implementation. If it's properly provisioned, then there's no issue. If you're sitting on a VM host and guests are competing for resources amongst that host and that host is not providing enough resource, then, yeah there's going to be contention there. As far as the system itself, it is very scalable.

Technical support is great. They're really great with the turn around time from submitting a ticket and getting an answer back for most issues. Most issues are not new under the sun. So it's just a matter of looking into the knowledge base and making sure your own system is provisioned properly. Then they'll feed you back information and stuff like that.

CA UIM was really the first time we’ve had a dashboard type of technology in our infrastructure. So prior to that, it was all siloed for the most part.

I was involved in the initial setup for the most part. I participated in gathering requirements and working with the account managers at CA. Then once we decided to procure, we took it to the software delivery life cycle, going into development, the DevOps type of model.

Some aspects of it can be complex. It's all about your learning curve and your dedication at the end of the day. Add to that having a great team to support you internally and then to reach back into CA.

I haven't considered any other vendors. I have individuals in the organization I support who were looking at other opportunities or products. But I would tell them, "Hey just give me an opportunity to allow this product to work." A lot of times, it's not the product, it's the people. It's the human. Granted, no product is perfect because humans aren't perfect, but again they are not far off from what they're touting themselves to be able to do.

Definitely insure to manage expectations you do a proof of concept and then executive buy-in. If you can get executive buy-in, you're good to go at that point.

The most valuable feature for me particularly within the enterprise space and what CA does is that they provide an integrated central approach to monitoring. No matter what tool we're using whether it's a phone system or whether it's a storage system, whether it's Unix or Windows, whether it's an access point or a firewall, it can all be seen in a common pane of glass where you can see everything. All of our staff can all be trained on the same tool and then other people can see all the dependent infrastructure within the same tool.

It allows our communication to happen much more effectively. The primary benefit for us at this stage in our approach is that we've been able to cut outages by about 300%. For us in terms of an integrated management approach, it's an interesting question because the benefit that we get, it's two-fold. One we're monitoring everything so we're able to proactively see things that are going on but we also end up really driving the charge on technical debt. Because once we put everything in infrastructure monitoring, we have systems that maybe haven't been updated that now come front and center. If you have a storage array that you have been meaning to upgrade or you've been meaning to optimize, once you put it in monitoring, before we even start alarming and cutting outages, people tend to clean up those systems.

3 years.

You end up pairing off a lot of technical debts so most of that 300% improvement, I mean reduction in outages actually didn't come because of our monitoring, it's because we put the monitoring in place. That's the hard work that's done by our infrastructure teams in order to support it. The solution is very stable. When you're in the outage management business, the last thing that you want is your own solution to be going down. It doesn't speak well for the whole solution but we get a tremendous amount of stability from the system. We have redundant nodes and all that stuff all in place. The last thing we usually think about is the system itself going down just because, to be honest, in the five years that we've been running it, we haven't had any issues.

It scales fairly well. I mean the key with scalability and I think this is true with anything, you have to be able to configure it. The challenges, I think some people will take on an enterprise piece of software and not bring on the people to get it tuned and configured right and then it consumes a whole bunch of data. Then there's this fear of like, "This product isn't scalable." It's like, "Well, you have to tune it to takeout all the default data that you don't want and things that aren't helpful. A lot of enterprise solutions are going to give you the whole kit and caboodle right when you install it and you have to know when to turn it off. I think people end up thinking that something isn't scalable only because when they take it to the enterprise level without tuning it, it doesn't.

We had, to be honest, some of those pains ourselves, we were generating way too much data in our reports, we were generating a ton of network traffic. Once we tuned it and figured how to get just what we wanted and get just the right amount of metrics, our storage numbers and all that came down very reasonably. Serious technical support gets the job done. I wouldn't consider it to be the strength of the product. I think there's a lot of really smart people who run CA. Their product is in other solutions, their products are being implemented by an army of consultants. CA is largely implemented, well from my own experience, not by the consulting team but by hands on guys who work there which means they know the product. I don't think there's as much dependence on the support.

You start with the product. I will look at the product, how you it’s managed, how it’s run, how it’s designed. I’m an architect by trade so and that’s what I did my graduate work in. I'll look and see whether they have an architecture that’s scalable and supportable that they’re modernizing, they are making investments to make sure that it stays current whether it’s with programming languages or new tools or new modules. I look for a strong community base so I want to see something where people are working together outside of their confines of the company to develop either solutions, plug-ins or modules or to share information.

We've had some problems, some challenges with silos of support in situations where we would spend weeks working on something and then I'd finally escalate it and a senior technical person would solve in 10 minutes. The weakest part of the products we use is in the mobile space. We can't seem to get the products to work at all and we can't seem to find the mobile team to even talk to about it. Their mobile app is Circuit 2003 you know kind of very crude. It doesn't have any interface, it doesn't actually connect to our devices. I would say the strongest area for them is going to be in mobile. When you're running like we are in operation sweep, sometimes my guys are only one deep and they got to use the restroom and I send them in there with a mobile app in case something goes down but I can't do it if the mobile app doesn't work.

Generally when a company becomes serious about operations, older companies have been around, they understand the value of operations. Younger companies or some people might say more entrepreneurial companies don't have that strong operational focus. I think one of the cornerstones for that is when you get your house in order in terms of operations and infrastructure so that you're not your own worst enemy. You're not designing solutions that don't work whether it's in the application space, you're not buying infrastructure that isn't performing or you're not able to be accountable with the people that work for you to get them on the phone or addressing issues because they simply don’t know about them.

Today’s enterprise software can’t just be about the product. It has to be about the kind of ecosystem that that goes into it and companies need. If they don’t make a choice to invest in that ecosystem, they miss out on some of the best resources in terms of staff and technical development. I’m looking for a company that’s going to be straight forward. If they can make money because they have a good product people will pay for it. If they have to trick their customers into buying the product by selling them one thing and then forcing them to buy another because they don’t want to lose the investment they already made, that’s not somebody I want to partner with long term. I have personally worked with IBM’s product, HP’s product and CA’s product. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses. I wasn’t actually a part of this decision to make the investment in CA but CA has stood up against all of those vendors.

Say, they as were strong when you got down into it, they have some areas they are stronger other areas, they aren’t as strong. We’re a university so we’re not really in the making money business. Our decision was really about just ensuring that our students and our faculty and our staff had the best experience they can when they interact with technology and that means it’s up. That means that it’s working, that it’s fast when it should be fast, it’s stable and that really drove our decision. It’s that universities are very unique environments. The original campus, in the network sense, was a college campus. A lot of the technology that’s used in enterprise was developed on college campuses. There’s a lot of driving factors in there that come on the operational side to try and keep it stable. We realized that in order to be effective, we need to be able to see everything.

There can’t be a fog and it says, “We know how the servers are running or We know how the servers in storage are running." We don’t know what’s happening with the network or we know what’s happening with the network but we don’t know what’s happening with the VOIP or the phone systems. All of this technology is dependent on each other when things are down. Ends up resulting in a lot of finger pointing. When you have a centralized integrated approach and everybody can see everybody else’s stuff, you cut through all of that. If you have tuned the products and you can pinpoint exactly to the problem, then everyone can be working together on a resolution as opposed to spending all their time finger pointing, “I think it’s your network. No, it’s your storage array. No. It’s your server.” That all goes away.

I think the more complicated space is the ones where you have a mature monitoring solution but it’s not a central integrated monitoring solution and you have to figure out how to trade, things you’re going to have to give up for that silo in order to move it into an integrated approach. That’s always harder that just taking something that’s had no monitoring and bringing it up from scratch. I would put them in the top of the eight, solid nine category. I think they still have some work to do integrating some of their acquisitions. Like I said, the mobile and support space I think. My team has been very effective. These are a lot of people that I don’t interact with on a daily basis.

I think most of the time when people are looking at these other low cost solutions, they are not thinking about what they’re really going to spend. They’re not thinking about whether it’s sustainable, the solution that they’re putting in and they’re really going to see their return on investment. We had very specific needs in higher education that drove us towards CA. I don’t know if those needs would have been similar for instance when I was working in a marketing space. We’re watching a lot of websites and a lot of that kind of traffic. You need to look and see which product meets your particular space the best.