DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Cloud monitoring

• Easily skinnable
• SAP monitoring
• Reporting Tools
• Probe packages and probe deployment

Through action automation (using NAS and robot actions) we got reduced operational effort, improved operative tasks, and optimization of resources.

I would like to see improvements in the maintenance mode area. I would like to set only a probe from a robot or group in maintenance or place profiles from probes in maintenance. Making a GUI with criteria such as selection by robot/hub/probe etc.

I've been using it for five years.

No deployment issues encountered.

No stability issues encountered.

No scalability issues encountered.

We didn't use customer service.

10/10 CA Support team is excellent we get from them issue resolution within a single interaction and anchoring alternative solution.

Previously we had multiples tools to monitor IT infrastructure and other apps e.g ManageEngine to monitor databases, Nagios to monitor telco devices (switches, and routers, etc.) We switched to CA UIM because we had a lot of issues when we tried to correlate events and get unified metrics from our monitoring tools databases, in the same way we had maintain multiple tools and open tickets with multiples vendors.

Initial setup was straightforward. Installing and deploying software was very quick and easy. We have experience with similar tools implementation.

We did the full implementation in house.

Licensing model and packaging:

Server pack - Charged per server.
Server and application pack - Charged per server.
Service response time advanced pack - charged per site.
Ping pack - Charged per device.
Network advanced pack - Charged per device.
Flow analysis - Charged per device.
Storage pack - Charged per terabyte.
Ecometer pack - Charged per device.

We also looked at OpsView and SCOM.

Monitor governance and solution sizing are key topics to start solution implementation.

We find the flexibility and portability the most valuable features. We are using it for synthetics, E2E, and its ability to monitor itself. We're getting rid of one product and bringing UIM to take over. We're using it for our application SLAs. We're writing, synthetically, all these transactions that can perform to our service levels. We are monitoring application performance with UIM at this time.

Currently, the environment that we're using it in is strictly application performance. We want to be able to give the business visibility on how the application is performing, whether it's in the cloud, a simple URL hit, or a thick or thin client. We're using it within the Citrix environment also.

Right now, I don't have any new features in mind. We’ll see once we get in and start playing with it a lot more in depth. We do have another team that's looking at implementing it, so that may be something down the road on which we can give more information.

The product out of the box is great. We were very impressed with it. We have only used it for what we need so far; the SLA piece for monitoring our apps.

We heard at a recent CA World conference that APM integrates with UIM. Spectrum also integrates with UIM, depending on the release and can actually cross-correlate alerts. When we have APM and Spectrum and we get them on the right versions, we'll be able to link all three together. That would be an improvement.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have not needed to use technical support for UIM. It's been great.

The other product was at the end of its life, so we had to find something.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had the engineer on site to walk us through the way the environment would be set up. We had it set up in a couple of days. He sat with us and went over the architecture, the way it was laid out, what our goals were, when we upgrade, and what we could do in the future to make it more beneficial.

Because I don't know the bottom line, I'd say it was a very good investment that we made.

We looked at other solutions, but they really didn't meet our needs. Dynatrace is one of them and Micro Focus may have been also. UIM met everything we needed and more when you consider other areas and departments with whom we work closely. It actually helped them out as well. It's not just our department utilizing UIM. It's going to scale across the company.

Give UIM a try. Build out a PoC environment. Play with it. Utilize all the probes you can that you think would meet your company's needs. Take advantage of it.

When choosing a vendor, we look at technical support.

• CA UIM Solution is very easy and fast to use, it offers both agent-base and agent less monitoring options. UIM have lots of monitoring options that help us to manage our Enterprise heterogeneous monitoring demand.
• Database monitoring - helps us with monitoring critical database instances. We have many different databases from various vendors -- Oracle, SQL, Sybase -- and UIM helps us with managing all of them in one place.
• Infrastructure monitoring - Helps us to manage the data center, critical Ci's and v Center.
• Application monitoring probes - we are using Middleware application probes for monitoring critical apps.

It helps us to monitor critical servers, applications services, etc. We have many databases, hundreds of probes, and thousands of applications. This tool helps us manage all these and gives us insight into what's going on in our infrastructure.

There are several areas for improvement, among them are --

• Reporting capability - We're unable to drill down to the specific data that we'd like. We're also not able to get some data, such as trends, that we want when trying to determine root causes of issues in our applications. This is particularly frustrating because we have so many applications that we use and depend on that we need to know with some certainty what the issues are affecting them.
• End-to-end application monitoring probes function - We're quite large with over 500 probes, and there's no ability in UIM to monitor all of them through our many, many applications. We're relying too much on middleware applications to do this.

There was no issue with the deployment.

There has been no issue with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

8/10

I've used them many times, and they were OK.

It's very easy to implement and use. If you want to onboard devices and applications, it's just drag-and-drop. Very user friendly.

In-house.

It has helped us cut manual efforts and reduced manpower. It's helped us with automation. ROI 50%.

This is very good product for monitoring as it has lots of functionalities and probes.

Server and database availability as well as performance monitoring in my environment. We also monitor URLs using UIM.

We now use only one console to monitor all servers, the database and the network. It has allowed us to consolidate four previous tools (BMC, HP, SolarWinds, Nagios).

It is easy to implement but requires good planning. If you don't plan the number of probes it can lead to an event flood. It is also reliable when it comes to monitoring.

Reporting capability can be improved especially when it comes to availability. Additionally, automatic baselines can help reduce the count of alerts.

Monitoring the servers, the infrastructure and we also monitor applications with a specific probe doing Synthetic transactions. We use a dirscan probe to monitor files to make sure that they transfer at the correct times, and it will send alerts if they don't. We use logmon monitoring and we use the event log monitoring processes. We monitor processes for up/down state, CPU usage, memory usage. We use the NT Services probe, the monitor services on the Windows boxes. That's to name a few.

Regarding performance, we've had some struggles with it at times, but we get a support case opened up and support has been very good at helping us resolve the issues that we encounter.

The monitoring of the applications to let our business know when things are performing and that they're up and available.

We have less downtime. We have alerting to let us know when disks are filling up so that we get that taken care of before it becomes an issue and is noticeable to customers.

In the UMP, certain devices will show up multiple times and they don't correlate correctly. That's one of the issues. 

Sometimes the probe, on its first release, we will find some bugs with it and notify support and then they escalate it to the upper level and they get things corrected.

The dashboarding. They're going in the right direction, getting away from flash and using the HTML5 with the Cabbie dashboards. That has been very helpful with us in developing dashboards. But maybe some additional out-of-the-box dashboards with different standard tools that people are using. 

The one thing that our company has started to use is MarkLogic, and they don't have a specialized probe for that. We've reached out to them and put feedback on the community trying to get votes on that. But so far, it hasn't gotten a lot of votes.

The stability is good. They have an HA feature, high availability. And whe we were setting it up with use of support, we decided not to even set up that functionality because it's very seldom that we have a problem with it going down.

Scalability has been fine. As the new servers are brought on with the new MCS tool, it allows us to get configuration on the servers put on in a faster time.

I'm happy with the technical support we've received, and their response time.

We actually had UIM before it was UIM. It was Nimbus in 2004. Then it went to Nimsoft, then CA bought it and then rebranded it CA UIM. When it got brought into our company, in 2004, we used it for Synthetic transactions, to monitor the email and different products on the web, and the response times to that. And then we were using a different product for our network monitoring. 

We wanted to try to eliminate some of the excessive tools we had so we moved our network monitoring into CA UIM at that time.

When we first moved on to UIM, and brought the network monitoring in, at that time, the event correlation product wasn't built in - so one event happens and then it triggers three or four other things. And when we were doing that, the product we were getting rid of did do that. CA had said that that would be on the roadmap. It seems like the roadmap has changed now, and they're doing more of the event correlation with Spectrum, but we don't own Spectrum. So we have a little bit of a struggle there with the event correlation, and it seems like CA is not doing the event correlation with their SNMP Collector probe. They've moved more towards Spectrum.

It was straightforward. I and another person set up how the servers are going to be set up and then we got approval through CA. We asked them if that looked good to them, and they came back and with what we had set up, they didn't have anymore recommendations. They thought that what we're going to do was going to be successful.

When our company is looking to invest in a vendor, our criterion is that we will try to stay with a vendor that we have a relationship with already. 

I rate it an eight out of 10 because the ability to configure the probes is much easier than with other products. Before we went with the UIM product, I had to evaluate other products and the configuration of those was much more difficult than with UIM.

I would advise, because they have the new SaaS product - and I have a feeling we're going to be looking at that at our company also - doing a demo of the SaaS product and see if that meets their needs.

UIM is very configurable. You can do lots of things with it. Now that comes with a caveat, right? If it's highly configurable, generally speaking, it's not easily cookie cutter place-able, right? There's a lot of programming that comes along with it. Once you figure out that piece of it, you can do pretty much anything with it.

I don't think it’s very complicated. It takes time, just like anything, but once you figure it out it's pretty much the same for each individual section of the product. It's just applied in a different way.

Currently, my reach is just the Windows servers, but soon it will be all types of monitoring and automation, including Windows servers, Linux servers, and applications that live on those servers. They are the pieces that I'll be looking at.

Currently, without going into too many details, we are leveraging the product to perform self-healing. If there's an outage of some sort or maybe even a metric, if you know what metric to monitor, to tell you if something is about to fail. You can take action to prevent the failure. Instead of being reactive, we're being proactive. Even to the point of being proactive and realizing these are the metrics that tell me, “this system is about to become unhealthy”, and reacting to that rather than reacting to an actual outage.

I do a lot of coding outside and inside of UIM. The biggest, most annoying problem, if you will, is the ISE that's embedded in UIM. It is very limited in its scope and what it's capable of compared to even some of the more primitive ISEs that are on the market. Personally, I'd like to see more time spent on the ISE, whether that's going to be in their new product, which is Unified Management Portal.

I've heard from up the food chain that they're going to be changing it and it's going to be more integrated with UMP. But I'd still like to see more improvement on the ISE, especially from my perspective because I primarily work in automation. The ISE portion is very big in my space.

In PowerShell, for instance, their ISE is, in my opinion, pretty good for what it does. You can tab through all the options versus in UIM's ISE, in order to do that there's actually a pane on right hand side that you have to click through. Even then, what the actions that are listed there do is not described well enough.

UIM is pretty stable. Everything has its quirks. As far as the monitoring platform as a whole, I've worked with a lot of different programs and it's pretty stable. It's up there with the top.

I have yet to run into anything that it couldn't scale. We've scaled it massively since we've started using it.

Technical support is very responsive. They're quick to escalate an issue that they don't know how to solve themselves. Where other companies fail, I think, is getting a customer to somebody who actually knows how to fix the issue. Whereas with CA, it seems like every time I open a case, they're very quick to find out what the actual problem is and get somebody in contact with me that actually knows how to fix the issue. No matter whether that's somebody actually on the technical support team or if it's a senior principle consultant that's outside of the technical support team. It seems like they're always very responsive to get that done.

For the most part, initial setup was straightforward. It's very one-step-after-the-other to get the initial basic monitoring portion of it setup. Then, obviously, there's a lot more things that it can do after that. That takes a learning curve.

Choosing UIM wasn't my decision. That came from above my pay grade.

Last words of advice. It's a great tool. One way I painted myself into a corner was when I first started using it I thought that it only can do this this one certain way. With UIM, the one thing I've learned is there's hundreds of ways of doing it and they're all right. It's just a matter of which way gets you there the fastest I guess.

The product has a lot of flexibility in how we can report data, collect it, report it, and query it. Previously, we were using eHealth, which was a lot more cumbersome. Late '90s technology, so it makes sense that UIM would be more advanced than that.

It's becoming much easier to get more flexible data out to the people who request it from us, and also, we can make it more self-serve for them than it was before.

Mainly the policy-based management that they're working on. That's huge because changing configurations on a large scale is very tedious at this point, and keeping track of it is tedious. We'd be able to do other things rather than spending the time on the administration, and also there'd be less errors. We would have less times where we would find, "Oh, we've got the wrong threshold on this server because we thought it was over here, but something got overwritten when we moved this. That sort of thing won't happen as often.

We did a POC a little over a year ago and we started rolling it out in May, so about six months that we've really been using it.

We've had a couple of minor issues but some of it had to do with our own inexperience with it. It's got lots of room to improve in terms of management. Set up our configuration in groups, that's a lot more challenging than it was in the old product, but hopefully the new features that they put in in the next couple releases will make that easier.

That shouldn't be a problem. We only have about 2000 systems in it, which isn't really that large in the grand scheme of things. It's doing fine, and we are losing far less resources than we were told we would need to have, so we've got a lot of room to grow in what we've allocated to it.

It's generally pretty good. We do occasionally have a problem with they'll be really fast on the initial response, and then if there's not an apparent, obvious solution right away, then sometimes it can be slow and dragged out for a really long time. If we get our sales rep on it, he's usually able to get things expedited.

Since we already had the licenses for a longer period of time, we were going to move to Performance Center. These are all CA products. We were going to move to Performance Center, we built it under CA's guidance.

In the beginning of 2014, they said, "Move to UIM." That was kind of a step backwards at the time but it ended up being the right direction to go, but we spent a lot of time trying to get the other product to go. We had tried to implement it, and certain things that you would think any monitoring solution would have were not available in that one. Performance Center was meant to be the next generation product, but then they redirected things to Nimsoft/UIM. I think that was a year-end decision at the beginning of 2014 that CA made.

I thought the initial setup was fairly easy. It didn't take very long. We just run the installation, and it would build the database, our DBA set up our new space, so it's easy to cut over once they moved the database, so it wasn't nearly as difficult as, say, when we tried to set up SOI a few years ago. That was more challenging, but that may have improved since then.

Rating: 7/10. It's got the potential to grow higher. It's not like this is as good as it's ever going to get. We're very pleased with the product in general.

Advice for others: If I was looking in to the product I'd probably start by asking CA some questions, try to use it to pigeonhole our setup onto somebody else may work totally wrongly for them. Start small and build up to it to get their own familiarity with the product going.

• Easy GUI administration
• Unified alarm console
• Support for multi-tenancy
• Intelligent high availability
• Alarms suppression
• De-duplication
• Easy dashboard creation with several data sources such such as SQL, Oracle, and MS SQL databases

UIM has given us a platform to pro-actively monitor infrastructure and applications as a unified solution. We can have access to reports on applications and of the servers on which the applications are hosted from the same dashboard which can be exported as a PDF for historical data as well as a predictive data. Apart from which, it gives us many out of the box probes classified as -

• Databases - DB2, Informix, MS SQL, Oracle, Sybase and JDBC
• Applications - Cisco packs, Cloud monitoring packs, End To End application monitoring, Exchange, Lync, Sharepoint, AD, Lotus Notes and many more
• Gateway probes - For integration with key market products such as BMC Remedy, HP OVO, HP SM, Service Now, and SNMP traps based integration

• Multi-tenancy for ICMP profiles of servers is not there
• Availability reports in percentage is not calculated by the tool out of the box
• Rest of the things can be achieved by tweaking the script in Lua

I have been using this solution since 2011, almost five years.

There were no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

7/10

7/10

It's very simple and straightforward. The steps for implementation should be prepared keeping in mind that the pre-requisites are met.

I have implemented this product in five or six environments and do have a strong knowledge and troubleshooting approach.

The ROI, based on a rough calculation for a five year project, would be 50% for sure.

Pricing is one of the lowest for such a product in the market. If you have an experienced tools administrator you may want to go with this product over any other market product considering the cost efficiency.

I evaluated BMC Patrol and HP OVO. We chose CA as the license cost was much cheaper and almost all the functionality/requirements could be achieved via this product as well.