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.
