DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

We use CA UIM and CA APM. The most valuable features are trending and analysis. I also like the predictability of the systems, baselines, and that it is can prevent an outage before it happens.

It has allowed us to catch issues before they get to a point where there's an outage.

I would like to see more configuration around best practices and recommendations because the software that is being monitored and APIs are becoming more complex. It's just overwhelming what you can monitor. Having something out of the box that would allow you to at least monitor the most important things would be nice.

I would like to see a pack that just installs the things that need to be monitored. And this may not be where I know enough about it and it may not be configured correctly so I may not be getting everything I can get out of it. That's why I need my vendors to tell me how to get more out of the software that I bought. I know who my people are, and I don't think they understand how to configure it properly. My team doesn't know what to do with it, so I don’t think that is a problem of CA. But it is a business partner issue. I need to find out if it a problem on my side, theirs, or both.   It might not have been turned over, there may not have been best practices. It could be completely on my side where my people just don't do their homework. I have to stop right there because that could be the case.

I haven’t had issues with stability.

Since this solution is new to me, I don't know if it was properly scaled out for our environment to be as efficient and effective as it needs to be. A lot of the solution we have are single points of failure. I don't really have an answer about scalability. I would assume since we only have single points of failure, I guess scalability is something that wasn't taken into account.

I don't know who the vendors were. I know that I probably would have looked at SolarWinds. I don't really know a whole lot of vendors in this area.

In terms of selecting a vendor, it is just like any business. Either companies monitor in-house with a custom built solution and they need a better solution and support ability, or you have a product that wasn't performing and you want to get another one. Since our company was very small over 10 years has grown very fast to be one of the largest corporate travel company in the world, my guess is they didn't have anything and they needed something. Or maybe they did it all in- house previous to the solution, and what they had was probably very immature.

When selecting a vendor, look at the relationship, look for dependability and get references. Make sure the solution works. Look for a vendor who will be a good business partner. Make sure they offer a proof of concept and make sure that you dig everything out of the vendor that you can. Not from a purchase point of view, but from a knowledge perspective and best practices. That's what's missing in IT. It’s just not a lot of people adhering to best practices and things like that. You get workers that just aren't skilled in doing this, so they rely a lot on other people and recommendations. They rely especially on the people that built the software. I would rely on them. That's what I've done my whole career.

• 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.

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.

Monitoring infrastructure and business applications are the most valuable features.

By getting an early warning about problems, services can have high availability and perform well. In addition, we can respond automatically to failures so services can be recovered immediately.

It would be good to implement views showing the aggregated status graphically. For example, they could use colors reflecting the status, and the possibility to drill down to detailed information. The views should be configurable so the administrator can organize them the way he wants. Dynamic views should be supported. That means the members of the views changes based on conditions defined by the administrator.

I have been using this solution for over five years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is good.

We were using HPE Operations Manager and SCOM. We switched because it's less resource demanding and has more functionality out of the box. Especially when it comes to support for different monitoring techniques, so that fewer custom-made solutions (scripting, etc.) are required. There are probes available for most kinds of monitoring metrics, applications, and operating systems.

Setup was very straightforward. It's possible to have a fully functional monitoring system up and running within one day by use of the easy-to-use setup procedures and the automatic robot deployment functionality.

The license cost depends on the number of probes and robots. I advise customers to be selective with which probes to deploy on the different servers.

We looked at SCOM and HPE Operations Manager (OpenView).

Be aware of your exact needs so you can ensure the product will meet your needs.

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.

The scalability of the product and heterogeneous OS coverage is really what sets this product apart from others. Other features like synthetic (e2e) transaction monitoring, OOTB application support as well as the UMP (Unified Monitoring Portal) are the icing on the cake.

CA UIM is really built for the MSP and multi-tenant environments, although companies of all sizes are able to benefit from it. My company is a managed service provider and there are really no other products that allow us to manage multiple customer environments like UIM.

I’ve heard that there is now a free tool (CA UIM Snap) for up to 30 devices, but I haven’t used it yet.

There really is no perfect monitoring tool, CA UIM is really the best of breed if you need monitoring for all Operating Systems and a large list of diverse applications. Some areas of improvement would include enhanced management for the UMP where the MSP is concerned. Additional configuration auditing and reporting.

Six years.

I’ve been working with the product for a long time and have a lot of experience with deployment, so I didn’t have any issues. I do recommend that Professional Services be engaged in all but the smallest deployments. I’ve heard of many environments not being designed for scalability and deployed by the customer that had to be completely rebuilt due to a lack of knowledge on the product. Aspire Technical Professionals has a solid track record of successful large CA UIM deployments.

In a large environment using tunnels, occasionally there were stability issues. I found most them were self-inflicted though early on due to my inexperience with the product.

There were no issues with scalability after re-designing. After years of experience and PS we found the tiered design works best for scalability.

Customer service is helpful and knowledgeable.

8 out of 10

We tried several Open Source tools like Nagios and Zenoss, but as the environment grew we found that those tools wouldn’t scale the way we wanted. There was also a lack of Synthetic Transaction monitoring tools that would require large internal development effort. We chose Nimsoft because it covered Windows and Linux and most of the applications we wanted to monitor out of the box. Another large factor for us was the ability to customize the product, since we were used to using Open Source tools.

Initial setup was difficult because we didn’t know what we were doing and had to re-design and re-deploy. I would definitely recommend professional services for all but the smallest environments, as it would’ve paid for itself in man hours.

Initially, we deployed internally which was a mistake. We were directed to Aspire Technical Professionals and they were able to help re-design our implementation to be scalable and highly available.

I’m not sure the total ROI at this point, but as a service provider we generate revenue with the product so I’m sure it has paid for itself time after time.

I don’t handle the contract negotiation, but expect this isn’t Open Source so expect to pay for an Enterprise Monitoring solution. I’m a firm believer of “you get what you pay for” with almost everything. I’m a fan of Open Source tools for specific solutions, but a large multi-tenant environment needs an Enterprise solution.

Yes. SolarWinds, Tivoli, ManageEngine, and Accelops.

Infrastructure monitoring.

It preforms well, I mean it scales well. Handles about 17,000 servers. So it does pretty well. 

• Basic infrastructure
• Moving into cloud monitoring in UIM
• Resilient
• Pretty stable

Also, I think it's the architecture, the way the hubs are designed, the way that it scales, that it can be grown. That's valuable, in a large enterprise.

The large library of functionality; not having to go to multiple products to monitor different things.

Being able to report on the monitoring configurations and find out where you differentiate from standards. If I've deployed 500 probes to monitor Oracle, and I want to know that they're all monitored the same, I have no way to do that now.

Stability's been good.

The biggest problem is certain what they call "hubs." Different releases of different probes can be problematic, to get the right versions to work together. Or to find out if they scale or if they don't. So you've got to do some testing.

Scalability is dependent on the probe that you're using. Some probes scale really well, some things don't scale really well. So monitoring VMware may not scale as well as monitoring a cloud architecture. You have to test what you're doing.

I haven't used tech support for UIM recently but I have used CA's technical support in general. I would say they're responsive but can take a little time, if it has to go back to development for a review.

It's pretty straightforward.

When investing in a vendor, what's important to me are 

• software quality
• responsiveness
• communication.

I rate it an eight out of 10 and that's only because I think it can be better. I think as a competitive products in the market, UIM is really solid. A few changes could make it better.

Make sure there are staff to administrate it, after it gets deployed. And ensure that after CA delivers, that you have the ability to follow through with the rest of the implementation.

We use it for monitoring our infrastructure. 

I think it's a great product. It really brings it into the 21st century of Web UI. This latest version, version 9, that is supposed to be announced here at CA World, brings more of that HTML5 interface in and really steps it up to be a great UI. Easy to use, quick.

It's the probes. They have probes for all different types of technology. Whether it's WebSphere, JBoss, or you want to do JVM monitoring, you want to monitor just CPU usage, even Docker, they have probes for that. If you have a technology out there, there's a probe. And if there's not a probe somebody's creating a probe already. The probe library it pretty extensive.

The improvement is because we can deploy agents (they call them "robots," most people know them as "agents"). As most people know, agents are bloated, they can do whatever you want. With UIM, you put that robot out there and you place the probes you need, only the probes you need. So you have a base agent and here, for example, I only want to monitor server CPU, memory, storage, and maybe I want to monitor JBoss on this box. I just put the CDM probe out there, I put the JBoss probe out, and that's all you need. You don't need the load and probes for Docker or something else that you don't need to use.

More HTML5, more flexibility, and reducing the number of screens, fewer mouse clicks, fewer mouse movements. They should really take advantage of the features that the newer web technologies allow for. We're administrators, we're doing thousands of things every day, lots of clicks. Automation, automation, automation is what we want.

It's been a great product compared to some previous monitoring tools we had in place. Every time there were software updates for the server for security, from Microsoft or any other vendors, that would require reboots. A lot of the times we would have crashes or we'd have to do some recovery to bring them back up. With UIM, we've been running it for about nine or 10 months now and I think I've had to go and reboot the servers once.

Scalability seems great because they use hubs, so if your hub is hitting capacity on a number of servers, devices it's talking to, you can just add another hub. And it's a message-based system.

They've been great. Actually the guys that are doing the UIM product really know their stuff.

We have SolarWinds and we had some older Spectrum products that CA had, as well. But, the user interface was not as modernized as UIM.

The product we had was just nearing it's end of lifecycle for us, and we needed to move on to something else that the users would be more comfortable with using.

I think it was pretty straightforward. We did have, just as a disclaimer, a CA person on site helping, one of their sales engineers, just in case anything came up. The process went smoothly. Honestly, we probably didn't even need him there.

Our criteria when looking to switch to a different product include the user's ability, their willingness, to use it. And another main consideration, you can get data in but can you get data out in the formats you need? If you can only get data in, but you can't get data out, it's of no use.

I give it an eight out of 10 because, as I said, I think it needs a little bit more improvement around the UX, but it's getting there. And they're making a concerted effort to make that happen.

I would tell a colleague who is researching this type of solution to really look at your feature functionality. What do you need? Does it meed your needs?