DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

The main feature for us is its flexibility with their message bus and their API to make it do what you need it to do, since everyone's different. There is flexibility in the SDKs to customize it.

It really depends on where you're coming from. In 2009, we were working with Nagios -- before it was UIM and called Nimbus -- and weren't particularly unhappy, but there was an executive decision to go in a different direction. We were out-of-date and weren't taking advantage of some of the new features to see whether they would make a different for us. There were new capabilities, such as analytics and machine baselines versus static thresholds.

That said, it does provide us with a reduction in signal noise levels. It gives an alarm when there's something going on, not just when there's an expected spike that happens every night on a server.

Although this may not work based on our environment, but topology discovery and root cause analysis would be nice to have. Right now, we don't have the RCA and rootcon topology awareness. It may be in the new version, but based on our architecture, it may not work. It would be a big win, however, if we had it.

Another useful feature to have would be automatic configuration per standard by new robots that check in for any particular customer. This could help us decrease the configuration time.

We've had the same version since the install in 2009. We're looking to upgrade, and we do have the latest version in our lab, but I'm anxious to have it available in prime time.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We've had some issues that may to do with versioning, though not completely. In our backend, the database structure and message bus are on the really old version, though the hub is the newest version. There's a point when new features on the hub may no longer be possible. This may be where our version is hurting us.

Sometimes our hubs get choked up and support has never been able to isolate the cause.

We do have times where the hubs get choked up and we've never been able to isolate why with support. Is it something in our environment or is it something they see from other customers? Is it hubs that are too busy? Is it our REX infrastructure? We've never been able to isolate the cause. I've had several support cases over the years about a scenario where the hub gets into a partially functioning state and so all the robots have realized it's not working normally and have moved over to their backup hub. That hub itself still expects to hear from all those robots and so we'll get a flood of hundreds of alarms saying, "Robot inactive. These robots are not checking into me." It's really that they're just checking into the other hub.

That's the issue -- there's no intelligence at that layer. And because of that, one of our most common alarm floods is from the hub itself.

I had an escalation one time to double check that the hub failed-over okay and was back online because they got a hundred tickets opened all at the same time. That's the main point that we've had in terms of instability, is on the hub. We have hubs at other sites that don't have as many robots or aren't doing as many ping checks and they have much fewer issues. It could be that some of these hubs are just too busy and they're more likely to get choked up.

There's also the issue of portal performance. We have UMP released and it's not awful for our customers. If a customer logs in, from a security stand point, they're only seeing their data. If they have 10 servers that we manage for them, the performance isn't awful in that scenario. As an internal employee, when we log in and we have the permission to see all of our data from thousands of devices, the performance is a lot slower and a lot more painful and that's something that we're several versions behind on the portal.

We've had no issues with scalability.

We've had some concerns, especially since CA's acquisition and re-branding of Nimsoft. For a while, there was a dedicated support center just for the monitoring product. But now, there's a more standardized support structure where Tier 1 is not as specialized. I haven't, however, had a lot of cases to claim that it's worse than before, but we have had tickets that have dragged on for a long time.

There was an instance where they fixed a bug after 6-8 months, but it was the wrong bug. There are a couple of threads on their forum about comical support interactions where they get told, "Oh, that's an enhancement. Go type it and we'll vote on whether to fix it. Go type it out on the forum." I don't think that's always the experience in every case, but we have had some challenges like that, where it's like, "How are you calling this an enhancement? This is just basic core functionality that's not working" and getting agreement on that. At times that's been a challenge.

When we first implemented Nimbus in 2009, it wasn't fully vetted by the technical staff because management pushed it on them. For what we pay, I know many executives don't think we're getting enough ROI. We doing basic monitoring -- CPU memory, disk space, SQL responses, URL's, pings, and custom probes we've written using their SDK. Writing our own probes is one of the perks with something like Nagios.

The licensing cost is several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we're only getting several hundred dollars' worth of value since we're doing basic stuff. That's the challenge.

And we're hamstrung because we're still using the older version, and we're not getting great ROI. There's a lack of clarity on where we want to go, but we could do a whole lot more than we're doing.

There are things that are nice in just covering the basics for us, but then we have pain points on some of the more advanced stuff.

Monitoring infrastructure and network devices: UIM can monitor devices such as switches and routers, and infrastructure such as memory, CPU, disk health.

Most of the time, we need to restart the monitoring server when deploying new features. If it is possible to enable new features without restarting the managed server, it would be awesome.

I have been using it for two years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. It is very stable.

Technical support is 9/10.

I have been using this from the beginning.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

It is very reliable and easy to implement.

• 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.

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.

Our main use case is obviously doing base monitoring with the product, and also going beyond that doing URL monitoring. We are actually exploring more than what the UIM can perform with the current solution that we have in place. So, we are migrating everything over to the UIM. So far, it works well, even though we have not migrated everything over.

Obviously, the base monitoring and how we can essentially set up alerts to go to the board through Spectrum. However, that is pretty much our main use case for it. 

The alerts and thresholds that we set up within the tool, that's important for the business. If it were to meet that threshold, it goes to the board, which in turn, we can notify the application's owners swiftly to minimize the impact of a SEP-1. So, it is critical.

Just to have that overall picture when it comes to monitoring throughout the whole environment and be able to act on it.

The main complaint with the tool is we are attempting to migrate off of SCOM and the management packs that SCOM has for exchange (ED and SharePoint) it does not look like UIM and can't necessarily compete with those. Maybe, if that could be improved.

I would have to look up some actual use cases, but when we initially set up the 6-risk environment within UIM, it did not meet the needs for the application owners who actually manage the Citrix environment. They decided to actually go back to SCOM. That was the one main concern, and that is something that we will have to readdress with CA.  

It seems pretty stable. I have not had any cyclic concerns. There was an issue when we migrated to the latest version, but we had support that day to get it resolved and it was resolved within 24 hours, so that was a plus. 

When we upgraded to the latest version, the admin lost access to the management console. That was the issue and it got resolved really quickly. 

I do not know if I can speak to it.

The individual that manages the product itself used tech support. She received a response/resolved within 24 hours. She found them to be knowledgeable.

We moved from the HPE product suite two or three years ago. I was not a part of that, but the main complaint with HPE was the support was locking. That is really about it. 

We did migrate from a different solution, which had a similar functionality. I would not say that it necessarily added to it, but I received feedback from the admin who administers the tool itself that it is a lot easier to use and very user friendly for the teams.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, I have not heard anything bad about it either.

Splunk, AppDynamics, and CA were on our shortlist.

I started just a few months ago, but the company has been using it for about two years now. I have been surprised by the foothold CA has on the marketplace and how many products they actually manage.

I would definitely recommend the concept if it is something you are looking for.Just make sure that it integrates with the rest of the tools in your environment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Functionality of the product
• Ease of use.

What I like about CA compared to other vendors is they are not pushy. They are actually more supportive if we have any issues they will get the appropriate rep to assist. Our rep does not feel like he is a sales rep, even though he is. To have that good relationship with the people that you are responsible for is a big deal, because I have dealt with other vendors where they are kind of the sleazy, salesman type.

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.

I believe that the fundamentals and the logic of how UIM is set up is very stable. We like that the fundamentals support providing metrics and alarms.

I feel it provides the essentials. That is, to extract data from an environment and present it through a front-end, using graphs and charts. It also allows for analysis on the collected data, which is crucial to most companies. I believe that UIM does a good job, of being able to manage all the steps along the way.

I haven’t been in my current position for too long. I definitely noticed that UIM provides a level of reliability in our operating center for the people who actually implement the alarms. When an alarm comes in, they're responsible for making sure the alarm validation is raised. It allows reliability and it gives us assurance that we have an accurate picture about what really is going on in our monitoring environment. That's reassuring to know. We know that when we get an alarm, it is because something is actually happening.

We're just hoping to see the growth in different functional areas so that it's a little bit more dynamic. The other enterprise suites that they're trying to bundle up are great. I think that the core functions of the product itself are great. I think it might need a little more work at the extremities, trying to hook up with other software. Right now, they're doing a good job at trying to implement additional suites and software. What I would like to see is that the quality of what is currently in place just be increased.

There are some components of UIM that are dated, or they're being left behind and some newer ones are being put forward.

I can't see any new features, and if I did, I don’t know what I’d be doing around here. Can this feature do my job here? But no, realistically, we depend on these systems that when we see configured, we know exactly what we're going to get. It's been improving. Still, I think there's a lot of room for growth

The stability for UIM creates that reliant backbone that we need. If there is anything customizable that needs to be done, that is being done by the other suites; but UIM is very good and it helps coordinate everything and provides reliability.

The scalability is great. I think they understand that it’s a concern because it's at the enterprise level. I think they're moving in the right direction.

I know that right now we're a little bit outdated in the product version that we have; but it's just part of the product, and we understand that. Moving forward, when we update, and when we do all these things, I know that the scalability has been opening up in different components within UIM.

Adding components, such as MCS, which enables you to configure your entire enterprise from one place, is a good thing.

I used to work for CA UIM support. I would be the one to talk to. Having worked there, and now coming from the actual implementation where I'm an enterprise-level user is a very up-and-down, roller-coaster feeling. It’s like I'm stuck in support because as much as I want to say that everybody is consistent, and every technical guy wants the best for you, it just doesn't happen that way.

When it does, it's great, and we really appreciate it. When it's lacking, we suffer a little bit and it creates a bitterness. We don’t do anything up front, but we keep a record of it. Technical support was not the best. We could use more. We're wasting money because we see it didn't produce here or wasn't responsive enough.

It definitely raises questions and concerns, but I know CA is very open to hearing customers' concerns and listening to feedback. I think they’re very open and understand that that’s an area they can improve.

I don't do the selecting processes. My boss definitely lets me know, "Hey, we want to read into this," and I go into it with a particular perspective after he gives me some goals and requirements. The most important thing is the goal of your company and what they are trying to achieve.

We have looked at other vendors but upper management is always trying to cut costs, and understandably so. We were looking at other solutions which might provide a level comparable to what we have with CA, where we have what we need, while reducing costs; but it's kind of tough. CA's pretty competitive. They're good. They're solid.

Make sure you have a good grasp on what you need to get out of the product, of course. What does this product do for you? Once you have a good understanding of that, it's really communicating with either the architect or whoever is going to implement it to make sure that it reflects the goals, the requirements, the SLA, and so on. Then you can do the configuration and implementation.

CA UIM gives us interoperability between network and server monitoring, as well as the ability for us to be a one-stop shop. We are able to do all the monitoring for our customers.

We're a managed service provider and have multiple customers under us. CA Unified Infrastructure Management allows us to use one tool so we're not looking at five or six different ones. It brings everything into one dashboard so my team can pick up their information very quickly.

Our experience has been that UIM does not do discovery well.  While discovery exists, it does not have a method for reporting out on new servers, and it cannot be used the way our new customers would like.  Discovery should be more than discovering the IP or hostname.  We would like to see a tool that can discover the device and go through an information gathering process.  What is the server, what does it do, or even what is it connected to?

As for event correlation, this is a bigger issue.  Right now, UIM does not give us any form of true correlation. Our customers do not want four alarms for every server outage. They want a single alarm that tells them if the server is down.  However, the current system will not allow us to tie a ping response alarm to an SNMP unavailable alarm. We have to do custom work to make this happen.  There is also no direct correlation to upstream devices. If we lose a database, how does it affect an application?

CA UIM is very stable. We're using an older version right now, but as we move forward, the product is getting better every year. It seems to be more stable every year when they come out with a new release.

Scalability is good. We went from about 1200 to about 5000, so we've scaled very large.

Some of our customers had previously used CA Spectrum, but we did a complete business case analysis and then talked to sales teams from the other vendors. CA was very on board with us and worked with us better than any of the others.

For us, technical support was most important in choosing a vendor; trying to determine what kind of support we were going to get and then evaluating the ability to do the monitoring as a one-stop shop.

Initial setup was a little complex, but it was straightforward enough to where we did it ourselves. We've actually done it three times since with no problems.

Some of the rule sets and some of the way we had to do things were complex though. We started off on Unix and turned out it didn't have all the features we needed, so we had to convert it to Windows.

We looked at HPE, SolarWinds Orion, as well as a couple open-source projects, like OpenNMS. But, CA had the best product. We could use a single product and not have to buy four or five different ones.

My advice is to be patient, work with CA, and don't be afraid to ask questions or seek help.