DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

In our organisation we use this product mainly for server monitoring. OS, Database, URL, schedules, hub configuration and the dashboard and performance reports.

Management of servers, network and different types of probes and customisation of probes.

This is one of the main products for monitoring in our organisation,.e.g. our network monitoring sometimes doesn't capture interface traffic, during that time we use Nimsoft's interface traffic probe to check the interface utilization.

When ever there is an IP address change to the server and even changing the IP inside the robot.*.cfg file it won't update on IM automatically, and we have manually validated the probes. This should be improved.

I've used it for the past few years.

During deployment, not many issues.

The robots are a bit unstable sometimes, we often encounter robot inactive alerts even though the service is running. We have to restart to fix this issue.

Scalability in terms of how vast you can monitor, Nimsoft is a very useful product.

Customer service is quite okay, however whenever we face issue with probes, they only suggest to upgrade the probe to latest version and check if the issue reoccurs, and if it reoccurs then they troubleshoot, this should be improved.

Technical support provided by CA is quite good an they have a very useful knowledge base. Most of the solutions we find are on the website.

Nimsoft setup is quite straight forward, however, later stage usage and customisation depends on the requirements. A few probes are a bit complex, but the basic monitoring probes are easy to configure.

As mentioned, the initial setup was done by vendor and their level of expertise is good.

This product is very useful compared to other products i worked on like MS-SCOM, CA NSM, an IBM Tivoli.

As i have worked on this product for quite some time I personally think this product is the best in terms of overall infrastructure monitoring.

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?

Basically, the most valuable feature for us is that the dashboard if easy to use as it aggregates all data.

It's really been beneficial to the applications teams in their ability to see CPUs and disc memory. It monitors memory on the servers associated with our applications.

One of the things I would like to see an improvement on is the ability to do mass deployment. Also, I'd like a federated identity feature, where I can give our users a login and they can choose whatever thresholds they wish to have.

Even better, I would like to see a synthetic transaction report from the reporting feature that our business unites can use to record their transactions and provide it back to us. That would save us a lot of time.

Finally, I'd like some self-service functionality out-of-the-box, so that you can assign probes, or deploy with thresholds, or whatever you want to do. You just put it in a server and let it self-service.

There's been no issues with deployment on my end.

It's been very stable for me as an end-user. We haven't had any problems yet.

No scalability issues so far. That's been fine.

I don't use tech support for anything. I rely on our in-house team for that.

I wasn't involved in the setup.

If I had to choose all over again, I'd probably look more into the mobile function of it.

The features valuable for me are scalability, redundancy, and the wide range of probes available for just about any platform.

Another major advantage is the easy configuration management. When you define standard “base” monitoring templates and on top of those, define “differential” templates, having a tool that allows you to manage these hundreds (and even thousands) of templates in an organized manner is an absolute necessity.

CA UIM not only allows you to manage the templates, but the new MCS module allows you to dynamically assign them to groups. This means that any node/probe belonging to that group will automatically receive the templates.

Note: At this time, MCS does not yet support differential templates, but it is on the roadmap.

When this customer did the PoC, the competition clearly failed in this area. Furthermore, the event management part (alarm server and alert console) is feature-rich. It allows for some advanced, alert processing and correlation.

Nodes are now monitored in a standardized way, thanks to configuration management. We are a lot more pro-active to solve potential issues, thanks to event management.

Different teams are using different dashboards according to their requirements. For example, the end-user service desk uses a high-level dashboard with the state of the most important applications, printer malfunctions, etc.

A lot of the functionality is available out-of-the-box without having to script it, although scripting it is still needed from time to time. This means new objects/metrics are effectively getting monitored quickly without a lengthy development period.

I would like to see the retirement of the heavy client (infrastructure manager) in favor of the web-based admin console. It is close, but it is not there yet.

Support for the PostgreSQL database platform would be nice. At this time, you can only choose between Oracle and MySQL when running CA UIM on Linux.

As a DBA, I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL. (This is my personal preference. By no means do I find MySQL a bad product.)

For this customer, it’s their first implementation. However, I have been using CA UIM since 2014 and its predecessor, Unicenter NSM, since 2004.

We had no stability issues. The built-in redundancy allows for maintenance windows for patching.

Scalability is one of its strong points. A manager server (hub) can manage a lot of nodes. Adding another hub is really straightforward. You just need to make sure you have plenty of storage for both the database and the primary hub.

The technical support is very good. You still need access to the old support.nimsoft.com site for downloading new versions of probes. Overall, it is very good.

CA support did have a bad reputation 10-15 years ago, but they made a lot of effort to improve it.

The customer was using Nagios, and still is for the network part.

The main issues were:

• The lengthy development periods (because you need to script everything),
• The difficulty of having any custom reporting/dashboarding capabilities
• The total absence of decent event management functionality: This is something most cheaper monitoring tools anyway don't have

The actual installation was very quick and straightforward. Of course, you can spend ages configuring/tweaking as the product has endless options. It all depends what you have defined and how complex your environment is.

Most of the time was spent defining the architecture: What probes go where, redundancy, tunnels for the DMZ networks, and capacity planning. I recommend spending as much time as required on this, as you will benefit from it later.

It is definitely not the cheapest on the market, but you can save a lot of money by carefully making a list of which probes you actually need and how many of them are required.

Often probes can monitor multiple instances or are included in other packs, so you don’t have to purchase them separately. Make sure to be precise. Your CA representative can assist you with that.

The customer did a PoC with two contenders: CA UIM and Microsoft SCOM.

Try to look beyond the price tag. You really do get a lot in return, especially when you have a highly heterogeneous environment.

The most valuable feature is the very large probe number, over 180, for different technologies, that all comunicate their metrics through one product.

When you are implementing it, I think the most valuable tool is the Infrastructure Manager (a Windows client for probes management and configuration). Of course, there is also a web-based tool, but you cannot do it all from the web interface.

When you are using the product, I think the most valuable feature is UMP, with its dashboards, and alarm view. You can see the alarm state of your system, and pinpoint the most critical elements and metics in dashboards. This allows you to rapidly view and acces the alarm console for that specific element. It is fast and easy to use.

Not for my organization, but for our customers, they managed to monitor their infrastructure in a unified manner, more easily, and at different levels (management, operational etc.).

Although the products is easy to deploy, the implementation effort is still inconsistent. This is because you have a lot of different technologies and vendors.

I started with this product a year ago, and am still working with it.

None, but of course you need basic knowledge about the infrastructure elemets that you want to monitor, and for which ones you want to deploy probes.

CA UIM is a mature and stable product.

No issues encountered.

10/10

9/10

I have used and implemented the old product, CA Infrastructure Management, but CA UIM is the new strategic product in this line.

You can try it, or you can try the Snap (CA UIM Snap), unlimited in time, but only for 30 devices and with fewer features, by registering on the vendor site.

If you have a strong IT department, or some special request for monitoring, that is hard to shared with others, you can try to implement it yourself. Otherwise, it is better to have services (from CA or other companies). You just have to remember that it is harder to take on an implementation on the fly and correct what is already done, than have one done from scratch.

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.