DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• 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're a managed service provider so we monitor customers and their networks and infrastructure and we're their support. We're a customer of DX and I'm a services infrastructure architect. 

Prior to using this solution, we had three point solutions in place; one for voice infrastructure, one for servers, and one for networks. This tool meant we were actually able to collapse everything into a single interface which made my team's life easier, but it also meant that our first line staff then just had one view of the customer's entire infrastructure.

The big attraction of this product is its out-of-the-box capability. It means that there is not a lot of custom development required. 

The product could be improved if the company kept up with service developments, in particular from the cloud vendors. As Azure, AWS and Google are rapidly adding features and functions to their own public cloud offerings, UIM has not necessarily kept pace with that development. In particular, it was the platform as a service capabilities. The infrastructure as a service capabilities were quite good, but the platform as a service was lacking significantly, along with a lot of the serverless capability as well. 

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

The stability is pretty good although it still has some quirks. It is a legacy tool and as such, there's been a lot of angst in the development of it. Once you've been through years and years of bug fixes it's quite stable. Some of the newer components are still rough around the edges.

In our initial roll-outs in the early years, the product proved to be quite effective in its scalability, but as we continued to grow, we have seen scaling limits. My team, the infrastructure team, are primarily the administrators of the solution. There are six of us in the team. Then there's our level one in our team with about 20 people, and then there's some SMEs that handle specific components within the system and there's probably 70 or 80 of them.

They're pretty knowledgeable and they rely heavily on documentation. I don't know if they have a lot of direct hands-on field experience, but their knowledge of the documentation is pretty good.

The initial setup, which I carried out, was complex. That is primarily because it was a significant learning curve at the time. I was also supporting the existing infrastructure and trying to learn the new tool as well. We didn't have an implementation strategy. We piloted it with one customer and then expanded that to two more, and then expanded out to the rest. At the time, it would have been about 30 odd customers. In total, I think it took about a year as the customers cycle through their contracts, we flipped them over to the new tool. Once we got a feel for the tool, it was much easier. 

 I believe we pay around CAD $400,000 per year. It's a pay per consumption fee. 

We're currently evaluating other options. I'm looking for an MSP friendly tool. We have to be able to differentiate between different customers. I'm looking for a tool that has a good degree of scalability, more than what we have now. A tool that, if it doesn't have capability in the box, provides a means to extend the tool for our custom purposes and also a better price point than we have now.

Cloud vendors have expanded their services and features and functions within their own platforms. Having to rely on a third-party to keep pace with that development cycle has proven rather disappointing. That's why we're looking for a tool that has the capability to enable us to extend the tool on our own, if we choose to.

I don't think I would recommend this product. My issues stem from the turnover between companies that we've experienced in the last 10 years. The continued development of the tool has not been great. I think they've become lost in their tracks.

I would rate this solution a six out of 10. 

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.

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 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.

We are using it for the monitoring of our hardware infrastructure, and also for our applications' response times. So far, it has performed well. 

• The integration with Spectrum
• The ability to create an integrated console based upon the services which we are offering.

We have had previous experience with CA products, so it is another progression in our use and deployment of the CA suite.

• Ease of use
• Integration with the other CA products

We are working on the process improvement. We have a large deployment across multiple applications, so working with the applications team and obtaining velocity is a difficult thing. 

If there was a way to better harvest information from other sources to configure the components, it would make it easier to do.

For the past year, the tool has been quite stable in our environment, so I enjoy working with it. 

The scalability is good, because of our diverse locations and the large number of applications. However, getting the right components in the right area, we just have to think through it and engineer it.

It is difficult to get their time to instrument their applications. So, it is not the product that is difficult to work with, it is getting the people's time to work with us.

For technical support, we sourced knowledge from one of our in-house partners, which is a contract resource type of thing.  

This was our first implementation of this type of solution. We had done an internal proof of concept or proof of value. That is where we came up with using the tool. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Because of our previous experience with CA, we did not really look elsewhere.

Plan well. Because of what the tool does, some companies do not really have a good service catalog, and without a good service catalog, taking the leap into the UIM space is going to be an interesting challenge. That has been one of our challenges, we did not have a good service catalog.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• The partnership with the team
• The quality of the products
• The reputation of the vendor.

The most valuable features we're taking advantage of today is computer memory disc monitoring and the alerting on it. We're able to predict how close we're approaching our thresholds so we can head off a disaster and we can troubleshoot it before it becomes a big problem.

We have the solution across all the production servers in our operation. We have seen, over the last 4 or 5 years, about a 30% decrease in escalations in crisis management, less severity events because we are trending and tracking against thresholds so we get early warning alerts. Our goal is trigger solutions in escalation resolution before it becomes a critical event.

We monitor SQL databases, we have a lot of servers; Windows servers, we have Linux boxes and we have network equipment.

One of the things we'd like to see is a more streamline and baseline reporting mechanism. We use several CA products and we'd like to see all of the products dump information into a common format so that we can harvest it into multiple dashboards. Right now if you use multiple applications, you need 3 different experts on 3 different reporting structures. We'd like to see them come with a unified database and ability to harvest that data.

We haven't had any issues with downtime with the solution at all. We do have, at times, the robots which are probes that log onto server. Sometimes they'll hang or fall offline and we generally have an auto-restart if that happens. Most the time we find out we caused it ourselves because somebody was performing maintenance.

We've been able to scale it across 20 platforms in 3 different data centers. It doesn't mean it's simple, but once you've got your thresholds down and your methodology, your strategy of what you want to monitor, it works pretty well.

We've used technical support before, especially when we first loaded, our server installed our design. Very responsive, stuck with us on the phone till we resolved our issues and at some points they had to come back a few days later with a solution or a patch to fix us.

We were having system outages, or server outages, or connectivity outages with the network and we weren't able to see it. The tools we had in place weren't robust enough and weren't flexible enough for us to design thresholds and different levels of monitoring. We started researching tools and we decided on UIM.

I think the initial setup was pretty straightforward. It was a little more complex than we thought but it wasn't insurmountable. The biggest challenge we had was that we didn't understand how our applications ran or how our hardware was responding to our applications so we set the thresholds pretty low, generated a lot of alerts, and then had to adjust. That was probably the biggest challenge we had going into the project

We chose CA primarily because of the size of the company and past relationships at other companies I have worked for. Also, we looked at vendors for many different products but we chose CA because of the the flexibility of the product and the supportability of the product.

When selecting a vendor we are first and foremost looking for a partner. We're not interested in a vendor/client relationship. We're not interested in just being a dollar sign at the end of the quarter. We want somebody who will work to understand our business and understand what's unique about us. I'm sure that's a common thread with many customers but it's really important for us to have a partner relationship. The second thing is we want serviceability. We want to be able to call tech support, or talk to a systems engineer, and have them engage with us and work with us through a problem, not just throw us canned solutions and assume we're going to apply those and walk away.

I'd rate it a 9/10. First of all, I don't know that I ever reach a 10 with any vendor, but a 9 because the solution works as advertised, the service is there. The responsiveness of the tech support is very, very pleasing. They come back to you when they schedule, they follow up on their commitments. We've had some challenges expanding our footprint in other data centers. Like I said earlier, it's not perfectly easy, it is complex but once you get it dialed in we're up and running and everything's smooth. Their service teams have been there with us all the way, so that's really important for us.

When it comes to advice to others, I think you should focus on having an understanding of what you want to measure and monitor in your environment. It's more than just saying, "Yeah, we're going to monitor all the servers." What thresholds? What do you expect your CPU utilization to be? What do you expect your memory utilization to be? What's important for you from a customer service responsiveness? Do you have a systems engineer who's willing to put the time in to understand your business before providing you a solution? Those things are really key for us.

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.