The ability to monitor any platform. We have Windows, Linux, AIX, and mainframe all being monitored with the same UIM infrastructure.

The number of probes available. Out of the box, I believe about 200 probes are available. And, if there's a probe that is not available, you can write one. You can also go to the communities and suggest, and based on demand, CA will write one for you.

I would like to see auditability. We've built our own audit functionality to ensure that every CI has the desired model configuration applied to it. And we run that on a daily basis. If that became part of the product, I think it might be a little bit less intensive in terms of resource, because we're doing it with scripts.

Very stable.

Scalability's gotten better. When we first were using it, there were some challenges with that, but we were able to work with CA and scale it up to an enterprise class.

We were using CA Nimsoft Monitor, and we knew we had to invest in UIM because NISM was a few years past sunset. We realized that we needed to embrace the latest technology being offered by CA.

I would give it an eight out of 10. Business class, I would give it a 10. Enterprise, eight. And there are just a few more things to make it more enterprise-class friendly.

The most valuable feature for us are the way it brings silo products together that we've invested in over the years, and it allows us to consolidate our views for our customers.

We started off with standard infrastructure – networks, switches, routers, firewalls – but as we've grown, our proposition has been able to expand to the cloud, internet of things, and big data. Although we don't use all of those capabilities from it today, the key thing for us is, we know it's flexible enough to do that.

The key things for us are: help bring people together, break down the silo teams, and then be able to see the customers' problem, the pain points, in a single place. It helps us make more-effective decisions and also the response time to fix.

I would like to see further consolidation of the tools from a deployment point of view. Make it more modular; drag and drop; being able to have a commercial model that also lends itself well with what we're trying to achieve for our customers.

It's not only about features and gimmicks. It's about making sure the features and products align to our customers’ outcomes.

I have been using UIM for about seven years now.

Stability is an interesting one. From a design point of view, if you understand the type of demand you're putting on it and you plan forward, which we've worked to learned to do, it becomes more stable. If you don’t know what you're doing and you try to do something with it which it's not really designed for, of course you have performance issues with many products.

So, it's really about knowing what you want to get out of the product and how you want to architect the product to meet your objectives.

I would say it is scalable. We use it in a multi-context environment. What I mean by that is, as a service provider, naturally we have customers who scale horizontally. So, for us, we've got a template-driven approach now. With the advent of virtualization and cloud, that's also allowed us to scale out much quicker.

Technical support is interesting. Initially, in the UK, we had challenges having to engage the standard process. But, with the advent of the online forums and the communities, that's allowed more open questioning and learning from others out there and the peers, not necessarily just from our own industry; from areas that are adjacent to our market but are also trying to achieve the same outcome. I think CAhave now created more of a flexible platform to do that.

I think there are areas where initial setup has become more simpler now, but in the early days, it was really trying to understand what we want out of the product because, without knowing what the requirement was, we were kind of grappling with lots of the features. But then, once we understood what we're trying to deliver and then we worked with CA; I think once we engaged with CA, they did really come through. They came forward and supported us along the journey.

I think organically we tried putting it in for various products and services. Over time, when we realized that we can harness more out of it, we made a decision to put more energy for our enterprise customers into tools that really give them more value. Rather than trying to invest in too many tools, we decided to actually work on fewer tools; we'll get more out of them.

Without being biased, I feel that the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is about the people and whilst there's always a tradition in an organization when you're working with a vendor, it's really important that you have engagement from all levels of your business, from product marketing, engineering, architecture, as well as from a commercial relationship.

If you have a transactional relationship, you will only get suboptimal results. What we've learned is to broaden the discussion with different areas of our partner-vendor and work with them at different levels to bring the best out. That collaboration is really important. That's, I think, changed a lot over the last few years and we're now starting to get the value out of the relationship.

I’d never give anybody a perfect rating. If you asked me about two years ago, my rating would have been lower. As I’ve mentioned, the collaboration has definitely improved things.

OOB probes

We're able to respond quicker to incidents.

Dashboards +++ and correlation creation tool (instead of NAS)

4 years

Not really

Yes, Q issues at very slow dashboards (flash!!!)

No

4 out of 5

6 out of 5

Many (10+). We switched to centralize on one tool.

Easy

Both in-house and with a vendor team

1200K €/

day2day 200k/Y

Yes, IBM, BMC

Have a good integrator

We mainly use the solution for infrastructure monitoring on our customers' in-house systems. 

This solution allows us to have an overview of the infrastructure and identify areas where the performance isn't optimal, or where upgrades could be carried out.

We would like the navigation of this solution to be more user-friendly for our system administrators.

Also, the solution is quite complicated, so we would like there to be better documentation on the processes, in order to ensure we know exactly how it works.

We have been working with this solution for around 10 years.

We have found this to be a stable solution.

It is an easily scalable product.

The technical support for this solution could be improved. 

Neutral

The initial setup of the solution was straightforward.

We have found that the ROI with this solution, is that the features available allow for us to spot potential issues, before they occur and cause problems for our customers.

We would advise any organization implementing this product, to ensure that there are good training materials available for their users, as it is a complicated solution and requires some specific knowledge prior to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Basically, the most valuable feature is the ability to scale and quickly allow us to deploy an infrastructure management solution to our clients in a very timely manner, across the board, using many different technologies; so, storage, databases, OSs, and synthetic monitoring, things like that.

It allows us to create a baseline template for each of the different technologies. That allows to quickly deploy our solution set for that particular technology base to each different client. So, across the board, we have a baseline of measurable, simple deployment mechanisms.

I would probably like to see more out-of-the-box solutions that I don't have to individually go into, configure and set up myself.

With every new probe that is released, we have to come up with a good monitoring template to accurately identify the key metrics for that specific technology to monitor it correctly. We have to find SME’s for that technology, sit down with them, show them all the metrics that we can collect then ask what are the key important metrics that if this breaches a threshold, should we alert. This is very time consuming for all parties.

I've been using it for two and a half years.

It is very stable, I would say. Maybe, we had issues during upgrades, but it's been relatively very stable.

It's very scalable. We have no issue adding on additional clients because of just the way the product has been designed, it allows us to scale very heavily.

Technical support is excellent. I've been working with them for 10+ years. I have a good relationship with the support company. I know every support individual there and it is run in a very professional, friendly manner.

Upgrades are very straightforward. You have the wiki site, which tells you step by step. I do run through the upgrade in a test environment first before actually implementing in production.

I was able to quickly learn it and use it, deploy it, modify it to our specific needs, and it's been very reliable since.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the history of the company, how long it's been in business, what offerings in terms of support it offers, and really other customer feedback based on their personal experiences.

Custom Dashboard is one of the best features of the product because it allows you to bring great value to people who are not technical. It gives them visibility over their infrastructure and the ability to cross-reference that information with business data. It's also good for big screens to show the power of the product, providing a great vision of the orientated services.

With the SLM feature, you can transform any collected metric into a Service Level Objective that affects a Service Level Agreement. You can then predict when your SLA will be below the specified marks.

Since it supports a wide range of different monitoring technologies, it allowed us to turn off GUIs from other tools and consolidate them into it, making it a single console, plus the dashboards do a great job of showing us what is happening.

With the increased amount of data it has to collect, a different approach to data storage would be nice, perhaps something similar to a NoSQL instead of a relational method. But this is something to be studied, of course C.A will choose a method that is capable of delivering performance and integrity.

We've been using it for almost three years now.

No problems at all so far with deployment, but you just need to follow the documentation carefully.

No problems at all so far with stability, if you happen to have a problem, just open a support ticket and C.A will try to help you as fast as they can.

Depending on the amount of data you intend to collect, the database to store it all may get large. Other than that, the product supports big numbers regarding scalability.

Customer service is good, most of the times you get the answer you need really quick, it will have situations that you'll need to wait for a longer period for solution (cases that require development), but it gets resolved at some point.

I hardly had any unsolved problem. They usually reply within SLA, but the solution may take some time depending on the difficulty of the problem.

I’ve used other monitoring solutions before. I chose CA UIM because it’s pretty good at what it does, makes your life a lot easier with fast deployment options, and CA is always improving it a lot.

The initial setup was straightforward, really fast, and simple. It was just "Next-Next-Finish" for Windows installs or as simple as just answering some questions on Linux installs.

We implemented it ourselves. My advice is that you should always read the requirements and compatibility guides before implementing as it has everything you need for a smooth installation process. Don’t try and guess the OS and DB versions by yourself or try to use the latest releases. It may take some time for the last release support, but the product is usually up-to-date. Always read the manuals before going full hands-on with some probes because it can save you a lot of time.

I have a rough estimate that the ROI is around 30%.

You should always send your number of devices and other relevant information to a representative partner or CA directly, because CA UIM has some differentiated methods depending on what you have in your infrastructure, but they provide you with the correct questions so that you have the needed amount of licenses.

The product is one of the best in the market. I can say that because of 10+ years of experience with monitoring solutions for infrastructure. Even more, it's better when you start talking about the enterprise level because of its great scalability. But this product is simple enough to be used by small-to-medium and medium-to-big companies. They offer also a free version called SNAP that anyone can try it out.

The cohesiveness of the product. It's versatile and easy of use.

We're monitoring servers, network devices, storage components, load balancers, phone systems, virtual infrastructure, applications, etc. The various SDKs are great and have also allowed us to write custom probes for anything else we've needed.

Again, the ease of use and the administration, I'm a single UIM administrator, and I can administrate the whole product from reporting, systems monitoring, network monitoring, it's a very practical solution.

Maybe a little bit more on the reporting side. It does integrate with a product called iReport, but that's very cumbersome to use. It's a very full featured product, but something you'd have to work with every day to fullyleverage.

Like with any big product, it's had it's ups and downs. The last few releases have been outstanding. The stability has really come along way in the last few years.

We've increased the product's footprint twice and it's rose to the challenge each time. We've integrating multiple other companies that have been acquired with this product. It's just been a fantastic solution.

The tech support has been very well. Sometimes it takes a little time, if it has to go thought the back end support. For the most part, very happy with it.

We had numerous solutions. We had SolarWinds, we had WhatsUp Gold, we had a lot of different things like that. With CA UIM, we were able to roll all those into a single monitoring platform. It's not nine different products that are configured to work together, it's one cohesive central standard product.

We actually used a CA support to help us roll out the initial product, and it took the learning curve way down. I was able to watch and ask questions. I was really engaged in that process with them, so that when they left, and it was deployed, I was able to pick it up and I've done multiple deployments my own since then.

When selecting a vendor I'm looking for: support, are they going to be there if I need them, the maturity (are they mature enough that it's not going to be all over the board), and consistency.

I think I evaluated fifty different products before we went with CA UIM. It was just the out of the box functionality was there. They had probes for everything in our infrastructure. Linux, Windows, it works just as well on either. We have a heterogeneous environment. Everything was there.

The deployment and everything went really well. The biggest feature we've seen is the ability to track availability. Availability reports, how's the product performing, not just up down like ping monitoring. We can get in there, we can pull metrics, wherever we need them, it's just very easy to use.

It is probably an 8/10, just because there's always room for improvement. A solid eight because it's always been able to do anything we've asked of it. We've done custom integrations, written custom probes, and it's always there, anything we need to do, it's fully capable.

Recommendation to peers: do your homework. Really get in there, really look, set up a sample. Again, I can not say enough the cohesiveness of the product. It's not multiple different piece meal products that have to be configured to work together, it's all one product, under the hood, and it does what it says it does.