DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

From a managed service provider standpoint, the product truly understands managed service provider architecture. It’s multi-tenant, which for us is huge. We’ve had other products in the past, including CA Unicenter, which weren’t multi-tenant aware.

The reporting flexibility is another key item for us.

It also gives us the ability to monitor many different platforms and applications.

Not only do we use it to monitor our customers' environments on a 24/7 basis, we monitor our own internal infrastructure. It gives us the visibility into our own environment, and likewise for customers it gives us that visibility and confidence to be able to raise alarms and issues for both ourselves and our customers. Ultimately, that keeps us running.

Since we’re in the technology space, I’d really like to see quicker adoption or certification process for new product or platforms that come out. A faster time-to-certify in other words.

With the SNMP collector probe they have a catch-all general solution; if there’s no probe for a specific service or application, it’s for general use. There is a certification process by way of their list, but it does take some time. For us, streamlining that process would be key.

I think it’s a very stable product. The portal and application have been stable, so no issues.

It does seem that it is flexible; as we grow with our service offering it does have the flexibility to scale the architecture. No problems so far.

Overall, I’d say they’re fairly good. I think when compared to a couple of years ago, support has gone down a bit rather than up. A lack of product knowledge is probably one of the key reasons as to why it’s not excellent.

I was in a position where I was managing the NOC, and I was getting multiple complaints from our customers that they weren’t being notified of issues in their environments. So I started a reveal of the product in place and found some major deficiencies. At that point I approached our CEO and told him of the issues we were having and that we were losing customers, and we put together a plan to find a new product.

We did use CA to help with the implementation, and overall with the help of CA professional services, it went very well with zero downtime. We had a former version and we decided to build out a new version, and we had to move our existing customers from the old to new environment, and it had a very minimal impact to loss of visibility. In that respect it was very good.

We looked at SMARTS, and we also looked at Spectrum (at the time it wasn’t CA). From a solution standpoint, UIM really fit the bill. We’ve been for the most part very happy customers. First and foremost we looked at the toolsets. Then the product knowledge of the vendor, and the knowledge of our space. Also, the size of the company and costs are the other factors.

It’s been very stable, it’s flexible, and it really fits our business needs and business model. Integration with some other CA products has been a little challenging, but I can’t blame it on this toolset alone.

You would probably want to have, at least in the beginning, an understanding of what you’re looking for. Before you start evaluating any products, have at least a short list of what you want to get out of a product. When we didn’t have that setup at times, when you’re dealing with different vendors, they tend to steer you rather than you directing them. Identifying key items is extremely important. Make sure that you have staffing, because like any solution, it’s not a one or two person job.

The most valuable features are the alerts that go to the service desk and the application-level monitoring.

Having a monitoring tool allows us to preempt disasters. When it hits thresholds, then an alert is triggered and we can act, reducing user impact. That reduces service interruption.

It seems clunky, not as user friendly as Spectrum, for example. When setting up monitoring you can have Nimsoft agents installed on some servers but not others, so maybe it’s a bit more complex than it needs to be. It’s not as straightforward or easy to implement as Spectrum was.

It serves its purpose. We only seem to be able to have one threshold per server at this stage instead of multiple; it’s not clear whether that’s a limitation of the software. They have a whole bunch of different groups – for example one group has a threshold of a certain value, and another group with another threshold. So many groups can quickly get out of hand; managing that many different groups can be difficult.

We just have to watch the group sprawl.

Our networks team have, so I can’t comment on what that support is like. We’ve had the support, but I think it’s a combination – they’ve advised on best practices and how we should do things so they’ve done their job to a certain extent. But we haven’t had a CA resource for implementing those best practices.

It was already in production when I joined.

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.

We use this solution for monitoring our infrastructure environment; servers, storage, database, and applications. This is an infrastructure monitoring tool. I'm a solutions consultant and we are customers of DX. 

The value of UIM is that we are not only monitoring the infrastructure asset but also monitoring it as an IT service. 

I would like to have the option to monitor via mobile phone so it would be helpful if DX would develop a mobile application. I'd like to see a single dashboard and automation implemented as part of the solution.

I've been using this solution for seven years. 

The environment around UIM is sometimes complex and can cause some instability. We have good support to resolve issues when this happens. 

In terms of the knowledge base of the technical staff, they are average. 

Positive

SolarWinds and ManageEngine are both good tools with good technology in this sphere but for our purposes they are unlikely to be able to scale and provide the information we need in our environment. It might work for other companies that have a different environment from ours. It's difficult to compare these solutions head to head because it all depends on an environment's requirements.

The initial setup is easy. Deployment time depends on the number of devices to be monitored and the metrics that are going to be collected. We have 15 users and the solution is used on a daily basis. 

Licensing costs are reasonable and affordable. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We use this solution for server, networks and storage monitoring purposes.

The feature that we've found to be  very helpful is the way the solution categorizes the devices to identify groups, groups of devices and clusters. This allows us to be aware of their position within the topology.

The product also has a standard monitoring process regardless of operating systems; it monitors everything the same way.

We have experienced challenges with finding a mechanism to deploy the agents, but it's only on the first deployment so it's not a big issue.

We would also like to see some enhancements in assignment and adaptation functionality for consoles.

We have been working with this solution for three years.

We have found this to be a fairly stable solution.

We have setup this solution so that we can easily scale up as necessary. It is a multi-tenanted arrangement, so if  new companies come on board, we will then deploy it to them.

We haven't had any issues at all with the environment in terms of support.

Positive

The initial setup of this solution was very straightforward, with the full deployment taking around three months to complete.

We have a partner company who carried out the implementation with us. We first worked on the high priority servers, then the next level, and so on.

We recommend this as a good starter solution for organizations, however, we would advise that additional functionality will significantly increase the cost of this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Infrastructure monitoring. Right now, we do not have an application monitoring setup. That is something that we are looking to get, so at the moment we are just using it to monitor the infrastructure.

We just got it set up a year ago, and then had a company move in between. So, we just started using it, technically, probably like three months ago.

Diagnosing issues is a lot faster. We can pinpoint what is going on more quickly than trying to figure it out. Trying to drill in it in other ways, especially with our teams being kind of split. We can all access it all at the same time.

It allows all of us to be able to see what we need to see very quickly and easily.

It notifies us quickly and easily on the 3D view. We can see when the monitoring lights show up over the racks. It is nice to be able to just see that at a blink of an eye if an alarm is going off, then we can just dial in from there.

It has been very stable. I love it so far.

We have not run into any issues. I will not know until we deep dive into it later, when we get everything up and running. We only have a few racks online right now. Until we get it fully deployed, I will not really know if we would be able to easily add or remove devices as needed.

We have run into a couple of issues, but our rep has been very readily available and responsive. So the issues were fixed right away. It has been great.

My co-worker, who is involved in the initial setup, says that, "Everything has been great so far." Straightforward.

From what I have seen, version 9 looks great.

1. Scheduled maintenance - it gives a good backbone to CA UIM as a product because we do not have to rely on another Event Management tool to do that.
2. Logmon - this probe is sophisticated in the sense that it offers you options as to how to monitor the log - from the start, from last resumed etc. It also has options to execute commands when a log is found.
3. Adding third-party widgets onto the dashboard - you have the liberty to freely exaggerate your UI on the UMP Portal.
4. URL_Response - This probe has SSL monitoring available, which is pro-actively calculating in how many days the certificate is going to expire! It is pretty cool.

It had been suggested that we should look for other tools in order to ensure Application Monitoring. We managed to convince our client to use CA UIM as it individually ensures monitoring of all the aspects of an application, be it processes, event logs, URLs, ping availability, server response time, log monitoring, database monitoring, clusters, and what not.

If it had solid capabilities to ensure complete network infrastructure monitoring is performed that would be good. Everything in a single platform for the complete IT infrastructure will be a boon for every customer. In addition to that, telephony, and VoIP monitoring is also an aspect that can be looked at. Transaction monitoring will be yet another field of research and innovativeness.

It has been close to three years that the product has been deployed in our environment and serving us well in order to monitor the complete server based infrastructure. We recently upgraded from v6.5, and have had no issues.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Support from the vendor has generally been rather slow and ineffective, at least in our case. This should be a key area for CA to dig deep.

We had been using BMC Patrol and BPPM for infrastructure monitoring. However, we switched to CA UIM as it promised to be equally competent. And we have not found ourselves complaining since then.

It is a bit tedious architecture as of now, a one-server-per-component set-up. It still does not qualify to be called user-friendly.

We have had vendors responsible for completed deployment. Before proceeding for implementation, prerequisites should be gauged effectively, it helps ease the whole implementation.

It provides a wide variety of monitoring options to the user. In addition to that, the reporting has good features like trend reports, customized dashboards, etc. It still has a way forward to strengthen the network as well as application monitoring and newer versions might have that in scope.

The product promises an overall good experience to users. Users will find it easy to access, without being highly technical or thoroughly well versed with the product.

• Multi-tenancy
• Ability to set thresholds per system
• Wide variety of probes

As a data center, we provide monitoring of client systems. Automatic alarm generation, client notifications, and managing SLAs are paramount to our success.

The scalability of the web-based portal needs improvement. Users will need to quickly become proficient in scripting to take full advantage of its capabilities.

I've used it for three years.

There have been no issues with deploying it.

There have been no issues with the stability.

Scalability for redundant data centers is challenging.

Customer Service is great 10/10.

Technical support is a bit behind 8/10.

We started out with HP, then added Nagios, looked at EMC, and finally selected CA UIM.

We have a complex infrastructure, with multiple sites, which the systems handles beautifully.

We have over 10,000 client systems monitored and negotiated a package deal.

We used a consultant and utilized the training after we set the systems up. In hindsight we should have taken the training, then set up the system.

Decide upfront about monitoring thresholds and use templates.