DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

• Ease of setup - install is quick and easy. For small environments, all components can be installed on a single server. Even larger, more-distributed environments are easy to install, given all required network ports are open.
• Automated robot deployment makes it easy to select targets for performance management.
• Justifiably, local and remote options are available for agent-based and touchless monitoring.
• Most probe configurations are OOTB best practices. The probe GUI is easy to navigate.
• A new feature, MCS, allows for monitoring policies to be created for groups of devices. You can monitor just about anything.

We are a managed services organization. Knowing about performance issues before our customers is key. To have reports ready at the beginning of the day is even better. Report scheduling is priceless.

I would like to see enhancements to core probes for bulk uploads. Some probes have the capability to monitor multiple targets. You either must enter them one by one or use scripting to bulk load the targets. I would like to see that functionality built into the probes.

We have been using this product for about seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent. 24 x 7 support is awesome, not to mention that their support staff really knows the product. What makes it better is that support and development work close together so that turnaround on bug fixes is expedient.

We previously used Solarwinds NPM but it wasn't as scalable.

Setup was easy.

Buy what you need. The product is worth every bit of its cost.

We did not evaluate any other products beforehand.

Plan and commit people and processes. Build a service, don't just implement a tool.

• 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.

We use UIM primarily for monitoring and managing all of our clients. As an MSP we need some kind of tool to be able to go out and do that. CA UIM has fit the bill quite nicely.

It's been pretty good. It does have its hiccups. It takes a fair amount of customization, but overall it's done what we need it to do and, when it doesn't out of the box, we are able to actually go in and tinker it enough to make it suit our needs quite nicely. So it's been doing a pretty good job.

It's the outcome of our being able to perform our job and gather the information we need in order to provide value to our customers. The real value is our being able to pull all the historic data that we need in order to gather every little metric and nuanced piece of information from a given device, a given piece of infrastructure, in order for us to generate alerts. 

If we want to notify our clients, or for us to turn around and maybe run reports to proactively identify an issue with a device, that may not seem evident at first. But when you have all the pieces of the puzzle together, and when you can see these metrics aren't necessarily lining up nicely and they're acting a little bit abnormal, we can put that together for a bigger picture and provide a recommended action.

The convenience of both the web portal as well as the thick client. We are able to go in and actually leverage the thick client for a nice, easy drag and drop solution. It works out really nicely, especially for our front-end team. The team that I am on is actually quite small, so we need to leverage our front-end team to assist with making changes, and actually running the software. Having the GUI, that simple user interface, really helps us to offload that work to that front-end team to help free up our time.

Usually it's reliability issues. Some of the components don't always function as intended, or don't function as you would think they should. 

To give a specific example, within this product there are individual probes, and each of these probes doesn't always necessarily output the same kind of information into our database. So when we try to collect QoS data, from one probe we might get a ton of information, lots of good stuff that we can use in our database, but then from another probe we might not get so much, or we might not be able to pull the things that we want to.

I'd also like to see more probes and more templates. More probes in the sense that we were coming across devices that we're expected to monitor and manage for which, out of the box, there isn't a nice clean solution. There are probes that are dedicated for certain devices and certain device types, which is great. But then there are times we come across nuanced products for which we have to develop our own solution. There are probes that exist in there that allow us to make a customized solution, but it takes a lot more time.

The other element is that there are no real templates, out of the box. Let's go with an example where we do have the probe, which is great, and we do have a really nuanced customer with a small set of devices that maybe not a lot of other customers use. There might not be a template in place, so effectively we have the tool in front of us but we still need to develop a solution. So it would be really nice to see a little bit more of something like a central repository of templates that we could use. That would help us expedite our onboarding process.

Stability is pretty good. As I said, it does have its hiccups at times. We use an on-prem solution, so for the most part it's pretty good. 

Our issue comes in scaling. We're hitting a point with our customer base where we brought on enough clients in using the software that we're starting to hit some interesting connectivity hurdles. As a result of that, some things can take one or two attempts for it to work the way we want it to; maybe probes closing out or a connectivity from our primary infrastructure right down to one of our client sites. It can take two or three approaches, but overall its pretty good. There just are those occasional hiccups. 

They're good. Their response time has been pretty good. They don't necessarily always have the answer I want, but that may be because the answer I want doesn't necessarily exist, so I can't fault them for that. But overall the response is pretty good. As far as the turnaround time, it's fast, the quality of the support answers that we get is usually pretty good.

There have been times where its been a little bit insufficient, in the sense that we might have needed to move it to a different engineer, or they may need to escalate it to go to their development team and get some answers, and the time frame on that can slow down a little bit. But for the most part, it's been pretty good.

I was not involved in the initial setup but we did a major refresher and I was involved with that.

It was pretty easy actually. It's a relatively simple project to set up. It's difficult to master but easy to initially deploy and configure, so I'd say it was pretty easy, off the bat.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• level of support
• reliability of the tool
• functionality of the tool and 
• cost, obviously. 

Know what kind of products you are going to be using UIM to monitor and manage, and ensure that the compatibility is there. Because if there is not out-of-the-box compatibility, it can take a significant amount of time and effort to make things work.

There is a large selection of Application specific probes available. We are primarily a Microsoft shop, and most all of our needs are covered with what is offered. This relies on backend sources such as PerfMon counters, event viewer, services and similar. It covers our basic monitoring needs in this regard.

We use this in a Multi-Tenant environment as an MSP. Prior to UIM deployment, we were using SCOM which was overly complicated and difficult to manage. UIM fulfilled our needs at the time by allowing simpler deployment and management.

Although it is better than SCOM, it still needs major improvements to usability. If you need a rapid deployment solution, this is not the best tool for that job. You can create Super Packages which allow you to pre-configure Probes, but it still requires a lot of invested time to set up and still needs customized to each environment if they are not identical. UIM and its agent/probes rely on JRE7u45. Support is not offered for any newer versions at this time. I would like to see better rapid deployment options, interface updates, and less reliance on Java.

We have been using this solution since before CA bought it from Nimsoft. I have been using it for about a year.

We have run into instances where probes are no longer supported and are integral to our monitoring, and there is not a bulk solution for replacing with the new supported probe. If you are using the SSL Tunneling in the Hub Probe, Support has been unable to identify a method to monitor the tunnel status which is built into the Windows Service. Many times, the tunnel will experience communication issues and being queueing thousands of alarms, alerts, qos but we have no way of being notified until we notice we are no longer getting metrics. The Hub probe has not been reliable for us in the past several versions across various sites and we often need to work with their developers to resolve issues. SAN and Networking appliance compatibly is severely lacking (Dell EQL, Nimble, StorSimple, Cisco ASA, and more all have issues or have no support). You can custom create via SNMP MIBs, but this requires manual implementation.

Support has been very responsive to our requests. They understand the limitations of the software and do their best to accommodate our needs and issues, but the software just doesn’t seem to be meant for smaller businesses and needs a lot of hands on attention.

We previously used SCOM which is similar in many regards. This was the first product we evaluated and chose it mainly because they offered to customize it to fit our needs. Other vendors were not as responsive to our requests, although I feel they may have been a better fit overall.

It was not straightforward. There are many modifications you need to make to text based configuration files that are not well documented is deployment instructions. We have multiple CA solutions that were not easy to integrate. This required and still requires time with their developers to resolve issues.

We had an outside company assist with the installation. I would recommend getting as much hands on time as possible with an expert. UIM is not intuitive, there is a high learning curve.

If you have a large scale deployment or resell services and have a dedicated administrator with java dev experience, pricing may be suitable for you. CA is one of the more expensive solutions, and not one of the best in its category.

UIM is showing its age, and need a major overhaul to keep up with competitors. I would recommend using other solutions.

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.

• Scalable monitoring
• Integration of all monitoring on one tool.
• Simplicity on creating dashboards.

Optimizes delivery of managed IT services with CA Nimsoft Monitor.

Implementations, operations and technology departments are benefiting most from this tool.

3 years

Yes, at the first time of implementation, we encountered many issues with the tool, all due to a wrong configuration of the disks on database server.

Yes, it was unstable for couple months due to the main component that inserts the QoS data on Nimsoft database.

No

On scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), 4.

On scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), 4.

Yes, the main reason for change were high support costs and a difficult management tool.

It was complex, due to the configuration that we already had with another tool, implementing everything again took us longer than planned; it really is a difficult tool to configure, specifically in our infrastructure.

Vendor Team, the provider level is poor, finally was configured by a CA Engineer.

CopperEgg, Splunk.

Discuss whether it is feasible to do so through this tool, because the administration is complex, I recommend that due to the integrations with network monitoring, servers, SAN, VMware, etc., it's worth buying.

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.

Their concept of probes, where you have a lot of predefined items that you collect. Also, their baseline thresholds that speed up a lot the implementation, and the evolution of the monitoring system.

For example, once you have applied the SQL Server Probe, it collects all sorts of data -- from the log size to the time that each query is taken to execute on the database -- with the same click.

In terms of features, it is easy to use and implement, and CA provide solid support.

In the past we would spend months in meetings with a new customer, defining what they wanted to monitor, and most of the time we would come back home to see if that was possible to do. However, with CA UIM, we can provide our clients with a predefined menu of items to collect, and we can select those faster and more efficiently.

We have been able to automate the Active Directory user provisioning integrated with the HR systems. This means that was can provide users with a self-service password reset tool. Also, it has given us Log Management for our daily routines.

They need to improve in their mobile interface to enable access to the dashboards through that channel. Their application requires a lot of servers to run, so that architecture is also something that requires attention.

A module for keyboard and mouse actions would be very interesting, for actions that cannot be performed differently. Also, it would be interesting for them to enable SAP integration in the future.

We have been using UIM/Nimsoft for about two years now.

It requires a very skilled team to be able to deploy that application, and if you don’t invest in training and don’t go over a long training period, you might find it difficult to deploy.

The application requires a lot of capacity to run and grow, so it’s important that you be aware of the impact of the growth of your IT infrastructure on the monitoring system.

Capacity management must be done on a regular basis if your IT environment grows too quickly.

6/10.

7/10.

We used to use a Nagios-based solution that was cheaper, but the problem was that we didn’t have the proper support, especially for application management such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix, Amazon, etc. With CA UIM we were able to start monitoring those applications out of the box.

The initial setup was complex due to the training hours, as the technical team had to go through it to be able to use the application to its full potential.

We did it in-house.

I think that’s always something harder to measure, but I would say that we were able to gain some clients due to this change to CA UIM.

Since we provide services using the CA UIM platform, I would say that for a partner they have a very strong pricing approach.

We evaluated SolarWinds and Nagios.

First of all design do a analysis of what kind of process you can automate in your company, that way will be easier for you to capture value from a solution like this. It's important to pay attention to the infrastructure requirements.