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.

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.

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 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.

We consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (using UIM and Spectrum) integrated with dashboards and reports, to give the business a real-time vision of the company’s health and position in the market.

Besides the technical benefits described, CA UIM and CA Spectrum were the key factors in increasing the SLA from the IT environment to 99.99%, from the 99.5% achieved without CA solutions. This achievement completely changed the way how LoBs see and recognize IT as their partners, avoiding the blame game and finger-pointing. After improving the SLA metrics, the next step was to get closer to the LoBs and provide relevant dashboards, punting together business views and emphasizing how it is related to IT, and vice versa.

After several weeks, this partnership and closer communication between IT and LoBs resulted in some dependency of LoB on UIM dashboards (i.e., every hour executive and tactical dashboards are sent to the senior executives). It is impressive how important it is to be connected with LoBs using simple, visual and intuitive dashboards that remove the roadblocks between IT and the entire organization.

I would like to see them improve integrations with other CA products to use the data on dashboards and more widgets on UIM dashboards.

I have used it for four years.

I’m a CA beta tester and found all issues that need to be solved in this program. I have no stability issues in my production environment.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

UIM is a very scalable product. It includes agents for a lot of technologies and new technologies that help the IT team to detect problems proactively with visibility of the IT environment and the business using dashboards and reports. It provides a unique vision when using UIM and Spectrum together, including a unique alarm console.

• 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.

Extensibility - ability to centrally manage large enterprises.

Consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (Nimsoft). Reduced staff required to support the enterprise.

Reporting.

Approximately five years.

Minimal, if any.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

6/10.

We previously used Solarwinds Orion (NPM), and IBM Netcool. The main issues with them were scalability, features, and cost.

It was complex due to the size and requirements of our company. Most deployments are typically not as complex.

Primarily our in-house team.

• BMC Patrol
• IBM Netcool
• HP Operations

Ensure that you have a competent and experienced person doing the initial architecture.

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.