What advice do you have for others considering BMC TrueSight Operations Management?

The most beneficial part of the product in terms of IT monitoring revolves around the areas involving automation, and it also serves as an end-to-end event management and incident management tool. In our company, the event management part integrates into ITSM. When it comes to open and closed incidents, the tool manages it from end to end. In our company, we don't use the tool's predictive analytics capabilities. The tool is purely useful for live events, event reduction, and event enrichment, while monitoring tools will do any predictive analytics. In BMC TrueSight Operations Management, one has end-to-end performance monitoring and ELM. My company uses LogicMonitor, which does not offer event management functionality at the moment. I am looking at integrating all the event tools in my company and all my monitoring tools into one event management solution and then having an ITSM tool that has autotask features. Though I take care of the full-time maintenance of BMC TrueSight Operations Management, there is an IT team in my company for it. In case my company plans to migrate to VMware from BMC TrueSight Operations Management, we would have certain AI features and functionalities. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is a solid platform that users can use at work. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

I advise you to find someone with experience before entering the space. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

I will recommend the solution to others. People who want to buy the solution must ensure that they use all the features. They must spend time with the tool before deciding to buy it. Overall, I rate the product a ten out of ten.

We are moving from basic monitoring to AIOps, where we can do things like self-healing. We also want to create dashboards for IT and business users to show the status of their services. We have done a couple of demos. I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

In my project, the company had to replace BMC TrueSight Operations Management with Dynatrace because we were not getting the desired output from BMC. If you have a low budget or some other budget constraints, then you can go with BMC TrueSight Operations Management. If you need performance enhancements and other additional features or capabilities, BMC TrueSight Operations Management will not help. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is good for monitoring infra servers, but today's need of the hour is an overall monitoring stack. I rate the overall product a five out of ten.

We require market standards to understand the improvements needed in the product. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

For future implementation, people should not pursue anything from an on-premise deployment. They should look more into SaaS environments like BMC Helix. An enterprise must pursue SaaS to focus on the development and the applications rather than maintaining a complete monitoring unit. A small-scale business should hire an SRE consultant to work on InfluxDB, Telegraf monitoring, and other systems like OpenTelemetry. If an organization is planning to choose BMC, I would recommend BMC Helix because, from what I have seen, compared to other products like Datadog, Dynatrace, and Splunk, it is cost-effective, and they promise the same features. If someone already uses BMC, it will also be easy to migrate. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.

I rate the solution as a six.

I'm using BMC TrueSight Operations Management version 11.3, but my organization is upgrading it to the latest version. The number of people needed to deploy BMC TrueSight Operations Management depends on the infrastructure size. In some cases, if it's a startup or small-scale company, generally, everyone works together, which means, from each sector, you would need at least one person, plus the person who would be managing the solution and the person who would be providing the database. The deployment would require not more than three or four people. If the BMC TrueSight Operations Management administrator is good enough, one person can install it, with another person as a backup, while another person communicates requirements. BMC TrueSight Operations Management requires maintenance because you must update your VMs with patches, but it's not as frequent. Once in a while, whenever BMC releases a patch or hotfix, you must take care of it. More than thirty-five people use BMC TrueSight Operations Management in my organization. If you want to purchase the solution for your organization, and it satisfies all your requirements regarding what and how to monitor, etc., then please go ahead. If you want to do VM monitoring, BMC TrueSight Operations Management is a good solution because it provides excellent granular monitoring compared to other solutions in the market. It's also pretty easy for monitoring and alerting. Customization is also good in BMC TrueSight Operations Management, and you can customize it according to your requirement. If you're looking for a cloud monitoring solution, on the other hand, then BMC TrueSight Operations Management is not for you. If you need a scalable solution because you have an extensive infrastructure, then you better call BMC and ask BMC to prove that the solution is scalable and stable enough for your infrastructure. My rating for BMC TrueSight Operations Management is six out of ten, on average.

The visibility of the environment that the solutions provide is great. The visibility of the entire infrastructure and the ability to drill down to the detail is useful. I rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management an eight out of ten.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend this solution to anyone looking for a standalone solution with high availability meaning that can be used depending on the customers requirements. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management a ten out of ten.

I would advise others to use BMC TrueSight Operations Management. I rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management an eight out of ten.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten, and I would recommend it to others. In addition, the solution is deployed on-premises.

You will face some difficulties unless you have someone with advanced knowledge of the solution. I would rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management a seven out of ten.

I would recommend this solution to potential users. I would tell potential users that we have to focus on the prerequisites and the planning phase. If these two things are taken care of properly, then the implementation will be smooth. On a scale from one to ten, I would give BMC TrueSight Operations Management an eight.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

We are a partner of BMC Software, RiskNow, and Atlassian. We have experience with all end-to-end BMC tools, starting from BMC Remedy ITSM for automations, to their operations management tool: BMC TrueSight Operations Management, which is used for monitoring, etc. We recommend these tools for our customers to use, except for application monitoring, as we didn't find a good tool for this on the BMC side, so we went with AppDynamics, then moved to Cisco. We are also looking into Dynatrace and exploring if our customers can use it. We're always recommending the latest version of BMC TrueSight Operations Management to our customers, and we keep on upgrading if a new version is available. Most of our customers have this solution deployed on-premises. If it was deployed on cloud, then we wouldn't have to take care of the upgrade, because it will be done automatically. Though cloud deployment is picking up, most of our customers are still deploying on-premises. Apart from being a reseller of this solution, we also perform 100% implementation and other processes for our customers. We do end-to-end customer management. After deployment, BMC TrueSight Operations Management only requires normal maintenance, or it can be taken cared of under managed services. Maintenance of this solution is hassle-free. It's just normal updating, e.g. patching. This solution works well for any company size: small, medium, or large. It can take the load off any enterprise, no matter the size. It can be onboarded for a very big conglomerate without any challenge. My advice to others looking into implementing BMC TrueSight Operations Management is to first find a partner for this solution. Once the implementation is done successfully, they can start using it. This is a beautiful solution and it works 100%, but it will still depend on how you're using it and how you're taking care of it. You need to take care of it so you can use it for a long time. I'm rating BMC TrueSight Operations Management a ten out of ten.

I would advise potential users to try to get TrueSight Infrastructure Monitoring and synthetic when implementing BMC. Then they will have a very powerful solution. The main point is that it's the manager of managers. It would be best if you highlighted this, and BMC can integrate with all monitoring solutions. They will have only one screen to show all. That is the multiple monitoring application. On a scale from one to ten, I would give BMC TrueSight Operations Management an eight.

These kinds of products provide benefits if you have other processes that require alignment with other IT solutions, like in sales and deployment and CMDB. Without that, you don't get the full benefits. At the end of every phase we stop and check the software products before starting the next phase of the project. I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.

TrueSight, as a solution, is a very large suite nowadays. In the last year or so, BMC has made the Orchestration module a part of the TrueSight portfolio. Then there are the Server Automation, Network Automation, and BladeLogic Client Automation pieces that are merged into the TrueSight portfolio. If you consider the entire TrueSight product suite, which includes TrueSight Operations Management, Infrastructure Management, and Application Performance Management, and you have TrueSight Capacity Optimization, TrueSight Orchestration, and TrueSight Automation — if you combine all these solutions you can see business innovation. You can automate a lot of mundane and repetitive tasks. You can automate a lot of administrative functions. You can integrate a lot of different components using Orchestration, and that helps reduce the human cost involved. And maybe you can use your human resources for more productive or more creative tasks, for things other than repetitive activities. So TrueSight can help businesses to innovate. Overall, I would rate the solution at eight out of 10.

Keep it simple. Make sure that you understand, architecturally, how your applications and your data center are set up. It makes your life easier to know exactly what you're going to need to monitor. The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is to really take full advantage. I joke with the BMC guys that TSOM is like AutoCAD, the engineering tool that people use to design and draw. We only scratch the surface of its full capabilities. The thing that I've learned is that it's a good idea to take advantage of all the bells and whistles as quickly as you can because it really pays dividends to do so. We are using a little bit of the solution's machine-learning and analytics. That's an adjacency tool called IT Data Analytics and we feed that into our overall, single pane of glass monitoring. I don't know that we've taken full advantage of that quite yet. It is on the roadmap. We'll probably get to that, realistically, next year and in '21, where, as we're seeing those analytics, we will actually link automation to it. So when we see something we'll actually do something. We're a fairly small shop and therefore scale is not an absolutely necessary thing, but it is something that we are striving to move towards. It has affected our application performance in bits and pieces. It's not something that I'd wave the banner on quite yet. We have pocketed instances where ITDA has come back and told us that there was an issue, and we were able to remediate proactively versus reactively. I don't know that we're leveraging the tool's full capabilities where I can say that I have a use case where this was a big win for us. I don't think that the monitoring tool, TSOM itself, has created or helped to support any business innovation. As for users of the solution, I have the two admins and then I have, say, half of my organization that consumes it as a tool, so there are about 12 to 15 users. Each of those people is an application admin. Their primary responsibility is the applications that they support. The monitoring is a tool for them to use to ensure that those systems are healthy and top-notch. I have a senior manager who manages the space. He also manages our asset-discovery tools along with all of our web and third-party space. He is a busy guy but it's all managed under one leader. There are the two folks who administrate it. It's really a very small human-capital resource footprint, in comparison to what it does technologically. I give TrueSight Operations a nine out of ten. There are always bits and features from other products that we wish we would see in it. Usually, we see them pretty quickly.

Make sure you have knowledgeable people on your staff. Give yourself plenty of time for deployment, if you think it will take three months, make it six months. Look at past companies' experience on time to deploy, knowledge, and staffing requirements. The solution's event management capabilities are very good. In some ways, they are based on very old technology. I first started using it way back in the late nineties and the basic core of the product does not appear to have changed much since then. Back then, it was a very good product. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. The other things that the company has done since then. Its enhanced the website portal, which I have a very positive impression of. The website is fairly new, and it could be a little bit better. However, if I were to compare it to some of the other tools out there, it has a much nicer GUI and presentation. The web presentation is much more advanced than BMC's TSOM server. We still have multiple panes of glass. E.g., we have an Event Manager screen along with a Remedy screen. We're getting closer to a single pane of glass and have fewer panes of glass. Where we had a lot of dashboards before, we now don't have anything, as we've replaced all of them. So, there are no panes of glass in our support. So, if you are a support personnel at our company, you are not looking at a screen. Instead you are looking at your cell phone, because we reach out to you when there's a problem and you don't have to look at anything. We are using about five percent of our environment. We have what is called a limited deployment right now, because we have so much integration and automation going on. We needed to mature the support teams and the rest of the organization as a whole in what we're doing. Once we have achieved that, I anticipate a 100 percent of our applications are going to be feeding this system. After that, we will greatly extend our use.

BMC is at a critical point in redefining TSOM, how it's built. Anybody looking at BMC now needs to jump on the new version of TSOM and skip the current versions. I would wait until their new environment is ready. It will be containerized. Anyone implementing BMC can get used to the environment in a PoC but they shouldn't implement until their new stuff is out. I expect it to be that much different. Make sure that you have stakeholder buy-in and that they are able to provide the resources with the correct knowledge to implement in a smart fashion. Everybody's definition of "smart" is going to be slightly different. We really hone in on the business service side to make sure that our business functions are healthy and that we're able to understand what's normal and what is out of normal. We work with the teams, even from the point that they're in development of projects, to make sure we're ahead of what's going on rather than reactive. But that means the buy-in of multiple teams: development, operations, support. That amount of effort requires stakeholders with decision-making capabilities to say that it's a priority for them. We knew up front - and we've been able to validate our assumption - that monitoring doesn't do any good unless you are analyzing your business service for what are the critical components to observe. That's an educational effort and an implementation project. It's that upfront effort that will make your monitoring successful. Where we've been able to engage teams and teams have remained engaged, we've been the most successful in that. We took that to heart upfront, we made that part of our route to success, and we put the effort in. Our monitoring's been successful because of that. If we didn't do that, and we didn't constantly engage teams to make sure that they were aware of capabilities including the ability to give us feedback, and that we can implement quickly, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't have advanced as far as we have. Most of that advancement was in the first two or three years, and we've just been riding that wave of success since then. Keep in mind that most companies don't go from nothing to an enterprise monitoring solution; they go from one monitoring solution to another. But if there's anyone in the boat that we were in, where they are the size we were with no monitoring solution, they'll be in the pain that we were in. Implementing a good monitoring program, not just the tool, but a program around it, can make a world of difference to the operations teams, and subsequently to the business as well. For those teams that are utilizing TrueSight, they don't rely on other monitoring environments. Some of those teams rely on those actionable alerts almost exclusively, and don't really use TrueSight's single pane of glass. We do have some teams that consume TrueSight and use it on a daily basis to ensure that they don't have any events, whether or not they've risen to the level of action. They'll also proactively look at some components, either business function components or infrastructure components, to ensure that they're working as designed and within the parameters of normal. I don't think the functionality of Operations Management helps to support our business innovation. Our business runs forward and headlong into innovation, regardless of whether or not IT can keep up. We were never an impediment, other than cost. The way we run our overall IT environment is very open and flexible. Monitoring is a way for us to give business the confidence that what we're implementing is healthy, but it doesn't impact their interest in being able to implement what's new. They've always been able to do that and continue to be able to do that. In terms of machine-learning, I mentioned above the baselining which, depending on how it's implemented, might be called machine-learning, but in TrueSight they just have a straight calculation-type of activity. We have other monitoring solutions that we're implementing as well, and that topic may be more applicable to them, but not in the TrueSight world. The TrueSight world is a straight application implementation. It's nothing exciting on that end. I have to give our BMC partners a lot of credit for where they're planning to take TrueSight based on their roadmap, although it is speculative. I don't think the areas for improvement from us would be any different than anything they've already heard. If someone were to implement the full suite of BMC products, you'd have to give it a nine out of ten. TSOM by itself, I have to give it a seven out of ten.

My advice is that it's not going to be as easy as you think, but it's going to be worth more than you think when you get it done. It depends on your situation. It depends on how far advanced you are in operations management. For us, this was a complete cultural, technological, and process overall. It wasn't just replacing one tool with another. It wasn't just putting a tool in place. It was an entire IT renewal and it's still going on. It's been a long, hard road, both from a cultural perspective and from a technology perspective, just getting people to realize the value. But once they do, they're willing to bend over backward for you. We had some false alerts. In my job the red light means it's bad and the green light means it's good. There should be no light you think is green but it's bad. We had some of that at the beginning, more our fault than anybody else's. But once we got to the point where the signals were good and people could appreciate what they are getting, we became a very different organization. The biggest lesson I've learned from it is that you can talk about it, you can visualize it, you can proselytize about it, but until you have a single pane of glass which is actually up and running with a lot of stuff connected to it, you just can't really appreciate the value of it. The functionality of the solution is not helping, so much, in terms of business innovation. We're not doing business process monitoring at this point. While it might be that the business is not complaining as much, I don't measure that. But from an innovation perspective, it has had people look at things and say, "Well, if you can do this, can you do that?" We get a lot of requests for strange things, some we can do, some we can't. But it's getting people to think about things that hadn't really come up before. It's a really good tool and most of the issues we've got, they've either fixed or they're fixing to fix. So a nine out ten is right.

Understand your use cases. Take a look at the use case to product fit. I don't really recommend many other products. We are sort of committed to the BMC product set because it's good. We have a lot of experience with it, and came from a company who was acquired by BMC Software. The product manager for that company, April Hickel, she's done very well. She is the product manager for TSOM now. I know her, her innovative capabilities, and her whole team. I've been working with them for a long time, so I know not only that the product is good, but the roadmap is good, and the people behind it are very good. If you have a good imagination you can solve anything, but you need the right tool to be able to apply that to.

You really want to plan out your policy and architecture in great detail before you start any deployments. It is a complex product. You don't want to have to go redo it. Pick a small environment, test out your plan, test it out a second time, beat it up, and once you're happy with it, then go nuts by deploying it everywhere. It's great once it's there, you just have to get past that design hurdle, because there are things that aren't necessarily intuitive. I have a mixed bag impression of the usability. The end user experience is mostly good, as it's a very clean interface. There are some quibbles with it. You have to drill into a lot of layers to get into the data that you want. However, when you hit "Back", it takes you all the way back out of the tree. Then, you have to redrill into all those layers. That is a bit of an annoyance for end users. From an administration side, it is still sort of heavy, and policies are very complex. Therefore, it takes a fairly senior level engineer to build it and get it to work well. But, once it's working well, I can monitor tens of thousands of things. Definitely get multiple references from each of the clients, since all salesmen lie. They all promise the possible best scenario, and I have found depending on the client that you get very different experiences. So, the claims that the BMC sales guys have made are all achievable in a perfect environment. No one has a perfect environment. Claims from CA, I have found to be outright fabrications, such as, "We can do this." Then, we buy the product. "Oh well, you actually need Professional Services, and you're going to need like three years of custom coding." Millions of dollars down the drain with them. Other vendors have different levels. They all come in very rosy, and sometimes too much. So, talk to people who have really done it. Take their advice. Don't assume that they didn't know what they were doing. There are a lot of good engineers out there. If the company is struggling, assume you will also struggle.

BMC products are very good. All products have pros and cons. For example, all the enterprise monitoring solutions are not really set up for multi-tenancy. BMC products are very stable and the support is good, and the configuration, especially, is easier to do. I think it will come down in pricing, although the cost is not something I am not involved in. We started using TrueSight in the early stages. Like every product, TrueSight, as a new product of BMC, was going to take some until BMC improved it, got all the bugs out, got all the features added. It's not perfect but I do see improvement. When a product is in its infancy, it will always have some issues. I do see BMC trying to improve that. It's getting better now. It's pretty stable. It's a very good tool for traditional open systems and mid-range. I would rate TrueSight Operations Management at eight out of ten. It's not a ten, because, as I mentioned, it is missing some capabilities in HA solutions. In the past, we had load- balancing HA. Now, it has to rely on an external load balancer to achieve HA. But I have to say that my view is limited because we do not have the whole suite of BMC products. There are certain things we do not own, like automation and deployment. If we had the full BMC suite, I would probably give it a ten.

If we had to do it all over again, we would have spent a lot more time in the early going on planning the architecture, on how we were going to build this out. That could have saved us some pain, once we got it up and running and started adding customers and expanding it. If we had spent a little more time with BMC, planning architecturally how we were going to design this to support the scale we needed, it would have helped. That was a lesson learned. And that would be some advice I would give. Depending on how you're planning to use the tool, make sure you spend some time looking at the architecture in the systems and the architectural design of how you're going to implement it to make sure it's going to meet your needs. Make sure it's going to scale appropriately and do what you need it to do. Our goal is to get this solution connected to every single customer that we're maintaining equipment for, because of the efficiencies and the improvement in the end-user experience. When I say we support over 350,000 assets in 36,000 data centers around the world, that is our maintenance business. We're working to connect TrueSight to all of that. We have sold - not quite yet deployed, but we have sold - about 33,000 licenses, which means assets. We've deployed just under 10,000 of those so far. So we're making good headway and we're very pleased with how it's performing so far. One lesson that we've learned is that we're now in a great position to expand our portfolio of services which we offer to our customers, well beyond hardware. Without this technology, we could never get there. Prior to us putting this in, it was all done manually. Phone calls, emails, people driving to the site to try and diagnose problems. It was very manual and inefficient and not scalable the way we were doing business. And we were growing so fast. There's no way we could have scaled to where we're at today or scale to where we want to go, even in our core business. The other lesson we're learning now is our that customers are asking us to do more and this technology is going to help us do more for them and expand our business. It will enable us to expand our portfolio of services. That's our biggest lesson. When we started out it was really all about driving operational efficiency in our hardware maintenance business. And now we've learned we're in a very good position to move into other services, based on what the capabilities of this platform bring to us, beyond hardware - into application monitoring and operating system and network and all the other pieces of the infrastructure. We can start to support them going forward. It has completely changed our way of thinking about our strategy going forward. It's amazing. At this point in time, I'd rate it a ten out of ten. We've got something really unique here. We built some integrations, some things of our own around it. And we're feeling really good about it.

The advice I would give is not to make a mistake and think it's an off-the-shelf product like Office 365. Understand that it's a very robust set of tools and procedures. You really should define what you want to do with it before you bring it in the door. If you had asked us before we brought it in, we had an idea, but we didn't know exactly how we wanted to utilize it and that was because we didn't know the capabilities of it. We thought we could do X, and we found out what we really needed to do was Y. It was that gap that we had to fill, and that took us time. So the better you can define your requirements, the quicker you'll gain the true value with your outcome. Believe me, we're seeing true value. But if we had had a better definition of what we needed up front... We thought we had all the information in the RFP but we probably didn't. I'm not sure you ever can do that, but do a good job of architecting the scope or the spec of what you're trying to do and then get their input. They can give you that information and that's when you get your true value. When those two things meet, you get the value prop. Working with BMC has been interesting. It's been very helpful. They're part of our team, which is great. They bring their partners to the table. Their partners don't have an agenda. Everything that we get done is literally for us as the end-user and for our customers. I've not had that often before with software companies. They invest in customer satisfaction to the point that we've asked them to implement some things that are a little bit beyond the normal scope of TrueSight. We're using it for 800 customers in an instance of TrueSight, where it really should be one TrueSight for one customer. And they've helped us make all that work, and arm-in-arm. With Sentry it has been a team effort. Sometimes we don't know who on the call is not on our team. We're all having the same conversation, and it's not a situation where "BMC said," or "Sentry said," or "we said." It's one common unit. We had a call yesterday about architecture and making that whole piece work. I said to their architect, "Gee, you know I really like that document you put together." He said, "John, you can use any piece of that you possibly want. Go ahead and take it and do anything you need to do with it, make it work your way." That doesn't happen very often, where someone is building their own thing and they come back to you and say, "Yeah, you can use it any way you want. Just make sure it makes for you." We have 11 people who are installing agents and policies at our customers' sites. Their job is the implementation with our customers. In terms of people actually running TrueSight within the company and our IT infrastructure, we have parts of a couple of people. It's a part of their job. It's almost like shift work. We have a part of a full-time person on a daily basis engaged with TrueSight care and feeding. Running the product requires less than two people, all-in. We will be hiring a new person to be a TrueSight architect, because we're bringing on more of those KMs and we need somebody who can help us do the rules management. They're not going to be here running the product, they're going to be adding new features. Overall, I would give the product a very solid nine. If I had the reporting piece, I would give it a ten. It has provided more value than we expected and it does what it says it's going to do. You can't ask for more from a product than that.