What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Operations Management?

Cost is an issue with BMC TrueSight Operations Management. Though I am not responsible for the budget, I know that it is an expensive tool set when used only for event management. The tool's issue predominantly revolves around the cost. My company's complaints regarding the product stem from the fact involving the cost of migration of the tool to BeyondTrust. In our company, we want to look at opportunities and see if there are any alternatives to BMC TrueSight Operations Management. I wouldn't want anything to be introduced in the product since it has the job when it comes to the area of event management. I can do more with the product's dashboard and graphical features, which are all available in the upgraded version of the solution involving BeyondTrust.

The dashboards are not good. We have a limited dashboard, and if we want better dashboards, we need to use other solutions like Grafana because the TrueSight dashboards are not good. TrueSight could add any new resources because everything is changing to BMC Helix and will be discontinued. Some points didn't evolve. We are still using the node architecture, a node type of agent, and a decent cell, which was created many years ago.

The product must provide more AI capabilities. AI is already available but must play a deeper role in the solution.

I couldn’t use the tool for anything beyond IT-level management. The product must provide application or service monitoring features.

Application performance management (APM) is an area with certain shortcomings in the solution that needs improvement. If I were to describe what is wrong with the solution, I would have to state that in an end-to-end monitoring solution, including system monitoring, application availability, URL availability and monitoring, and transaction performance.

The solution could improve its price.

If I want custom monitoring across a very large estate of more than 50,000 units, the on-premise deployment gets quite slow. The on-premise product’s performance must be improved. The solution is a little obsolete. That is why the solution moved to Helix, a SaaS operating system. The SaaS platform has the features I like. There is no point in BMC expanding TrueSight Operations’ console. It's high time that BMC starts a demise path for the product and is associated only with Helix. If we need any additional function, we must switch to Helix. Since TrueSight is deployed on-premise, the scalability and usage of the product are mainly focused on providing basic features and not enhanced features like analytics or cost analysis. People should move to a SaaS platform because on-premise products have limited storage and capacity.

The solution's reporting, monitoring, and configuration features need improvement. Presently, it is challenging to produce insightful monitoring data.

The stability of BMC TrueSight Operations Management needs improvement. At the moment, that area is pathetic. My organization's infrastructure is vast and implemented based on BMC recommendations, but the solution needs to be optimized for large-capacity infrastructure. Though BMC has released some USPs on how and what to monitor, what and what not to alert, and has good specifications, my organization hasn't been happy with BMC TrueSight Operations Management stability. BMC has not been making improvisations on the stability that have made me happy as a customer. I want better reporting capability in the next release of the solution. BMC TrueSight Operations Management, in terms of UI, could be more user-friendly, so this is another improvement I want to see in its next release. I have used other tools which were convenient to use compared to BMC TrueSight Operations Management. I found other solutions, such as AppDynamics and SolarWinds DPA, better than BMC TrueSight Operations Management regarding cases and features.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management could improve the reporting.

The dashboard and performance graphs should include a way to automatically schedule and export reports. The licensing category has single endpoints and entities but should also include CMDB and other integrated components. It should be capable of providing which countries need more licenses and what endpoints they use to narrow down information for developers. BMC Helix is the SaaS solution but it is not yet mature so some features are missing. It is difficult to transition customers from TrueSight to Helix when the same customization is not available. For example, the solution provides control for building custom knowledge modules in the repository and bringing them to the server endpoints. However, Helix does not allow control over the repository and instead manages it within the solution. The customer should have complete control like they do in the solution because the SaaS format can cause data privacy issues.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management could use some enhancements in the application visibility tools.

The pricing could be better.

The dashboards could be better. The graphs are extremely limited. We don't have a lot of dashboard options. To make reports and dashboards more useful, we usually need to integrate some dashboard solutions. The initial setup could be simplified.

It would be better if the initial setup and deployment were more straightforward.

The UI for the end users could be improved and more flexible than it is now. If it becomes more flexible, it will be the best interface among all ITSM centers.

There are still many things that can be improved in BMC TrueSight Operations Management. They need to dig deeper into the layers of application monitoring. They're very strong in server and network monitoring, but they're still lacking on many of the sites, and there's still much work to be done on cloud monitoring. These are the areas that need improvement for this solution. We would be expecting additional features in the next release, as they always come up with good features and updates during version upgrades. I'd like to see more features in the application side as they are lacking, when compared to AppDynamics or other competitors who have advantage over application monitoring features. On the Cloud side, what I'd like to see on the next release is for this solution to be 100% on the Cloud, rather than it being a hybrid model. These are the things we are looking forward to in the next release.

I would like them to improve the deep-dive details, tracing, and data agents in this product. We have EUEM, an end-user experience monitoring appliance. This one's quicker than the current one, and reporting side and filtration side are very bad. There are many details we look at and explain what we receive information in the current one, but we cannot have historical data like we do with EUEM. We cannot have a powerful point to look for specific traffic from a specific application and a specific browser. We don't have it in the new one. The current BMC also needs to add the thing that control versions.

I think the solution is overly complex and requires a lot of resources.

In terms of root cause analysis, BMC TrueSight has a couple of modules like Service Impact Management and the Probable Cause Analysis, which work together to help you identify related events. This module, on paper, has a lot of promise, but it is actually really complicated. There are really small pieces working together and you have to have a lot of expertise to get any value out of the root cause analysis piece of the solution. For that reason, most of the customers don't really get much value out of the root cause analysis part of TrueSight. There are other areas with room for improvement as well. For example, the monitoring part requires four or five different types of agents to monitor different things in your infrastructure, which makes things very complicated. In addition, to implement the Operations Management solution alone, you need a lot of hardware; a lot of servers and a lot of hardware resources. If you compare it with other solutions in the market, like Dynatrace or AppDynamics, the implementation of those products can be done using notably fewer servers. If you want to set up a standalone TrueSight Operations Management for a customer, you need at least 10 servers to implement Infrastructure Management and Application Performance Management. To do the same implementation for Dynatrace or AppDynamics or SolarWinds you only need three or four servers maximum, for the same environment. So the number of resources required for implementation is very much on the higher side. The complexity of the solution is, again, a challenge. There are so many different components that it becomes almost a nightmare for the operations teams to do the administration and apply hotfixes, patches, and to do daily operations for the solution. It's too complex, too many servers are required, there are too many different components in the solution, and a lot of agents are required. Apart from that, some of the intelligence features could also be enhanced. For example, the AI part of TrueSight Operations Management should be enhanced to compete with other products in the market.

Specifically around application performance monitoring, BMC is definitely not the market leader. The Dynatraces, the New Relics and the like are more of the market leaders in that space. I would like to see them grow that space a little bit more aggressively. It has not really been their bread and butter. They've been highly focused on cloud initiative. I don't know anyone in the industry who has solved how to monitor cloud, SaaS-based systems, because all of those systems are usually linked through other systems. That would be another area where it would be nice to see if they could find innovative ways to be able to do that. The third piece would be around out-of-the-box automation. We all have particular types of alerts and events where all we really need to do is be able to turn the functionality on versus creating the functionality. BMC is already addressing that in many cases.

It's a complex system. The implementation is fairly challenging. They have done a good job lately of getting videos out there. We would like more videos and self-training, though. Right now, you have to go to BMC's training classes to get a good understanding of the product, and those training classes are very expensive. While I understand they are a business and trying to make money, a lot of their competition has training available via YouTube. There is much more accessibility to competitors' training. In a large company of our size, we need multiple people in our company trained. So, I have to take the training classes. Then, I have to go and train the rest of my organization. I would prefer to say to the other people on my team, "Go to this link and..." Or, "Here's a list of training sessions that you can go to which are online and that are free." I think it would help the adoption of their product in the marketplace, personally. It's a far more complex technology than I perceived at the beginning to deploy. I would have thought that the integration between their products would have been more seamless than it has been. This is what has made it a lot more complex than I anticipated. From a technical standpoint, some of their products still have a dependency on Oracle Databases, and they are very well integrated in the cloud for a lot of their components. There is another database technology called Postgres, which they are partially integrated with. However, if they were to get all of their platforms integrated into Postgres, it would be much less expensive for companies, such as mine, to go to high availability, etc. The architecture really needs to be upgraded. I know they're doing a lot of this, but they need to keep doing it, and accelerate their process, so they can remain competitive.

I can only speak from my perspective because I don't know if some of the issues that we've had are industry-wide or not. For instance, we've got a lot of Microsoft stuff here, and the SCOM interface is very difficult to use. They don't have support for SCCM and some other things so you have to go directly. The one piece that I would love to see is a general-purpose, configurable agent which would be a framework that you can deploy on anything, whether it be Java or anything else. It would allow you to easily deploy it on a platform that they support. The KMs and some of the user interface are a little bit quirky. That's the stuff that they will eventually get to. TrueSight is a fairly new platform revision for BMC. I'm seeing a lot of those simple platform things, where you have to go here and do this and you have to go there to do that. They're very working very hard to integrate everything into the same simple console. I think that a lot of the issues that we have are going to slowly, or maybe rapidly, disappeared.

One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy. In addition, it needs some details such as auditing inside the product - there is no auditing for the policies.

Continue to improve the maturity of the product overall. I definitely would like to see more improvement in the self-diagnostics. I need to know when anything is not working or collecting, long before our customer finds it. I would like to see continued improved integration with some of their partners. We use a lot of Intuity software. While the connections are good, they could be better. We use App Visibility, as part of the TrueSight suite. Previously, we were a big BMC TMRT customer previously. They gave up a lot of features of TMRT to get App Visibility in. Features that our customers used. They still complain about this weekly: When are we going to get this report or view back. When we took this issue back to BMC, they said, "It wasn't an upgrade from TMRT. It's a brand new product. It just happens to be serving the same market." From my user standpoint, we went from BMC TMRT to BMC App Visibility, giving up all these features. For us, it was an upgrade that we lost features on. I need that stuff back, at the end of the day, as a service provider. The customers need to feel comfortable that the data is there. They need to have accurate SLA type reports. The SLA reports that we get on TrueSight today are unfortunately worthless. They go to the whole integer. So, they all show 100 percent, when we've got contracts which are 99.996 percent and are now rounding to 100. Well, if we were at .9995, that's an SLA miss. Things like this are a problem. We have to do all this manually on the side. We can't roll this back, as the versions that we used to use are long out of support. The biggest issue is probably the gaps in the reporting that I need for my end customers. That is a very public and embarrassing, I can't give you the report that you need. Also, the reliability of the ISNs needs improving. Having a customer find a machine that stopped collecting before we do, that is not what you want when you're a service provider.

I would like to see a little more out-of-the-box event correlation and expanded AIOps type capabilities. Where you can train your artificial intelligence operations to be able to memorize an issue once you encounter one scenario, so if you encounter that same problem, you can get to the root cause very quickly.

Reporting would be an area for improvement in TrueSight. In its purest form, TrueSight is an enterprise product, meaning one company would run it in its internal data centers and internal IT organization. But our company is more of a managed-service provider. We have almost 800 customers today on TrueSight and just under 10,000 assets. We need to be able to give a customer some information. If the customer's product fails, they'll ask us, "Did it have a problem beforehand?" We have all those events and we know all the problems it had beforehand. We have to be able to give them access to that kind of reporting. That's an enhancement that we need.