BMC Helix Discovery Reviews

Our company uses the solution to manage flows, automations, and mapping. 

The solution does not really meet our needs so our usage has dropped to 20% to 30% across ten users.

The solution is definitely useful.

The solution is old technology and customizations are very difficult. Other Discovery tools and ITSM tools are more user-friendly for customizations. 

From the Discovery perspective, the solution decommissioned Drift which was used to identify variances between baseline and new CIs. Drift was used once data pushed to the CMBD. It might not have been highly used, but now Drift is gone with no replacement. 

From the ITSM perspective, the solution decommissioned Smart Reporting when it was only launched four or five years ago. The tool was a good analytical reporting module. It is unclear why the solution invested so much in the tool when they had no clear roadmap. They might provide some other alternative but this was not a stable move. 

The solution is not user friendly. 

The solution is stable.

Technical support is not good. 

We had a challenge with the ADDM, server, or sendoffs getting corrupted. It took a very long time for the solution to get back to normal because there was no backup file. Support did not fix the issue for weeks. 

Support is rated a two out of ten. 

Negative

The setup is complex because it requires particular SMEs to implement. It is not like an IT guy with knowledge of applications or systems could handle the setup independently. 

We utilize third parties for implementations. We provide the network accessibility server and the three D's to vendors for implementation. 

The licenses are very complex and quite costly. Servers are one license, storage is another, and so on which makes license management quite complex. 

Building up topologies and licenses is very, very costly. The cost is very heavy on organizations and not viable in comparison to other tools. 

I rate pricing a four out of ten. 

We use many different tools such as Lansweeper and SolarWinds, but not exactly for the same purposes as the solution. 

The solution is definitely useful but is complex with regard to user friendliness and adaptability. 

It does not meet our needs but you should do your own research to determine if it will serve your purposes. If it does, then use the solution. 

I rate the solution a six out of ten. 

We use the solution for data center like server and discovery system.

The important feature is information capability.

It is very complicated to use. It should be more user-friendly. Also, it should provide more dashboards.

I have been using BMC Helix Discovery for two years.

It is not stable. We are suffering from upgrades.

20,000 users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six out of ten.

Support take time to respond but they solve the issue.

Neutral

The initial setup is simple.

The product pricing is high.

I rate the product’s pricing a ten out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

Overall, I rate the solution a six out of ten.

With BMC Helix Discovery, you can generate organizational maps and conduct discovery of your data center from hybrid environments. This allows you to discover any assets within your company's premises, including those within specified ID ranges. Furthermore, BMC Helix Discovery provides dependent maps and assists in topology visualization, enabling correlation with virtual IDs.

The ability to use it with or without agents is beneficial, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides comprehensive dependency mapping, which is essential for reducing the time spent and addressing problem-solving between data centers.

If the dependency maps can go live and we can work through the process with a click, we're reaching the stage where issues are identified and mitigated. It would be ideal if we could utilize it to reduce vulnerabilities or address any other feedback.

The solution could include drilling down into dependents and mapping for the project team. When an application is connected, you can right-click to identify whose site is not working and how to mitigate that if it's available.

I have been using BMC Helix Discovery for 12 years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable. If you're using a hybrid cloud, including AWS, Azure, or private cloud services, BMC Helix Discovery can detect and catalog all components seamlessly. This ensures there are no challenges in visibility or management.

Support is responsive and helpful.

You can obtain topology maps and dependency maps. The first time you request them, you may experience a slight learning curve in understanding your environment. However, you won't need to worry about adapting to changes after that initial hurdle.

If you opt for BMC Helix Discovery in the cloud, it operates on a subscription model, where you'll be charged periodically. However, you can also obtain a perpetual license. With the perpetual license, you can acquire lifetime access and pay only for the supporting services annually.

I rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

BMC Helix Discovery is a new platform with significant potential due to its incorporation of genuine artificial intelligence. This is a definite advantage for knowledge management. It takes a step further by assisting IT engineers and facilitating earlier responses and escalation of end-user issues with detailed information. It's designed to provide insights into your environment, including learning patterns, dependencies, and the interconnectivity of applications and memory devices.

The dependency map always helps. BMC Helix Discovery can be easily integrated with your IT system, regardless of what you are using. So, if any confusion arises, it can be clarified. Moreover, you can pull up data from there as well. Typically, it is designed to initially discover everything new in on-premises data centers or cloud environments, and it integrates with them seamlessly to set up the data from there.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is mainly used to discover the assets in the organization. A new concept called blind spots in BMC Helix Discovery seems to give more insight into which assets were missed. It helps VM managers or data center managers get a good picture of what assets are there and which VMs were deployed but not even touched.

The solution's most valuable feature is service modeling. BMC Helix Discovery already does almost 70% to 80% of the work, and only 20% is left for you to manually create relationships to complete the service model. It is critical for the business to define what services it needs.

BMC Helix Discovery is a bit tough to use and administer. It needs a lot of manpower to manage it on a day-to-day basis.

I am satisfied with the solution's reasonable technical support.

Positive

Setup-wise, the solution has recently improved a lot compared to the previous version. If you have the servers ready, the solution can be deployed within a few hours. The problem is with the connectivity. You need to get your connectivity sorted out from your organization, which takes a long time.

It takes at least more than a month to arrange the connectivity. Once you have the connectivity, the deployment can be done in a few hours.

Because of the solution’s automation, it saves up to 80% of the time for the administrator. The solution can save costs for the customer because they can reduce spending on other tools.

I've heard that the solution was expensive earlier but is now much cheaper than its competitors.

The solution can be easily integrated with BMC Suite. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

BMC Helix Discovery is very intuitive. All of BMC's products are intuitive and simple to look at from a look-and-feel perspective. They have tabs like "discover," which means to discover something, "managing," which means you can manage something. They are very intuitive. If you know the language, you understand what it does.
Another thing is that it is easy to implement because BMC is a virtual appliance you can use in your environment. It's not like you have to install an operating system. Instead, you must install the binaries or dependencies before installing the application. It's a complete package in one bundle as a virtual appliance. You don't have to provide a machine or libraries or install dependencies or verifications. The solution is agentless and non-intrusive.

It's very easy to use the solution if you are configuring a domain-based Windows environment. Still, if you want to discover some Linux-based environments, it's a little tricky. BMC Helix Discovery needs more customization options.

I've been using BMC Helix Discovery for two years. One of my projects included implementing a solution for one of the largest banks in my country.

I rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. It is a stable virtual appliance. The stability is based on a pre-hardened virtual appliance. It is not possible to break into the system, nor is it possible to have some virus intruding into the virtual appliance. The solution is pre-hardened by experts and based on Linux, not a Windows server. Linux is less likely to get infected with a virus. The solution is robust and stable.

I rate the solution's scalability a five or six out of ten. When you install the virtual appliance, you don't know how much faster you need to run the scan. If you have to rerun the scan often, you cannot scale it as much unless you have a lot of storage. You need a lot of housekeeping activity. But if you run scans five to six days or weekly, that would be okay.

Technical support is good. I didn't, you know, I didn't interact with support people for BMC Helix Discovery, but I have opened up cases with them for other products.

Neutral

I rate the initial setup a ten out of ten because it doesn't take much time. You just have to start the machine, which will take some configuration settings. The machine will take about one and a half hours to start. The environment is ready, and you can have a POC in any environment within three to four days, and in that time, you can discover 5,000 to 6,000 devices too.

It hardly takes a week to deploy the solution. The installation takes no time, while the configuration takes some time. Most of the time is spent Interacting with stakeholders involved to get permission to scan all the devices and equipment in the data center. You might get some pushback from stakeholders. But overall, it will take about more than a week to configure it, you know, have the results.

It won't take more than two people to deploy the solution. Sometimes, I deploy the solution myself.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. All BMC products are expensive.

There are open-source solutions available. ManageEngine is one option, but its look and feel and dependency mapping are not as good as Discovery and are not as intuitive.

You can discover Windows devices and servers easily using BMC Helix Discovery. The solution is designed by default for server Discovery and not desktop discovery. But you can use that as well as data center discovery. Data center discovery means you can discover server assets in your data centers, while desktops mean end-user devices. BMC is designed for servers in a heterogeneous environment, where you can discover Linux, EAX, Windows, you name it.

BMC Helix Discovery is an agentless tool. Nothing needs to be deployed on the system. The solution is non-intrusive and won't disturb anything on your servers. It will only read files and won't write anything. You need to convince stakeholders about this, and it will take some time to convince them that it's okay that you'll have a kind of privileged access to read files.

The solution is based on a pre-hardened Linux virtual appliance, which means you cannot use many Linux features. You can only have root access to many certain things, and it's not easy to get into it.

Discovery is a tool that is not for just one person. When acquiring BMC, you should take on board all the stakeholders of your IT state or your data center so they can utilize the product to its fullest. You should know what resources are utilized and how they are utilized. BMC Discovery gives you perspective on what applications are running on your servers, the storage capacity, whether your application is installed, and which operating system it is. Discovery will also tell you the operating system's end-of-life end of support so that you know everything in your IT state/data center.

I rate BMC Helix Discovery a ten out of ten.

Our use cases are service desk and service management.

We use it for all ITSM processes.

The license model could be more flexible and cheaper pricing.

We've been on BMC for over ten years. We use on-prem Delight, DWP build of BMC Helix Discovery, which is version 22.06.

It is a stable solution. The stability is okay. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement. 

Scalability is really costly. So, it's not really scalable for us. We're a company of 5500, but we have maybe 150 to 200 licenses. 

We plan to increase the number of users. 

The customer service and support are okay.

We have BMC Helix, but we're looking to replace it with a fresh service.

The initial setup is complicated.

The deployment can't be done in-house, so we used an integrator.

We need five admins and engineers for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

The solution is really expensive. We have a yearly license model. 

If we want to do anything extra, we have to pay extra costs.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use the solution to check patches for specific machines.

There are certain limitations in the mapping feature of the solution.

The solution's stability is excellent. In case of downtime, we always received great help from its support team.

We have around 200 solution users in our organization's assets and licenses team. It is scalable. I rate its scalability a ten.

The solution is quick to set up. It is deployed as a black box appliance. Thus, it requires spinning virtual machines for configuration. Although, it is most challenging and time-consuming to configure the solution for multiple networks.

We have a perpetual license for the solution.

We have evaluated ServiceNow. It has significant capabilities and provides essential data as well.

It is a good and powerful tool. I rate it an eight. I advise others to discuss the network location for the scanners with their IT security teams.

The primary use case of this solution is to discover all devices connected to the network. We use it for computer systems, laptops, printers, switches, IP phones, and servers.

We are using it for creating reports about discovered OS versions and installed patches.

We connected ADDM with the CMDB of BMC ITSM, and we use this data in BMC asset management.

Every week, we create different types of reports about the latest changes and track them. 

The process is very simple as it is easy to use. The IT security department uses it for troubleshooting security issues.

BMC Helix Discovery has improved our work. For example, with the solution, software and assets are now clear. It is very simple to sort assets and make reports to manage current conditions.

Weekly reports to management really make our life simple. Every change in assets of our organization can be trackable, and we can track any change and fix it.

Unfortunately, we don't use Discovery cloud services, and I couldn't rate how it works. However, it is good that BMC Discovery can discover multi-cloud environments. Likely, we will use it next year.

The security is invaluable. The security features are great.

The security policy of the appliance and system architecture is configured at the highest level. The appliance credentials used to log in are stored in the credential vault, and this security feature is very valuable for security reasons.

Another valuable feature is that the content of the vault is secured using 256-bit AES encryption in CBC mode.

The Sync feature syncs found assets with CMDB and BMC Remedy Asset Management. 

There are a lot of supported protocols and device lists.

We would like updates more often.

The virtual appliance with agentless discovery is very good and simple and doesn't need any improvement.

It will be better if the Nutanix architecture is more detailed.

I want to note the high stability and smooth operation of this system. New patches and updates are always coming and help to improve the performance of the system in a real way.

I don't know what else could be improved in this system. I am always satisfied with this product's full functionality and timely updates.

I've used the solution from 2016 - for about seven years.

I didn't use a different solution previously.

I did not evaluate other options.