BMC Helix Discovery Reviews

I use BMC Helix Discovery to search for devices on a network and monitor networks.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to install and deploy. In general, BMC Helix Discovery works properly. The solution helps solve problems, so I have never witnessed any high-end problems.

I faced some minor problems with the product, but BMC updates Helix Discovery every month, which makes the product work very well.

The solution's scalability is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are needed.

I have been using BMC Helix Discovery for a year and a half. My company has a partnership with BMC Helix Discovery.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

My company provides support services for BMC Helix Discovery. My company has deployed BMC Helix Discovery in twenty different companies.

My company can be considered as an enterprise-sized business.

My company provides support services for BMC Helix Discovery. Though my company has dealt with various cases related to BMC products, we have specifically dealt with any scenarios related to BMC Helix Discovery.

I rate the support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I don't know if my company used another tool before BMC Helix Discovery.

BMC Helix Discovery is easy to install.

I rate the initial setup a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. The solution can also deployed on the cloud.

The deployment phase takes a lot of time if you use the cluster version of the solution. The deployment process takes around half a day if you download the product on one server. In general, using the product's cluster version, which includes three machines simultaneously, takes a day and a half.

I don't know about the prices attached to BMC Helix Discovery since it is an area dealt with by managers.

I don't know if my company was involved in any evaluation process before selecting BMC Helix Discovery. I came to know about ITSM tools in detail only after joining my current company.

My company loves using the solution.

Big companies usually want to learn about their inventories, so they use BMC Helix Discovery. There are other software products or ITSM tools similar to BMC Helix Discovery in the market to deal with inventory. In BMC Remedy ITSM, you can raise two support tickets at once. BMC is a software in which all its products are linked and work together.

I rate the overall tool a nine 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. 

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.

I'm using it for the customer. I've been looking for BMC Helix Discovery. It's majorly for some kind of customization or development kind of thing that we have to do.

The solution has brought a huge difference to the organisation.

The most valuable feature is Windows proxy. We now need to install an additional link proxy server in Windows. The proxy is available as an outpost in the Elastic store. That is the advanced feature is added.

There are many other features which can be used once we discover them. One time I was scanning the servers and all, going to data from additional based on the additional features, including advanced data like score upper display data successfully discover servers. There are many things good things that can be implemented using it while we haven’t installed those yet.

The improvement which we require is to delete the Internet service. Till some of the features are coming, like, internally side. If you are taking one server to model, there are a lot of usages like three structures per diagram is coming, and we have to do the man lot of manual work. Instead of that, whatever our requirement, we should be able to provide the servers and get the structure. So this is what we want to implement with such data. 

It is not a very stable solution. I rate the stability a seven out of ten. 

It is a scalable solution. I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

The initial setup is easy except for some parts which requires expertise. The whole deployment have to be taken care of by us in the On-premises version. The pay on call monitor, taking notes all have to installed by us in the on-prem version. 

Operating cost is actually high compared to other products, actually. It's a little expensive only, but it's very good than other products.

I will rate BMC Helix Discovery an eight out of ten.

The use cases for BMC Helix Discovery would depend on the specific business needs of our customers. So, it varies based on their requirements. The typical BMC-ServiceNow scenario is when BMC Discovery collects data and passes it to ServiceNow CMDB to support IT and Business processes managed there.

BMC Helix Discovery can be a valuable part of the overall architecture responsible for discovering CIs and sharing the CMDB data with other systems, especially when the organization already works with the BMC platform. However, if the IT and Business practices/processes are managed in a platform like ServiceNow, then the discovery solution directly in this platform offers a more straightforward solution (one CMDB data model, no integrations needed, seamless connection to enterprise disciplines like Digital Portfolio Management).

Next to a horizontal discovery, there is also a capability of dependency modeling enabling us to see relationships between CIs.

There is still room for improvement in terms of stability and scalability. 

I have been aware of BMC (Helix) Discovery's existence since its appearance on the BMC platform. I have been working with ServiceNow for the last eight years so I'm rather using ServiceNow Discovery.

Since I am on the system integrator side, we are using the latest versions of the products.

The stability of this solution is above average but not perfect.

It is a scalable solution. The number of users depends on the specific customers we are working with. BMC Helix Discovery seems to work well for small to mid-size organizations.

From my perspective, the initial setup is quite easy.

The deployment of BMC Helix Discovery varies from customer to customer. I see it as a product that can be part of the solution from an architectural perspective.

First and foremost, it's important to understand the whole landscape of the implementation in the enterprise environment. Whether it's for ITSM or business management, you need to be aware of the target landscape and other systems in place and how the systems are interconnected. Integration of data into the system is crucial, so it's essential to assess how easy it is to integrate the data. 

Overall, this should be one of the key architectural principles to consider as any integration represents an increased complexity. There might be benefits of decentralized solutions in terms of multiple systems cooperating to provide their best value together, but there is also a huge advantage of having an enterprise platform as the real "one system of records" and "one system of action" when the provided solution is robust, scalable and modular (e.g. ServiceNow). It is also a matter of knowledge management - what knowledge do you need (and can afford) to maintain? Two platforms = two sets of knowledge.

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.

I sell the product as a part of the pre-sales team in my organization.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its application dependency mapping.

The product is not fully automated. The solution should add a little more automation for vertical mapping.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

The solution is one of the best products in the market when it comes to stability.

The solution is scalable. I rate the scalability an eight to nine out of ten.

The licensing fee is very low.

I have sold service management tools like BMC Helix and ServiceNow.

The product can be deployed as an on-premise solution or cloud solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.

Our company uses the solution as an inventory tool for customers. The solution discovers your infrastructure and lets you know what servers and network devices are on it. It gives you details about applications, hardware, and software such as how they are connected and the dependencies between them. 

The solution is very stable and powerful.

The inventory management is very valuable. 

The solution is very fast and an entire discovery can be done within 15 to 20 days. 

The solution should have different portals and logins for each customer so only that customer's assets show. As a service provider, we manage multiple customers so would prefer to view their assets separately. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is absolutely stable so stability is rated a ten out of ten. 

The solution is very scalable so scalability is rated a ten out of ten. 

We have a very strong internal team so do not need technical support. The most common issue is that servers are not getting discovered. Sometimes the server is not getting access and sometimes a firewall port may be closed. Our support team helps customers fix those issues. 

The setup is straightforward. 

We implement the solution for customers. An entire discovery can be done within 15 to 20 days. Two or three of our consultants can handle any project. 

The solution is pretty easy to implement. BMC provides you with the cloud solution or onboarding it to the VM takes just one day for on-premises. 

We ask customers some prerequisites to be full-scale once they are executed. The storage and all endpoints are part of our service application report. 

The solution offers yearly licenses. 

I recommend the solution to all customers. It is important to know your infrastructure and how it is all connected. 

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.