BMC Helix Discovery Reviews

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. 

Our primary use case was to discover IT configuration items.

The solution can be deployed on-premise and on the cloud with Azure.

The last version we used was version 11.

It improved efficiencies and saved money by replacing manual methods.

The most valuable feature is the automated service mapping.

There isn't much that could be improved. The solution is pretty thorough, very easy to implement, and very easy to operate.

I used this solution for about six weeks.

It's stable. It's been on the market for a long time.

It's very scalable.

I would give their technical support a 10 out of 10. 

They were very knowledgeable of their own product and also helped us when we were integrating it with a competitor's service desk. They're quick and very responsive.

Positive

Setup for BMC was very easy. We did it in a trial, and it took approximately 48 hours to implement and get results as far as in a trial capacity.

There will be an implementation plan for either the BMC or the ServiceNow product.

We used two people for deployment – one on their side and one on our side.

At the time, it was administered by one person.

We used a vendor for deployment.

When we had it implemented, we did see ROI.

The price was fair compared to competitors. BMC is very affordable. There are optional consulting services to assist with implementation.

We compared BMC Helix Discovery with ServiceNow ITOM Visibility. ServiceNow is expensive.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

My advice is to ask the vendor to demonstrate the product, and then you will be convinced. It can integrate with BMC's own service desk and other service desks.

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.

BMC Helix Discovery is used for data center discovery. Clients also look for client-side discovery, so desktop discovery is supported, as well as printer discovery and on-premises discovery, but the solution is more focused on data center discovery, where you discover all kinds of assets, including mapping and dependencies.

I've used other discovery tools, but I found BMC Helix Discovery to be more UI-friendly, and that's the most valuable feature of the solution.

What would make BMC Helix Discovery better is if it had more client-side discovery features, for example, printers and desktops. Right now, it's focused more on data center discovery, so if it had additional features focused on the client-side discovery, that would be great.

In the next release of BMC Helix Discovery, I'd like more client-side discovery features such as desktop discovery, printer discovery, and other IP-based client-side discovery features. The solution can discover desktops and printers, but there's still room for improvement on the client side.

I've been using BMC Helix Discovery for more than eight years.

BMC Helix Discovery is a stable solution.

BMC Helix Discovery is a scalable solution, though sometimes you need techniques for different integrations because some work out of the box while some require an integration flow but API's support makes it easy most of the integrations.

I've contacted BMC Helix Discovery support many times, whenever there's an issue in the client environment and I need help from the BMC support team. The support is good, and I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup for BMC Helix Discovery was easy. It didn't take much time because it had a clear format, so in one day, you can prepare the discovery environment, though it would also depend on the data and the requirements.

You need a license to use BMC Helix Discovery. The license is paid yearly, though I have no idea how much it costs.

BMC Helix Discovery was mostly deployed on-premises, and the rest was deployed on AWS.

My company deploys BMC Helix Discovery, ServiceNow Discovery, and other tools. 

I'm an integrator for BMC Helix Discovery.

I'd recommend BMC Helix Discovery to others because I've been working with it for the last eight years and my experience with it has been good. It's worth the money if you're using it just for discovery purposes.

I would rate BMC Helix Discovery nine out of ten because I'm able to implement it and discover assets with it and transfer those assets to CMDB. It's also very user-friendly and has several out-of-the-box features such as reporting and generating queries which I like. You don't need to know queries to be able to pick or generate a query. Currently, several dashboards are in process for BMC Helix Discovery, and it has installation facilities and CPIs, so my rating for it is a nine. I won't give it a ten because there's no perfect solution.

The modeling, service mapping. The start anywhere application mapping approach is actually a really good solution for those who use map services.

The CMDB could be improved. Getting data from the CMDB is the greatest challenge. 

Also, integration with the system, the platform itself, can be difficult. For best results, you need to integrate with internal vendors. 

I have been using this solution for roughly six years. 

BMC provides great support. As managed service support, they are gold. It's not the product itself, it's the managed service. They make this product; they can do whatever you want. They can build everything — it's perfect.

BMC is available for a reasonable price compared to ServiceNow — it's half the price. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

The solution can be used on event management flows to automate items. It has mapping capabilities to help the organization to see what they have in terms of infrastructure. You're able to see if there's an outage or certain KPIs, and so on. It can do many useful things.

The data models are the most useful aspect of the solution.

The product has been quite stable. 

There are plenty of item capabilities that make the solution excellent.

The technical support is excellent and extremely helpful, even though they know we are not continuing with their product.

The scalability is pretty good.

The deployment is very fast.

The monitoring tools could be more stable. Their TrueSight offering isn't as good as it could be.

I've worked with BMC Remedy products since 2008 and Helix Discovery since it was deployed in 2019. It's been approximately one and a half years. 

The solution is a giant when it comes to enterprise service management. With ServiceNow Discovery, you have to have it in every region or in every data center, with a mid-server available in order to be able to scan the devices. Right now, we have only 2 servers. Once we move to Service Now, we'll have 27 mid servers in all of the locations to be able to scan what we can scan today using Discovery.

The scalability is much better in BMC Discovery rather than Service Now as you can integrate with basically everything - including APIs and tools. While in ServiceNow, you have to build patterns to be able to do the same tasks. It's not as out-of-the-box.

We have approximately 185,000 users. Ours is a massive worldwide company.

We will not increase usage. Unfortunately, our plan is to de-install it in January.

Technical support has been great. 

We use premier support, which BMC offers, and I have never met more professional people than those who work in India. They are great. Even now, when they know that we are going to de-install their product, they are helpful. They reach out to us and offer help, even inside information, like how should we do certain tasks. They offer so much help. I'm impressed with them.

While we are still working with BMC products, we are going to switch now to ServiceNow.

For BMC Discovery, it took approximately two to three hours to be able to open all the ports and firewalls and stuff like that and to install the application. The application itself took five minutes, and therefore it was not so hard. 

If you compare it to ServiceNow, it's approximately the same. Mostly, it was internal processes that slowed us down. The installations themselves are very, very fast.

I have a team that backs me up. I'm working as a service asset and configuration management lead. I've got a managed services team sitting in Bangalore that helps me with the operational side.

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of any consultants or integrators or any outside help at all.

We do need to pay a licensing fee, although I'm not sure what the exact cost is. You have a floating license, which does not cost anything. However, when it comes to fixed licenses, such as licensing for administrators and stuff like that, you have to pay.

I can say that they are far less expensive than ServiceNow, which is quite costly.

We're just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with BMC.

We're using the latest versions of the solution within our organization.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployment models at this time.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall.

BMC Discovery for our customers is a tool that you can put in your data center to discover all the different data center tooling for servers, physical or virtual, storage, etc. Or, BMC offers a cloud-based solution, which can also do the same level detail in your data center. In addition, it now has the features to be able to go and discover things on Azure, AWS, GCloud, etc.

If a customer has a spread out enterprise support center, then maybe they have a main data center, a backup data center, and a colocation, so they need to be able to know what's in each environment without having to go to five or six teams, like the network or storage team.

Having one solution, one pane glass, saying, "Here is what's in A, B and C." It helps with a level of capacity management decision-making, "Do we need to grow this solution? Do we need to reduce this solution?" It helps with understanding disaster recovery and business continuity. "If we lose data center B are we still okay?" In terms of supporting our application and our customers who use these applications.

One of the customer areas that I deal with is healthcare. One of our customers had split their electronic health records system across three data centers, and they needed to make sure that each module of the EHR was still up and functional regardless of what was going on. So, our Discovery solution was able to go into the data center and show all the different pieces which made up that software, then where that was in terms of if they were doing virtual server migrations and being able to track the assets related to all that to show a service model. This helped a number of areas: financial management, disaster planning, in the areas of general change management, and recording incidents against the service.

1. It is agentless, which means you don't have to install anything on all the different pieces of hardware that you are looking to discover.
2. It now comes with a very flexible deployment solution, whether you want to keep it inside your data center or want to have the cloud, depending on if you're cloud forward or not.
3. The speed at which it's able to collect a wide-range of information, then make it useful for you, like asset management, knowledge management, and incident management. 

Those would probably be the three main tenants of why Discovery is valuable to a customer.

I would like to see the ability to scan some of the newer cloud platforms. I know that BMC has them on the roadmap, and they are coming soon, but they can't come fast enough. Being able to scan more of GCloud, Alibaba Cloud, or whatever the public clouds that our customers are buying, we need to make sure that Discovery can find them as well.

There should be more education to the customer that while you can set this tool up and walk away from it, just like any other IT tool, it requires care and feeding as your environment grows and your technology library scales out. You need to sit down and think about how do you manage your asset library. Sure, you can collect everything, but is there a business case for everything you're collecting? Maybe there is some rudimentary training, or some rudimentary thought leadership, which needs to be provided around it. Because while you can discover everything, it doesn't mean you should.

The stability is great in the sense that it comes in two different versions. There is the standard scanner, then there's the Collector. 

With BMC, you're allowed to deploy in an on-premise solution, or even a cloud-based solution, with as many as are necessary. Therefore, being able to scale up or scale down, depending on the size of your environment or migration of environments, is very flexible.

Let's say that you started with one data center, and you have outgrown it, or maybe you're going from data center to a fledgling cloud deployment. Being able to scale up across those is really the key factor of the way BMC designed the Discovery tool. Because it comes in a scanning tool and a consolidation tool, you can put as many scanning out as you need, and if there are maybe specific firewall rules and you need to scale up to yet another system, you needed to scale out over the WAN to another data center, or to cloud, you have that ability. It's not going to introduce a large hindrance into your environment or to your admins to be able to support it.

I have not used the technical support.

As a partner, we are able to provide the technical support for our customers. So, being able to either provide implementation, best-practice consulting on an existing solution, or we even offer a level of manage services. For example, if a customer for some reason, either through downsizing or depth of knowledge, needs somebody to run it entirely for them, we have the ability.

Customers decide to invest in a solution because a number of different reasons:

1. They want to support the work they have already been doing in their operations or service management by having an automated tool that on a regularly scheduled basis goes out and says "What's in the data center? How's it configured?"
2. Sometimes, they use it for security configuration management, making sure that all the patch levels are on the right thing. 

It just depends on the maturity of the IT service management and the operations management of where they start to see value in knowing what and how it's configured inside their environment.

The initial setup is amazingly straightforward because BMC provides the entire system as a virtual deployment. So, it comes as a VMware appliance, then your data center admin, or whoever it is, can actually just import the system and apply a static IP address, then the system is already installed and up and ready to go. I don't know of any other system that comes as packaged as well as this.

If a colleague, or even a customer, is sort of entering the idea that they are looking at Discovery, the first thing is BMC offers a trial. You can find a hundred endpoints. It is very low-impact to download and input it in a development environment.

Try it out. If you need further insights, you can go to BMC. Make sure you understand your use cases and business cases before you implement something like this. Know why you are trying to collect this specific attribute of this specific server and put it in your CMBD. If you don't have a use case for the information, there's no point in building up large amounts of data if you don't have a reason to.

Our customers do like to have that proof-in-the-pudding test, whether it's going beyond just the general demo, having us come onsite, implementing the solution in front of them, then running a level of Discovery with them. There is no better test of a Discovery tool, or an asset management tool, then to go to a customer and say "Here you go. This is what we found on your data center."

The competition is from Microsoft System Center. While it is agent-based, it has a level of being able to look at Windows systems just like BMC Discovery would. However, it does lack the ability to go into network devices and Linux systems.

The other one that we see in the market is a solution from ServiceNow called Discovery, which is still a fledgling solution. However, in another five to ten years, it might give BMC Discovery a run for its money.

From what I've heard and I've seen, the BMC Discovery solution has been in the market for over 15 years. The library of things that you can discover without having to make a custom pattern is very vast. It grows each month. BMC works with Microsoft, HPE, and all those different companies to make sure that the library is up-to-date and is all-inclusive as possible. Along with that, being able to scale to meet the demands of custom-made solutions and the ability to integrate with other BMC technologies, and even non-BMC technologies.

One of the things that sometimes people forget is the BMC Discovery tool can integrate with any CMDB. It's not just for RMDB. 

Whenever a customer says "I wish the solution had the ability to find this device," I can generally say "Well, it can." That's why I'm so proud that BMC sells this tool and I'm able to provide it. It's because whenever a customer says "Can you find this? Can it discover this?" Yes, it can. I have very little experience where a customer has asked me "Can you find this," and I'm not able to find it.

In terms of the tools that BMC sells and tools like this on the market, there is no match. It is a ten out of ten.

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.