Clarity SM Reviews

Incident management

Adoption of ITIL incident management for business process re-engineering was very easy to fit into the CA Service Desk Manager Incident Management module. It allowed IT operation support to easily identify, track and monitor incidents with data in 45 days that was analyzed. Within the first calendar year of deploy, the incident manager was able to strategically set and meet the field support goal of responding and resolving 25% of incidents remotely.

Ticket event and notification creation/management is cumbersome and has not improved over the many versions I've worked with. Workflow design and management requires knowledgeable administrators with programming experience.

I have used it for 9+ years.

I have encountered stability issues, although the tool is relatively stable in smaller to mid-sized environments and has gotten better with newer versions. Complex client environments can severely impact stability. When there are network hiccups, the system does not recover easily without manual interaction.

The tool can be load balanced and clustered, which makes it very scalable. The architecture can be designed to segment the Service Desk support team and the regular users. This is helpful as the Service Desk can continue to work efficiently when other users are experiencing performance degradation.

Vendor support meets customer SLAs. First-level technical support is very good at escalating as appropriate.

I have used many different solutions. My role is a consultant that helps design and enhance service management solutions. The customers mainly switch as they adopt the ITIL framework and move away from non-ITIL products that cannot be (easily) modified/adapted to fit the new IT operations strategic model.

Installation is straight forward for conventional configuration following CA-recommended specifications. Advanced Availability configuration is more complex and requires good planning.

As a technical consultant, I'm usually brought in after tool selection is decided on.

The tool supports several of the ITIL processes. Plan the implementation such that when other functions/processes (inter-related as well as non-interrelated such as ITAM, CMDB) are to be brought online, the initial implementation solution does not need to be re-engineered.

Incident/Request/Problem/Change Management, CMDB, and Business Intelligence.

From the user’s perspective: One of the most criticised aspects by the clients is the web interface, which is not too user friendly and hasn’t been changed in the last years. CA is trying now to promote an additional new interface which is more user friendly, but in this new interface, they removed some key functionalities. So, it brings value on the design, but with the price of losing some features.

I’ve been using it for the last eight years.

They usually have three levels of support: 1st, 2nd and 3rd, which are the developers. The 1st level of support is not always too experienced, but you can get real help from the 2nd and 3rd level.

I am part of a reseller team. The initial deployment of the application with the default configuration is not very useful for the client. The post-installation and configuration of the solution requires more advanced knowledge of the tool, as it allows a high level of customisation through scripting. If you have an experienced implementation team, you can get very good results and value from the solution.

For the first step, before deciding on a product, first make a detailed analysis of your internal processes and establish a list of key functionalities and requirements.

Present your requirements to the reseller/vendor and get details about how they can be implemented in the solution. A big advantage of this solution is that with a proper definition of the processes, almost anything can be configured & scripted.

Non-Functional

1. Highly configurable, scalable and extendable
2. Customizable with almost Hot Deploy except for business logic
3. Quick and has awesome architecture
4. It's robust

Functional

1. Fully fledged Support on Request, Incident, Problem and Change on various scales along with CA PAM and CA SC as well as supporting the classic workflow. It supports Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and Single Sign-On through Active Directory and other supported LDAP systems
2. Effective SOA layer supporting both SOAP and REST
3. Good SLA management along with Response measurement. It supports boht a single SLA or multiple SLAs
4. Strong logging mechanism with configurable event, activity notification, email eater. The email eater allows for ticket creation and updates via email without having to log into the application. Also, the Normal survey, and for change management, Risk Survey.
5. From 12.5 onward, it comes with a combined CMDB and visualizer along with Remote Support for taking remote control of end users while working on a ticket.

1. Bundled CA EEM (LDAP Application from CA) has improved, and it supports multiple AD integrations in v12.51.x
2. Up to v12.7, the load balancing feature (Primary and Secondary Server Configuration) was crude and script based, and from v12.9 onward, it is UI based. Apart this, from v12.9 onward CA SDM supports advanced availability which assures fail over along with load balancing
3. Internally lots of schema structures have changed to help improving our performance
4. Knowledge Management becomes smarter and from 12.9 onward it becomes federated Search enabled to capture from heterogeneous sources, Like Google, SharePoint etc.
5. Support community is strong and end users and customers can ask for feature enhancements through the Community after getting it verified by the product engineering team
6. v12.5 onward, Incident, Problem and Request Management can be extensible or customized with CA ITPAM. Initially it used to have CA Workflow which is replaced by CA ITPAM i.e. much stable, robust and high performance process automation engine.
7. v14.1 onward, CA Service Desk Manager gets packaged with CA Service Catalog, EEM, ITPAM, Open Space – a common portal to raise and track ticket for end user (but accessibility is controlled through licenses)
8. Integration documentation has been improved a lot with code snippets and examples since v12.5
9. Role Based Access Control allows user to login to the system with permissions based on their role. Single login and Multi-tenancy, hosting multiple sub-business units in a single instance were introduced in v12.1.

1. Release Management is not supported out of the box
2. SLO Management
3. Cloud, SSL Configuration, Remote Support and Chatting
4. Support for different mailing protocol other than SMTP, POP3/IMAP such as for MS Office 360 exchange
5. Conditional Survey so it doesn’t send a survey on the closing of a Parent Ticket but of the children

I've used it for eight years and have over 20,000 hours of project exposure on it directly and indirectly.

When we upgraded from 11.2 to 12.0, we faced an issue but later found out that it happened due to information discrepancies caused by ineffective data maintenance of CA SDM by our customer.

We have never faced an issue in a supported environment using the out of the box features. If we encounter an issue, we follow the log by increasing Log levels or contact CA Support help resolve it.

It can handle request of around 5000 concurrent end users in an optimum environment.

2008-2011 – 3.5/5

2011-2014 – 3/5

2014-Present – 4/5

They have a very fast turnaround time, strong community, and helpful support team.

We have never worked with another product.

The initial setup is straightforward. One can dump all databases and applications with one primary server into a single box with a minimum 8 GB RAM for applications and 8 GB RAM for databases in a vanilla setup. This allows you to have CA CMDB, Support Automation (Remote Connect to the end user by an analyst) along with a ticketing system and Knowledge Management.

A vanilla setup involve the following three steps, and the times given are adjustable +/-15 minutes -

1. Database setup (10 minutes)
2. Software installation (45 minutes)
3. Configuration (five minutes)

We have never worked with another product.

Understand Requirements and ITSM Processes for the required organization and identify the process stakeholders. Then, schedule a phased deployment, e.g. Asset and Configuration Management first, then Request, Incident, and Problem Management, then finally Change Management. You should consider solution architecting and conduct Training for the end user.

The important part for me is not related to any of the features the product offers as such as it doesn't offer anything some other product wouldn't offer. What I find comforting is that CA has been around for decades and therefore it is seen as a reliable partner, so companies buy their software even when there would be possibly better alternatives available. If I'd have to name one feature that makes it a viable option for some, I'd say it is the on-site installation instead of having your possibly sensitive data in the cloud.

I've worked as an employee and as an independent consultant for a number clients so I can't really speak to how this product has improved my organization. Usually, the organizations that decided to buy CA's service management solution had a very poor incident/request/change management system and process implemented, and this is what they got the product for. For some customers, it was way overkill when they would've been better off with some other commercial or open source solution. For some customers, it was scalable and robust enough to take the load the customer's use required.

The product has traditionally lacked the tools to support data migration from development to QA and then to production. CA has made a tool for this on the latest release but I haven't laid my hands on it yet. Also, data manipulation outside the UI - the parts that aren't modifiable through the UI by default and where the effort to enable it would be disproportional to the gained benefit - really lacks support from CA. They do ship tools that can achieve this but they're clunky, counterintuitive and prone to errors. Additionally, they bypass all the checks the system has in place for ensuring data integrity. Therefore, no, I'm not a big fan of those, and I've written my own tools to handle the data manipulation in a way that all the checks are made. Luckily, CA provides a couple of APIs for this. Also, the UI is a bit outdated and, while CA is working on bringing it to this century, they're still far away from it. The good part is it's pretty much just good old HTML and JavaScript, with just a hint of syntactic sugar from CA and you're golden.

The product has potential and if your business is flexible enough so that you can adjust the way of working to what the product offers out of the box, then it might be a good solution. However, I'm cutting down the score because of bad design decisions and outright bad implementation on some specific areas. Also, customizing the product to your needs beyond the basic UI changes means you'll have to hire either CA's professional services or an external consultant. Luckily, that's what pays my salary, so I'm not complaining too loudly. CA does offer training for this but they don't tell you the juicy bits. You'll have to reverse engineer and hack your way around to get to them.

I've worked with the product since 2008.

Deployment is more or less point-and-click.

Stability is usually ok, but sometimes you encounter issues that are sporadic and you have no way of reproducing those. Therefore, in the end, you just learn to live with them and find either a workaround or a quick-and-dirty fix that will hide the issue until it resurfaces. Since version r12.7, there has been fault tolerancy and high availability features built into the product, but it could've been done better. Officially the load balancer only supports F5 load balancers. However, with the price tag they have, I don't see too many medium or even large organizations going with that. They cook up their own solution, trading off some of the capabilities that make the system fault tolerant or HA in the first place.

Customer service is fine and their customer service manager actually follows through if you give them not-so-positive feedback on the case review you get after every case is closed.

Tech support is very courteous and it has some of the sharpest minds I've seen in CS that just enjoy the first line support and they really know the product inside out. Then there's a bunch of adequately competent people who can get you past the first line and you'll get your case handled even when it takes a bit more explaining.

Apart from the user perspective, I have no experience in the design and implementation of alternative products beyond the basic installation.

The initial setup is pretty much next-next-next-next-ok, if you just need to get it running to play with it. After you start thinking about security or fault tolerance and scalability, it becomes more complex. However, just to evaluate it a blunt tool from the shed will be enough to ram it in and get it running.

This is not relevant, as I'm working as an independent consultant doing the implementations. But if you want my advice, for the design, try to get someone who knows the product but is not in CA's pocket already. That way, you'll get honest opinions and options given to you. For the implementation, it doesn't matter, as long as the designer is supporting the implementation phase, has some stake in it and is technically able to do it in case the implementation team lacks the skills.

I'll say this: This is not cheap. However, with the rather hefty price tag, you do get the support from CA and for the alternative commercial products designed for same scale use, the price is still competitive.

Contact CA and get a 30-day trial license. You'll get to see the product and play around it. It will not be enough to implement any custom features you want apart from the very basic ones, but at least you can get a feel of it. Additionally, you could hire a consultant to evaluate the suitability for your business, assuming you have the service management processes mapped out already. If you have no established processes and you can implement whatever process the tool can support, then you're good to go and it's only a matter of comparing the prices.

• The TWA option for CA CMDB along with the simulation of CI and relationship data in GRLoader.
• The MDR button on the CI page, which directly takes you to the integrated MDR Source.
• The Visualizer, which automatically affects the map based on relationships.
• Personal Response, which is helpful in following a standard format across teams.

We implemented this for a customer. The major improvement in functions is their ability to track, report incidents, problem, changes and configuration management.

There is no documentation available from CA for SPEL code; I hope they make this available, so that we can customize it more 

CA Service Desk Manager used a SPEL code to perform different action in the tool. To create a new action or condition generally know as macros (type: action macro, condition macro etc) knowledge of SPEL code and how to use it important. Unfortunately CA does not share any document around it hence we as administrators cannot customize it much like we can in servicenow, remedy etc. So if they can make it available, we could tune or optimize CA SDM as per specific requirements and it will help the tool to sink in the organization implemented. 

The process of adding new columns in the DB and publishing it from the front end is a lengthy activity. I hope they make adding columns and tables in DB easier. 

Creating a new custom column in servicenow is a child's game as you can do everything from the UI. No service restarrt, code execution etc needed. However, in CA SDM the process of adding a new column is a little lengthy with service restart and few steps needed, hence this is where they can improve upon.

• There is no documentation available from CA for SPEL code; I hope they make this available, so that we can customize it more.
• The process of adding new columns in the DB and publishing it from the front end is a lengthy activity. I hope they make adding columns and tables in DB easier.

It pretty much does the work it’s intended to.

The tool itself is valuable as a result of all its features combined. Therefore, I have found that there is no feature more valuable than another.

The scalability of a product this size has provided us with the most improvement. Being able to use one product globally throughout our company to capture and report on all IT work being done has provided the most benefit.

Ease of support and upgrades need much improvement. We don't have a dedicated team to support this system, and we still need to rely to much on services to perform upgrades and major patches due to the complexity of the system. Also, their mobile application does not allow us to configure it the same way as the system is configured, so we cannot use it at all.

We've been using it for four and a half years.

We had many issues, especially in the first release we implemented (12.5). In later releases, the overall system stability has improved greatly, but there have been other stability issues with specific parts of the system functionality. They do seem to provide test patches that help with stability of those areas, but with each new release there are new specific functionality stability issues that need to be addressed.

We have had no issues scaling it globally throughout our company.

Support is great. The engineers should probably work a little closer with the support and services teams on new releases to better understand the overall issues. They need to understand the issues that older versions had to ensure they they willnot re-occur in the new release, as well to ensure that any new functionality does not create similar issues that will need to be addressed. I think that too many 'test' patches are provided specifically to one customer that aren't carried over to the new release which causes that customer to have to address that issue again with support in the new release, and again receive another 'test' patch. Introducing more configuration options for these would give customers the flexibility that is needed for these areas.

We also looked at BMC Remedy and GWI.

It's complex. Customers aren't really able to implement this system themselves, unless they are going to use everything out-of-the-box.

I don't see anyone other than large companies being able to afford this system.

We previously used a system that wasn't scalable to use globally, which is why we switched.

Most vendors will tell you that you don't need a full time dedicated person or team to support and administer their system, but you really do, especially if you are going to utilize everything it has to offer. This person should understand the code, since some supported changes are made at the form level by changing or adding to the code.

The most valuable features for us was the ability to calculate service levels for different time periods as well as the ability to store and archive contracts. BSI has templates for calculating key services levels as well as the capability to allowing coding for more complicated, unique measurements. Data for key metrics in individual contracts can be used to creat

It's given us the ability to allow for automation of service-level reporting.

It needs better report-generation features and allow for different types of data.

I've used it for six years.

There have been no issues with deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues with the scalability.

Technical support is excellent. I give them a 9/10.

The initial setup was straightforward and was done by a third-party installer. I'd recommend using the three-tier solution rather than the two-tier solution for installation.

The implementation was done with a combination of in-house and vendor reams. Be sure that your hardware and storage capabilities are adequate prior to doing so.

Licensing costs can be high as they're based on the number of service-level metrics rather than by user. For a large number of users, try to get the enterprise license rather than individual licenses for each metric.

Plan what information is needed for reporting before entering contracts and metrics for calculation. Have a visual basic developer on your team to script business logics used for metric calculations.

I handle primarily the back end of the tool. A lot of the benefits that we've seen have been the ease of use, the implementation of it, the actual transition because we had an existing product prior too and we're moving from our vendor product to ITSM. At the time, we were very concerned about how long it was going to take us to actually do the upgrade and it actually turned out to be not a long and arduous process as we thought it was going to be.

The biggest things that we've noticed has been the actual performance of the tool. In Maximo we had a lag and again, it's more or less because it was a shared tool were as we have a dedicated tool now. When we went to the tool that we're now using, SDM, we noticed that the performance was so much more increased than it was in the past. People were noticing pages would maybe take like 10 seconds to come up. It was almost instantaneous as soon as they'd click submit. That's the biggest hurdle that we had to overcome was just to demonstrate how much more of an increase time to resolve an issue we can give our customers

Room for improvement I would say from a back end perspective, I would say they need to streamline a lot of the code that they're using. I think it's very bloated, I think it has a lot of extra things that it doesn't really need. Things like for example, USS and Liferay. I mean, it's a great implementation and I think it can be used together if it was done appropriately but we haven't really seen much of a benefit in the way the tool works for our needs. For other companies I'm sure they've managed to implement the two and find a way to work with it but we've haven't had that kind of luck. I would say in those terms of getting a lot of the stuff in the backend, from my perspective, is to take a lot of the stuff out, look what they actually need, streamline the product, and then push it out forward.

We've had a few outages and a few bugs we've discovered. We've identified them and we've brought it up to CA's attention. They actually were very quick to get us a resolution towards that. We did have to work with our sales team to make sure we did have the right individuals in place but once we did that, we reached out, we did get a fast resolution.

The scalability of the solution has been very good. We think that it could definitely grow with our organization, it's just a matter of dedicating the resources needed to actually get that accomplished. When we first started developing the tool and putting it out there, we didn't actually scale it appropriately where we needed to. For companies looking forward, the biggest hurdle I think they need to do is actually look at how much they plan to use of the tool initially and also gauge in the future how much they think they're going to grow and not over estimate or at the same time, underestimate the usage of it.

There was a couple actual legitimate issues that we had. We started of with 14-1 and we were one of the first customers to implement that so there was definitely going to be some growing pains and some things the we discovered. Once we brought it up to CA's attention, we've had like a mixed bag at first and I think that's probably because the tool was so new and there was not many people on the service side that were really, really intimately familiar with it as they were with the past tools. We were constantly getting the, "Hey, we know version 12-7 or 12 whatever. I think it should still work like that in this new version." Once we started getting into it and it matured a little bit over a couple of months the support got a lot better.

When we first did our development and implementation we didn't scale appropriately so we were not dedicating enough resources to the tool. All those bugs and issues we've been discovering initially were partly self-inflicted wounds that we had to overcome. Once we then worked with CA and said, "Well, it's not really so much of a bug or a problem, it's because you only got one core dedicated to this and you can't do much with just one core." Once we started getting our ducks in a row and start saying, "Well, how much do we really want to dedicate to the tool and how much do we want to see ourselves in the future." Once we started getting those aligned into our business needs things started to work a lot better.

Rating: I would definitely say it's an eight. I'm not going to be super positive and super negative but it's an 8/10.