Clarity SM Reviews

• The remote connection part (Support Automation): CA Service Desk has a Support Automation feature which primarily does remote connection. This is an important customer support tool used in connecting to a user’s/customer’s device or machine to help them resolve whatever problems they have. The remote connection also has a chat functionality that you can also use.
• Robust knowledge search via its knowledge base: For knowledge search, CA Service Desk has a robust knowledge base tool where documentation, articles and notes around known incidents and problems are documented for users/administrators or analysts to use. They basically act as a self-service tool where users can go to, search for documents and resolve problems themselves instead of having to always call the IT people. This way the IT people have time to do other productive tasks.
• The simplicity of the tool

All business processes have been built around the service. SLAs are measured promptly and tickets are owned/resolved faster, thereby improving user/customer satisfaction.

The Reporting part (Reports Tab) needs to be more robust and made less complex. CA Service Desk makes use of a BusinessObjects XI tool for reports, which is owned by SAP. This is actually a third-party tool and a bit complex in terms of reliability on the network, mostly. If these reports were in-built, without having to integrate or connect to any third-party tool, then this would be better.

I have been using the product for seven years.

I encountered stability issues in rare cases but stability was good.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Good

Support from CA Technical Support has been brilliant, as far as your SLA is renewed promptly.

It was the same CA solution. The customer started with CA Service Desk 11.2 and they have upgraded to 12.6, 12.9 and 14.1.

I am part of a team that does pre-sales, support, deployments/implementations of CA solutions.

Pricing and licensing is usually a problem. CA solutions are very expensive; hence, only big organizations can afford them.

The customer looked at ManageEngine, HPE Service Manager and others.

CA Service Desk is built around the ITIL methodology and would help to improve all organizational processes starting from incidents/problems/request, knowledge management, CMDB, etc.

1. Ease of customization

2. Modules of integrated ITIL managers

3. Integrated remote access to tickets

The product update process has been improved, and I like that they have included advanced high availability. Also, the process of adding new customers using multi-tenant is relatively simple.

They need to improve the High Availability, and the native integration between CA Service Desk Manager, CA Process Automation, CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self-Service.

We have been using it for nine years, and currently have two customers with older versions of SDM. The products have been installed on site without multi-tenant.

The implementation of solutions using secure protocol is always complicated. It is not simple to set up, as it requires changes to specific files. It could be simpler.

There were no issues with stability.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

High. Collaborates with gains in maturity.

It's excellent. All there agents are willing to help, even involving other teams in more complex cases.

No.

It's simple, as we used the manufacturer's documentation (Green Book).

My advice is to define the scope of use and only then plan how best architecture. The secure protocol issues, high availability, and the use or not of a homologation environment generate operating and financial costs.

The ROI was satisfactory, but I would advise you to review the scope, as several solutions for simple things can have a high cost, for example, why use CA Infrastructure Management (Spectrum, eHealth, NetQoS) when Nagios could serve your customer demands well.

Plan a Homologation Environment and possible uses for other areas of the organization other than IT. These points are extremely important and can impact the management and maintenance of the product.

We also evaluated ServiceNow to reduce infrastructure costs, but some CA Service Desk Manager features do not exist in ServiceNow, even though it is a more expensive solution.

My advice is to get to know the product very well in relation to ITIL processes. A lot of customization only exists because we do not know the product at that level. The manufacturer's documentation "Content Pack for ITIL" is required reading even if the company is not a service provider.

I am enthusiastic about ITSM solutions. In addition to CA products, I know of LANDesk Service Desk, OTRS, Octopus, Zendesk, Microsoft System Center Service Manager, Axios Assyst and BMC Remedy. All of these solutions are excellent and have lots of documentation with the best implementation practices, both the system and the ITIL processes. I always recommend studying these documents before any customization.

Ease of integration with CA Service Desk Manager Account setup

New usage approach for end users

Access to services

I have used it for two years.

Low customer maturity in ITIL processes

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex, but normal. We use test and homologation environments.

A provider team implemented it, the CA Technologies team itself. They were expert in the subject.

The best ROI possible

Make the investment; return guaranteed.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

Make an extra investment in communication. Inform end users clearly and objectively of changes in how to request services. Demonstrate the benefits of the solution.

It brings a maturity of collaboration and support, facilitating the work of analysts, and benefits end users in service.

It provided greater agility in service and a more agile management vision.

We would like to see improvements mainly without the Service Desk. This was where we saw the greatest gain in unpaid performance and collaboration.

We have been using this solution for ten years.

There were no issues with deployment, because the wizard of this version has been greatly improved.

So far, there were no identified stability problems.

So far, there were no identified scalability problems.

Customer service is excellent, because it leaves a reality of collaboration more evident.

Technical support is excellent, because it provides and demonstrates collaboration, which speeds up the service.

We did not use a different solution previously. We just upgraded.

The initial setup was direct and easy with the settings that occurred in the wizard. We used to make it version 14.1.

We implement the solution with the support of the manufacturer. They had a maximum skill level.

As a financial institution, we cannot provide such information.

ROI is closely linked to its current maturity. Aim to know exactly where you are, where you are going, and map the necessary actions and adjustments before deployment.

We did not evaluate other solutions. We were already satisfied with the benefits of the previous version of this product.

The training of analysts and a campaign to demonstrate end user benefits and functionality is very important.

The following modules are the most valuable:

• Incident
• Request
• Knowledge
• Change Order

Quick capture of ticket info lends itself to easy resolution and/or assignment to other groups.

Reporting and integration to SCCM need improvement.

Service Desk Manager doesn’t integrate to SCCM out of the box. If you’re looking to use SCCM as your source of truth for servers or desktops and to populate a federated CMDB (using Service Desk manager), you’re looking at building a connector manually or buying another tool to do that. In our organization, we’re customizing code to do this in batch mode. Not ideal, but what we have to do. CA had recommended integrating with other tools of theirs that we have but the technology teams are centralized on SCCM. So that’s that one.

Reporting, we’ve had to buy Ivanti Xtraction to do all our dashboard and reporting. Boxi reports really fall short and we don’t use any reports out of the box. Be that as it may, we’re heavily metrics focused, so we’ve had to take that on separately to work with outside tools. Not ideal, but reality.

I have used this solution for thirteen years.

Service Desk Manager doesn’t integrate to SCCM out of the box. If you’re looking to use SCCM as your source of truth for servers or desktops and to populate a federated CMDB (using Service Desk manager), you’re looking at building a connector manually or buying another tool to do that. In our organization, we’re customizing code to do this in batch mode. Not ideal, but what we have to do. CA had recommended integrating with other tools of theirs that we have but the technology teams are centralized on SCCM. So that’s that one.

Reporting, we’ve had to buy Ivanti Xtraction to do all our dashboard and reporting. Boxi reports really fall short and we don’t use any reports out of the box. Be that as it may, we’re heavily metrics focused, so we’ve had to take that on separately to work with outside tools. Not ideal, but reality.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is moderate.

Remedy was the previous solution at my current organization. It was not easy to support or migrate to new versions and was cost prohibitive.

Minimal training is required to get everyone up to speed and using the system.

Negotiate with the vendor.

We evaluated ServiceNow. It costs a fortune and required too much management.

Develop a process first, then apply the tool and minimize customizations.

From our perspective, and taking into account that we have a lot of CA products for IT service delivery, the most valuable feature is interconnectivity with other products such as CA Clarity, CA IT Asset Manager, CA Spectrum, CA UIM, CA APM, etc.

• All incidents, requirements, changes and problems are documented in one database.
• It is easy to follow, control and generate reports.
• There is a synergy with other products for incident management, monitoring (infrastructure and applications), asset inventory, etc.

Taking into account the new version 17.0 that CA Technologies has released, issues in terms of the flexibility, ease-of-use, service catalogue improvements, etc. were resolved.

I have used CA Service Desk Manager for three and a half years. Previously, we used the IBM Tivoli Service Desk suite for five years.

No major issues that affect the stability were faced. In the beginning, the issues used to be in the first stages.

We had no scalability issues.

The support provided is very good to excellent.

We were using the IBM Tivoli Service Desk suite solution for many years.

The setup was of the intermediate level in complexity, but there is no need to worry about that.

We experienced no major delays in terms of the migration, configuration and setup tasks.

Taking into account of the strong relation that we have with CA Technologies, and so many others products that we have implemented, price was not an issue.

We looked at IBM and BMC solutions.

It is important to have all the procedures well-documented, have a sponsor for this project and have good relations with CA and a partner. They will help you to define and implement this solution.

SDM provides out-of-the-box integration with other CA Service Management modules. For example, it integrated with CA CMDB, CA Business Intelligence (for reporting and dashboard), CA Service Catalog and CA Unified Self Service.

• We are better able to manage and keep track of SLAs with end users.
• Analysts work more efficiently based on the ticket priority.
• We can better manage IT assets and contract license through CMDB.
• Reporting and dashboard: it is easy to produce a report with drag and drop functions.

Customization and configuration of CA Unified Self-Service needs improvement. CA needs to provide similar tools like Web Screen Painter (a customization tool for Service Desk) for CA Unified Self Service.

I have used this for 10 years; since CA Service Desk r11.

We have not had stability issues.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’ll give technical support an 8.

We didn’t have anything before this.

Initial setup is straightforward.

They offer a concurrent analyst license that covers all the CA Service Desk modules: Incident, Request, Change, Service Level Management, CMDB, and Reporting.

There is NO license for the end user. In my opinion, it is a good licensing structure because some of other service desk products in the market sell separate licenses for each module.

We did’t look at alternatives.

• The product aligns to the ITIL process.
• All modules are integrated: Incident, Request, Problem, Change Order, and CMDB.
• The Service Catalog makes it easy for the end user to log a ticket.
• It is role based: easily manage the analyst based on their role; e.g., level 1 analyst, level 2 analyst.
• Unified administrator task.

We use everything in service desk and each one of them are adding benefit to the company and users. We really benefit from all of the features but if I have to single some features out, it will be:

Major incident tracking: We are able to differentiate between a normal and a major incident and do comprehensive reporting on this to key stakeholders.

SLA management: Each category has it’s own unique SLA linked and this gives us the ability to manage the expectations of end users more effectively.

Provides quicker resolution of all tickets with SLA management; reporting is quick and easy; tickets can be tracked and escalations can be handled by the correct teams.

The old employee interface available in CA had certain features and functions that were not brought over to Unified Self Service. One of the features that we use extensively in our environment is the properties or also known as additional information. This gives us the ability to ask the end user certain questions upfront to assist the back office teams to resolve the ticket faster and more effectively.

We had to do some in-house development to get this functionality working and I am glad to say that we have successfully been able to get this implemented. USS is a huge improvement in terms of the look and feel from an end user point of view but letting out a key functionality like the properties resulted in a longer implementation period.

We have been using CA Service Desk since about 2006 when it was still called CA Unicentre.

When we were still on an Oracle database, we had some stability issues but we have been running on SQL without any major stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Support is a problem area for us. They take too long to respond to tickets logged.

We didn't have anything before this.

I can’t comment on the initial setup.

We don’t have any issues with regards to the licensing module or pricing.

I can’t comment.

Ensure you do an out-of-the-box implementation. We have learned from upgrades that customizations cause a lot of issues during upgrades.