Clarity SM Reviews

Change Management, Incident Management, and CMDB are the most valuable features.

• Automated our manual business processes

IT PAM Workflow could be improved.

I have used it for 10 years. We use CA Service Desk 12.9 and IT PAM 4.3.

There were some stability issues.

We did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was fair.

I am not interested in sharing this information.

Pricing is good compared to other similar applications.

The core SDM component (the ticketing system) is the most valuable to me. It is reliable and covers the basic ITSM process stack very well (I,R,P,C). I am an IT consultant specializing in ITSM tools. The CA system has proven to be reliable and trustworthy. It can be scaled to meet the ITSM needs of the largest global enterprises. The change module is particularly robust. It provides controls, visualization, and auditability.

The system becomes a centralized place for ITSM data and process automation for the enterprise. For example, a monitoring system generates an alert on a production server (the SDM system will integrate with any monitoring tool on the planet). The alert can generate a ticket in SDM. The server is listed as a CI in SDM, so the resolvers know where the trouble is. The Change Impact Analyzer will highlight how that server interacts with and impacts other systems in the environment) so you can see if this will cause a downstream problem. The Asset Portfolio Manager component of the system will have the purchase, warranty and service agreements for that specific server. The knowledge base can have articles describing how to deal with that particular alert, or possible specific steps that should be taken on the system in question. If this has happened often with this server lately, a problem ticket can be opened. The incidents related to that CI can be attached to the problem record, so the problem manager can get a full view of what has been going on, etc. And on down the merry ITIL path.

I’ve implemented, configured and managed this system for hundreds of clients. I trust it. CA is not perfect, but this system is one of their most reliable products.

The suite has grown too large, and has been pulled together from a series of acquisitions. For example, the Service Catalog, the process automation engine (IT PAM), and the Asset Portfolio Manager are all separate systems attached through integration. The good news is CA does not charge a la carte, so you get all of this stuff included in the concurrent user license. The bad news is this can be a delicate web of integration, which can be finicky.

The CA Service Management Suite is comprised of several components. All of them were acquired individually by CA over the past 20 years and integrated into the original system. The core of the suite is CA Service Desk Manager (“SDM”), which is a ticketing system that is excellent and scalable for Request Management, Incident Management, Change Management and Problem Management. This is the bread-and-butter of the CA Service Management suite. It is heavily used around the world and very reliable. A+ ☺

CA typically does a great job of incorporating acquisitions into their existing products over time. For example, the Knowledge base and CMDB used to be separate products, connected to the core Service Desk through an integration. However, today they have been fully incorporated into core SDM. Logging into SDM, you would never know that the KB and CMDB were once completely separate products. This adds KB and CMDB to the list of excellent, scalable and reliable functions of the CA Service Management Suite. A+ ☺

However, the industry is driving us all rapidly forward.

The Service Catalog, IT Process Automation Manager, Unified Self Service, Xflow and CA Business Intelligence are all separate applications connected to SDM via integration. Even though you are purchasing this as one suite under a per-concurrent user model, it is actually a bunch of applications integrated together. C-.

This adds complexity to the system and creates an urban sprawl of servers. This sprawl, in turn, creates challenges with patching, upgrades and daily operations. You’ve got to be smart about virtualizing it, SSO, etc. C-.

Consequently, my point is that CA has room for improvement here.

I hope this helps. I am a big fan of CA Service Management and highly recommend it. However, like the rest of us in life, we all have room to improve.

I have been using CA Service Management for 20 years (since 1997).

Stability issues are a function of changes in the CA system. If you heavily modify it, and do not pay close attention to the internal integration between components (SDM, SC, APM, IT PAM), there can be issues. The system also prefers some head room on resources. So you need to give it more HDD, CPU and memory than your IT team will think is necessary (not a horrible amount, but this is not something you can run successfully with the minimum resource requirement).

We have not had scalability issues. This system is capable of scaling to the largest enterprises. Conversely, it is overkill for small companies.

Support is good. The CA support team could be larger, but overall the support is responsive and effective.

I have consulted with many systems (Remedy, HEAT, Service Center, Tivoli, ServiceNow, Assyst, etc.). Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

The initial setup can be complex, especially if you want to track and notify on a variety of granular controls. The system is cool, in that it can do this stuff. However, the vendor oversells how easy it is and the training from CA is terrible.

Licensing from CA is straightforward. The system is licensed by concurrent user. The rule of thumb for named users to concurrent users is 3/1. When you buy this system new, the licensing is amazingly simple. No add-ons. Just one license and you get everything. The challenge with CA licensing occurs over the long term. CA routinely changes the suite components every 5 years (or so), forcing existing customers to pay a license upgrade fee for access to the new components.

I have consulted with many systems (Remedy, HEAT, Service Center, Tivoli, ServiceNow, Assyst, etc.). Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

If you are going to DIY this implementation, I recommend thorough planning with your IT team. Be sure you have the right engineers, and that they have at least attended the CA SM Admin course (4- or 5-day class). I mentioned earlier that CA training is not the best; however, this course is a necessity if you are going to self-implement. This is not a weekend project. Take it seriously; plan 8-2 weeks for yourself from the moment you build the VMs to the go-live date.

• Functions related to the ITIL process sets for change management
• Request fulfillment
• Incident management
• Knowledge management database

These elements are the most valuable to the organization because they are the areas that have at least rudimentary corresponding business processes and accountable business owners.

The features that are most valuable to me as an SDM administrator are:

• Extensibility of the interface to allow for schema changes
• Form-level modifications to support the aforementioned business processes

Utilization of change management features allowed us to effectively implement both group- and department-level change advisory boards and coordinate the interaction between the disparate management levels.

All areas of every product have room for improvement.

That being said, this product would benefit by allowing individual users more customization, notably around notifications.

On a per-user basis, the individual user should have the ability to determine what notification types they want to subscribe to and how they want to be notified.

On an individual basis, users should be able to modify their interface to change things like the attributes returned from search results or have the ability to show/hide fields on ticket creation screens to support their own or a team’s workflow.

It would be handy to have an option in the interface to disable large chunks of functionality. For example, we do not utilize the application for problem management.

If there were an option to yank Problems out of menus, screens, this would expedite deployments and limit the need for the creation and maintenance of custom test scripts.

The organization has been utilizing this product line for around 17 years. I’ve been using this product line for 15 years. This specific version of SDM has been in use in our environment for a year.

We periodically run into issues with the stability of the application. It rarely necessitates any action on our part.

We opted to deploy on Microsoft Windows and SQL, and occasionally run into issues based on those decisions. I am not sure if they can be attributed to the application, however.

There have not been any scalability issues.

There are basically two buckets: those that are really competent and those that are lacking.

In my experience, 75% fall into the really competent category, which is much higher than other companies I’ve worked with.

CA, given its size, surprisingly does not have 24/7 US-based technical support. As all of our deployments naturally occur outside of regular US business hours, this means that whenever I’m really having an issue, I’m invariably working with someone in India, France, or elsewhere.

I would like to reiterate that these people are usually very proficient in what they do, but because of language barriers, things do not usually go as smooth as I would prefer.

Our organization has utilized CA ticketing solutions AHD, USD, SDM, and Service Desk since I’ve been here.

The installation was GUI-based, and was pretty standard and straightforward.

I had no input nor purview into pricing or licensing.

The solution was already selected.

Ensure that your organization has robust business processes in place for the feature sets that you would like to implement. Organizations that expect the tool to define the business process can expect a very difficult deployment.

Ticket management and the knowledge base are the most valuable features of this solution.

Our managers are able to properly monitor their team activities with CA Service Desk. With knowledge base, the end users are able to fix simple issues.

It could improve in maintainability and customization of features with a better and simpler GUI.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

We were using an intranet website, initially. It was very rudimentary and we couldn’t customize it without relying on outsourcing. We switched over to CA Service Desk Manager.

Do not over-customize it, given the fact that it could directly impact the tool's stability and data reliability.

Advanced Availability architecture is hands down the key feature. We can make sweeping changes, to the application or database, with a minimal impact on our user base. Most of the time, the users see no downtime at all.

CA SDM has organized the work for our internal groups to run the IT infrastructure in our company. When you add the workflow engine to the mix, the productivity and process adherence both get greatly enhanced.

There are some functions I have seen from its competitors that I would want CA SDM to have. I also find some of the items to be tedious from an admin point of view.

The pdm_publish process, that adds tables and columns to the database, is an unforgiving key stroke of errors.

A “publish” can run to completion, but if a mistake was made, then the system will stay down, until you figure out what mistake was made and correct it.

I would like to see the process just throw away the mistake and continue cleanly. After which time, it could post a report upon completion that you have to redo the offensive work.

Personally, I have been using this product for eight years. However, the company has been using it for about 12 years. We started out with version 11.2.

Currently, we are using version 12.9 and we will be moving to version 14.1, very shortly.

The system is very stable, but there are some instances where instability has been seen. It typically comes from the external influences or from one, turn-off network interruption, causing us to re-establish a database connection.

There were no scalability issues, thus far. We have 28,000 users in the user database within the system, and it seems to chug along fine.

The initial support was wonderful. Over the past three years, I have seen some degradation in the support, both in terms of the response time as well as the resolution time.

CA has been advised of this issue and they have met with us on this subject. So, they have acknowledged the problem and are trying to make adjustments in order to accommodate it.

This is the first tool of its type that is being used in the way that we are using it.

The initial setup was straightforward, but there are many steps involved. I don’t fault the vendor for this. There are many aspects that require attention as the system is very customizable.

Take the implementation class that CA offers. It is key to have certain aspects figured out ahead of time, as they will impact the system heavily, as time goes on.

Provides effective management of service calls and work assignments. It includes good APIs to extend functionality.

In addition to IT, we also use this product on our business side to manage lobby flow for clients and workflow for our client service staff. The product has allowed us to efficiently manage workflow, measure performance, and analyze customer service measures.

The UI is old and passé. It needs to be intuitive, efficient, and allow users to tailor it to their way of working.

I have used CA Service Desk for fifteen years.

The product is very stable.

The product does scale effectively up to a point. Beyond that, it gets a little complicated to extend it.

I would give technical support a rating of 6/10.

We used Remedy and switched to CA Service Desk for cost and ease of implementation.

The basic setup is easy and straightforward. The product is tailored around ITIL. Business processes need to account for that in order to make the most use of the product.

We think CA pricing is straightforward. They do have a tendency to re-bundle (and sometime rebrand) products and you have to be on top of that. If you build a relationship, working through these things is much easier.

This was an easy choice fifteen years ago.

Look into the SaaS offering from CA and compare. While CA Service Desk has rich functionality and is stable, its skin is old and cumbersome.

The flexible envelope provides an infinite number of ways to customize it.

I can easily say that SDM is the core of our organization. We have integrated a lot of related systems, implemented contract management logic, and some HR functions, such as vacation planning routines.

Rebuilding the visual interface in the same style using modern web technologies can extend the usability of the system for up to 10 years.

I’ve personally used CA Service Desk since 2013.

We did have some stability issues, but with some fine-tuning, supported by CA support and the CA community, we resolved them.

We did have some scalability issues, but with fine-tuning, supported by CA support and the CA community, we resolved them.

Our current version is not within the scope of technical support.

The initial setup was performed by our integrator.

The system covers all of our enterprise needs. However, in order to adapt it to your business needs, you will need to have an experienced staff. Familiarize it with your enterprise and with Service Desk's undocumented methods and routines, such as SPEL, WAND, and overall daemon logic.

Customizability. You can easily make your own tables and add fields. Each customer is different and over time, things change. This product is flexible.

It is scalable and we are a big organization.

The upgrading process needs to be improved. They need more testing with more customers before the release. We are dealing with a lot of defects that should have been caught before the product was released.

I have been using this solution for 17 years.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We didn’t have a previous solution.

This product is worth the cost.

I didn’t evaluate any other products. I worked for CA at the time when I first started using this product.

This product is ready to go as is. It can be customized, but you need a dedicated administrator to manage customizations.