Clarity SM Reviews

The completeness of information on each ticket is one of the most valuable feature of this solution. We are able to gather information either directly from the product interface or from data extraction. Any reports that our analyst users request are available in some fashion.

It is often the center point of reference on discussions of either outages in other applications or planned modifications in hardware or software.

There is nothing major in this product that needs improvement; maybe more documentation is needed for database relationships.

Although, the documentation in the Administration references, is very detailed and complete with respect to the internal/external table names, field definitions and relationships, it is difficult to determine database table inter-relationships, without examining and tracing paths. A person needs to start with a major table, and follow each reference field to the next table.

It would be beneficial, if there were diagrams with basic table interconnections within the major areas, such as Contacts, tables relating to Change Orders and the same for Incidents/Problems. This way, it would be much easier for the support specialists, who are just learning the system, to know where to find ancillary information related to the main tables.

I have used this solution for five years; probably even longer on the previous version, before my time.

I have hardly ever encountered any stability issues. There are very few instances of unplanned outages – at the most 1-2 per year.

We have not had the need for scaling it. This product was configured in a way that we could use it for many years.

CA technical support is outstanding. They are very responsive and always have an answer.

Previously, we used an older version of the CA product that was no longer officially supported.

Since we were not upgrading but installing a new instance, the setup was very complex. We had to define all the configuration items and establish user update routines specific to our installation. However, there were CA support individuals on-site who were very instrumental in a successful installation.

Personally, we did not evaluate any other solutions. We were upgrading an existing product.

You need to plan ahead and talk with the CA installation support in order to define as many of the user areas as possible, prior to beginning the setup. This can help you have an easier method in setting up areas such as ticket categories and workflow steps. Otherwise, there could be a delay in installation while these are defined.

One of the features of this product is to elevate the customer experience. Due to the constant needs of the experienced customers, we always have to make changes with the way we are working so as to achieve satisfaction for our clients; this application has many ways to do that.

We have certainly increased our quality level.

First of all, the system is more robust. In this way, we can elaborate on more complex services. At one time, we had a lot of processes.

Secondly, the application has the possibility to integrate with other systems and transforms more solid information.

Lastly, owing to the integration with BI, we now have various possibilities to create reports in which we can see where and when we need to modify our processes. Therefore, there was a decrease in the number of open and duplicate tickets.

One area of this product that needs improvement is the user mobile experience. We need to get more solutions on the mobile devices of our clients so that they have the same mobile experience as they have on the computer.

I have been using it for about four years.

Particularly, I didn't have any issues with stability.

None of my clients have reported any scalability issues, neither have I experienced any issues.

CA technical support is one of the best that I've seen.

I have used a different solution before but it wasn’t what my clients really needed; thus I moved over to this product.

The setup was straightforward, i.e., once you have almost everything planned, it is quite straightforward.

It is a bit expensive, but you definitely get what you pay for. The product is worth it.

We had evaluated and looked at the second product in the market.

Plan every step that you need to implement and always look ahead to what your client would need in order to get there.

The process automation component is incredibly valuable. It cuts down on the workload of teams, organizational and clerical work, and allows employees to be more efficient.

I would like to see not having such strict compatibility requirements when working with other applications. This is just limited to certain parts of the application, though, such as email and how it interacts with certain servers.

This solution doesn’t always work in the real world with company and security requirements.

To clarify further, there are some parts of the application that have some inflexible settings, i.e., for the Maileater feature, you can only specify certain ports, encryptions and 1 certificate. This doesn’t always play nice with the email servers. For example, what happens if the settings that CA SDM send, are not the recommended settings that the email server is expecting? Maileater is the biggest issue we’ve had recently, and I’d provide another example, if I could. It is an issue to keep Java up to the latest security level, as it makes working with CA SDM also a little slow, but that seems to be a universal issue with many applications.

The company has had the product for a while. I have only been using it for a year.

They have two setup options. I can only comment about the advanced availability setting, which is stable.

There have been no issues with scalability.

The support staff is amazing and if they weren’t, I would have given this solution a lower rating.

I was only involved in performing a reinstall on our development environment. The setup was easy. The documentation could have been better for a couple steps, but support was able to help.

The product works very well when using all the recommended apps with it. I suggest using the recommended or preferred hardware and OS for the product so your life will be a lot easier.

The most valuable feature is the usability of the search when you want to find other tickets that relate to the incident you're working on.

We have all of our different ticket types in one area. There are incidents, requests, and change requests all tied into one application, so you don't need to go to different tools. It makes it easier to find all the data in one spot.

I don't know. There's really nothing that I can think of. Everything always can be improved.

It's really stable. We haven't had much downtime, so it's been a very solid product.

I haven't used technical support personally. My boss uses CA technical support. He handles all the issues.

Our old solution was not meeting our needs. It was very hard to use. It was causing a lot of people issues, so we needed to find something new.

I wasn’t involved in the initial setup, but I heard that it was pretty straightforward. They didn't really have very many issues. The CA people were able to help out with any problems we had.

I don’t think we looked at other vendors before choosing CA.

Have resources available and people who are dedicated to the product.

When we select a vendor, we look for a company that's a leader in their industry, or somebody who has the backing to support the product that they sell.

It allows us to integrate all our processes into one. It allowed us to retire several disjointed custom-built solutions. It helps us to fulfill requests and change orders.

Our key requests are being implemented in the next release. There is a knowledge management portion. It is very cumbersome to create a knowledge management document. That’s one area that could be improved.

The Knowledge Management module in Service Desk Manager is cumbersome and hard to use. It’s not so bad for browsing and viewing knowledge documents, but to create content is extremely time consuming.

The main problem we have is, you can’t simply paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, they first have to be uploaded and then, attached to the document. We would love to have the ability to copy/paste screenshots into the knowledge editor, similar to how you can add images to an email.

The only time we ever have stability problems is when our environment is not stable, so it's a perfectly stable product.

It is very scalable.

They typically get back to you quickly regarding the less complicated requests. For more complicated ones, they obviously take longer; but they're always excellent.

I only got involved a few months after it was implemented.

Try not to bite off more than you can chew. Try not to piecemeal.

We emphasize a partnership with the vendor and their ability to understand our business. The more they understand about our business and our goals, the better aligned we are. It is not always just about the technology or whatever the functionality is.

We have integrated Service Desk Manager fully from servicing the customer, right down to the network configuration. It's fully integrated. That provides many customer benefits, and enhances our customer experience as well.

Service Desk Manager keeps our customers updated regularly regarding any network outage and aware when we will respond to his request and when it will be repaired. Our customers receive better service and we also have a better experience serving them. The CA tool is actually helping us and we can see drastic improvement from it.

The view we now have of our customer base, and how they link to the network is more of a bottom-up approach. I would like to see it from a top-down approach. We want more visibility into how the network layers are linked. That's the next stage that we are working toward.

I also want to see how we can bring DevOps automation and lifecycle development into the equation, and evaluate how that helps us to mature much faster.

We have been at this more than a year. It's quite performance stable. We're doing more enhancements to our setup. The initial implementation covered 70% of our network. So now, at full capacity, we're adding additional features and have implemented more enhancements. There is deeper integration with our business systems and operating systems that give a fully integrated view regarding how CA Service Desk fits into the bigger service offering.

Currently, we are busy migrating customers to use to Service Desk. We are going to scale up to about 4 to 5 million subscribers. This will allow us to further extend our look at network integration as well. It's going to extend far.

We've got onsite technical support from CA. My impression is that they have improved drastically since we started.

We had a request to scan the market. CA was the best product at that time. They needed to make sure that our service catalog was communicated regularly within our business, so that everybody is briefed on what is new and how CA has evolved.

We needed a product that would integrate with our architecture. This is important, because we were looking for a specific piece, and it fit the puzzle nicely. There were certain features we were also looking for; a set of business requirements that we had to fulfill. That was basically our criteria.

I was involved in the initial setup. The first one was quite complex because we had to integrate into legacy systems. We had to integrate into new solutions with other suppliers and integrate into the integration bus, so it was quite complex.

There were other suppliers that we also looked at and compared. We looked at the Asian companies.

What helped us is that at the beginning is that we had a lot of offshore support. The best is to get CA onshore support. Then they understand the culture of the company. It's not only from a documentation point-of-view. They understand how to interact with different people. I recommend this even if you are based abroad. A local presence for us meant a lot.

Creating tickets is a frequent part of our job. The scoreboard allows me to check for high-priority tickets, check status of tickets I created and search for tickets with keyword searches among other plusses.

We lean on it quite a bit in creating incidences, tracking them historically and following up open tickets created by a number of sources. It also serves as a cross-reference for other tracking tools we use in our daily work.

It’s always bothered me how you need two steps to close a ticket (solution then update status) to do essentially one task. I’d love to see that merged into one easy step. I also have issues with Configuration Items but I think that it's our issue, not a CA issue.

I started using this program when I was hired in August, 2013 and there was a major upgrade roughly a year ago. I can’t quote version numbers to you, however.

We have major problems keeping SDM up and running with issues popping up once or twice a week affecting service. I do not know if it is the software, the server or the lack of a backup to fail over service to. I would think more resources should be devoted to it.

We always contact our technicians first and they contact CA if necessary. Often, the issue is resolved with a 20-minute reboot of the server. From my end user prospective, I’d say 7/10.

Incident Management module: Tracking events or incidents is one of the most challenging work phenomena in the workplace. Convincing your clients to report issues is another different isolated task that, when done right, tremendously improves TAT.

The IT team becomes more effective and efficient because there is workload sharing. Where a Service Desk administrator would have had to log a call, Users can now do it themselves to get a service.

Automated email logging: The tradition in the workplace for communication will always be email. If emails can be used to automatically trigger calls, that is the best thing that can ever happen in the incident management or service desk process. This would save a lot of time, plainly speaking.

There should be a way for emails sent to a particular address to trigger an alert to create an incident or request, similar to SIEM automation mechanisms. If this is already available, my apologies, but I currently don’t have it.

I have used it for over three years.

The product is quite stable and highly scalable. No issues yet.

Technical support is 7/10.

I’ve used SCSM (System Center Service Manager), quite a good product from Microsoft. The difference is in scalability; there was a need to use a web application compared to an in-house product solution.

I wasn’t directly involved in the initial setup of the product.

Solution was implemented through a vendor. It is a good product to implement; quite feasible.

It really has a good cost-benefit analysis for any business with a large employee base.

It is a good solution for service desks.