DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

Unified Management Portal (UMP) is the most valuable feature, as it did a lot of health monitoring for our environment to prevent some issues from happening. It has many features that are helpful, although I was not able to explore them all.

It has helped us to monitor the health of our network. It monitors the CPU, memory, disk/storage usage, and connectivity which were the vital parts of our environment.

NSD and NMS support need to be improved. Usually, what I encountered was that if we had an issue, the suggestion was always to upgrade to the current version, but sometimes when they upgraded some features would stop working.

I used it for less than a year.

There were some issues.

There were some issues.

There were some issues.

2/5.

Most of the support during my shift was in India, who are only 2/5, but if I got to speak to someone in Australia, Europe or the US, it's 4/5.

I can say it is straightforward if they can provide correct procedures and steps.

Make sure you have good support and what SLA is included.

Make sure you can get good quality support.

• The nimbus architecture
• Scalability
• Modular design
• Product coverage
• Ease of deployment

• Documentation
• Product releases
• Testing
• Transparency regarding bugs and closed support cases
• Honesty from the vendor on what is and what isn’t important from their portfolio of products

I've used it for five years.

It depends on the version.

The probes (basic components that can, amongst other things, monitor particular systems) can be buggy. More often than not new releases are to fix issues rather than add new functionality. The core components are fairly robust for the environments I have worked on. CA support are quick to act when issues arise however and the community has excellent contributors which can provide key insights into problems as well as identifying them before they arise.

I think the product is quite strong in this regard, but maybe not so much the underlying database. If the deployment is going to be extremely large than a clued up DBA is a must.

It's very good, they give us regular product updates. We also have calls with our account manager, and attend biannual conferences.

They are generally very good but occasionally I feel like I’m being purposefully stalled so that their SLAs aren’t breached. However, I can appreciate that all of the basics must be ticked off in case something basic was missed and so that a clear picture of the problem can be built up. There is always the opportunity to escalate to the account manager who returns with a swift and clear response.

No, but I have evaluated other solutions and deemed them unsuitable to switch to. Some solutions do, though, have novel ideas which could be more appealing to organisations with different needs.

This really depends on the environment in question, whether it is a single subnet on a Windows lenient group policy, security policy, short data retention periods, basic reporting to internal staff and a small amount of industry standard hardware/software is fairly easy to set up. Thousands of distributed, diverse servers and devices in a multi-tenant environment that needs years of data to be at the fingers tips of people with different access privileges across the world would not be so easy.

The sizing of the environment is very important, and the deployment needs to be carried out by someone with a bit of experience.

We implemented it in-house.

• ScienceLogic
• SolarWinds
• System Center
• Nagios

Get an expert to guide you through it. Don’t expect miracles, you get out what you put in, no solution is the holy grail. You should become a developer to really see the benefits of the product and get involved with the community to share your thoughts and ideas, CA listens to their customers feedback.

• Scalability
• High availability
• Distributed architecture
• Supported platforms

It has simplified our architecture when compared to our previous solution. We now have less servers, and just one solution to monitor all environments (LAN, DMZ).

Administration interface, in particular the infrastructure manager. The event console could also use a make-over.

I've been using it for two years, including Nimsoft v7.

There are no issues if you are well prepared.

No issues were encountered.

No issues were encountered.

It's very good.

It's very good.

We previously used CA Unicenter NSM, but we switched to UIM because NSM was an end of life product and CA no longer supported some common platforms (like RH64bit agents).

It's relatively straightforward, as we spent lots of time on the assessment and architecture analysis.

We implemented it in-house.

• SCOM
• Spectrum
• Tivoli

If you have a highly heterogeneous environment, CA UIM has the best chance of supporting all of your platforms (including probes for more exotic ones). The ease of scaling out your initial setup, the distributed architecture (Nimsoft has its roots in the service provider world) as well as the high availability are all differentiators.

Almost all the features are interesting, but the most valuable ones are:

• Infrastructure monitoring (agent/agentless) covering networks, servers, databases, applications, virtual platforms, and a cloud environment
• Alarm management capabilities
• Hub queues configuration (SSL, post alarms and metrics, etc.)
• Powerful UMP portal (especially for dashboards and reporting)
• Extensible architecture

It has provided insight on almost all our information system components/layers using a single unified solution.

Product stability and performance, especially in Linux environments needs to be improved.

I've used it for six months, mainly through testing it in a big bank context with a clustered architect.

No issues encountered.

There were some issues in displaying metrics in a large environment.

No issues encountered.

Excellent.

We already used v7, but we upgraded to the latest version because of the new enhancement described in the product release notes.

It's a complex setup based on clustering and failover. We defined a primary and secondary NMS and hubs.

The implementation has been done through a third-party team including product experts (neither the vendor or an in-house team).

We did evaluate other products,

In our organisation we use this product mainly for server monitoring. OS, Database, URL, schedules, hub configuration and the dashboard and performance reports.

Management of servers, network and different types of probes and customisation of probes.

This is one of the main products for monitoring in our organisation,.e.g. our network monitoring sometimes doesn't capture interface traffic, during that time we use Nimsoft's interface traffic probe to check the interface utilization.

When ever there is an IP address change to the server and even changing the IP inside the robot.*.cfg file it won't update on IM automatically, and we have manually validated the probes. This should be improved.

I've used it for the past few years.

During deployment, not many issues.

The robots are a bit unstable sometimes, we often encounter robot inactive alerts even though the service is running. We have to restart to fix this issue.

Scalability in terms of how vast you can monitor, Nimsoft is a very useful product.

Customer service is quite okay, however whenever we face issue with probes, they only suggest to upgrade the probe to latest version and check if the issue reoccurs, and if it reoccurs then they troubleshoot, this should be improved.

Technical support provided by CA is quite good an they have a very useful knowledge base. Most of the solutions we find are on the website.

Nimsoft setup is quite straight forward, however, later stage usage and customisation depends on the requirements. A few probes are a bit complex, but the basic monitoring probes are easy to configure.

As mentioned, the initial setup was done by vendor and their level of expertise is good.

This product is very useful compared to other products i worked on like MS-SCOM, CA NSM, an IBM Tivoli.

As i have worked on this product for quite some time I personally think this product is the best in terms of overall infrastructure monitoring.

Extensibility - ability to centrally manage large enterprises.

Consolidated multiple enterprise monitoring tools into a single toolset (Nimsoft). Reduced staff required to support the enterprise.

Reporting.

Approximately five years.

Minimal, if any.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10.

6/10.

We previously used Solarwinds Orion (NPM), and IBM Netcool. The main issues with them were scalability, features, and cost.

It was complex due to the size and requirements of our company. Most deployments are typically not as complex.

Primarily our in-house team.

• BMC Patrol
• IBM Netcool
• HP Operations

Ensure that you have a competent and experienced person doing the initial architecture.

• Monitoring the level of services
• Trend charts
• Management dashboards

This product has helped all my clients have a managed view of the data center and be proactive in preventing the most common problems.

Integration with other tools.

I've used UIM for five years.

No. There was not too much trouble during deployment. The solution is segregated into three layers: application, web portal, and database.

The stability is totally proportional to the defined architecture.

No issues but the architecture must be well designed.

Customer service is very good.

Technical support is fine.

No previous solution. CA Nimsoft meets all of mine and my customers needs.

It's a simple set-up however it depends on architectural planning for good performance.

I implement it for customers as an expert consultant.

The ROI is very quick. The information is extremely valuable for businesses.

I did not see the need to evaluate other solutions. To date I do not know of any product that has the intelligence and functionality when compared to Nimsoft.

Search for an expert to get the deployment right.

The scalability of the product and heterogeneous OS coverage is really what sets this product apart from others. Other features like synthetic (e2e) transaction monitoring, OOTB application support as well as the UMP (Unified Monitoring Portal) are the icing on the cake.

CA UIM is really built for the MSP and multi-tenant environments, although companies of all sizes are able to benefit from it. My company is a managed service provider and there are really no other products that allow us to manage multiple customer environments like UIM.

I’ve heard that there is now a free tool (CA UIM Snap) for up to 30 devices, but I haven’t used it yet.

There really is no perfect monitoring tool, CA UIM is really the best of breed if you need monitoring for all Operating Systems and a large list of diverse applications. Some areas of improvement would include enhanced management for the UMP where the MSP is concerned. Additional configuration auditing and reporting.

Six years.

I’ve been working with the product for a long time and have a lot of experience with deployment, so I didn’t have any issues. I do recommend that Professional Services be engaged in all but the smallest deployments. I’ve heard of many environments not being designed for scalability and deployed by the customer that had to be completely rebuilt due to a lack of knowledge on the product. Aspire Technical Professionals has a solid track record of successful large CA UIM deployments.

In a large environment using tunnels, occasionally there were stability issues. I found most them were self-inflicted though early on due to my inexperience with the product.

There were no issues with scalability after re-designing. After years of experience and PS we found the tiered design works best for scalability.

Customer service is helpful and knowledgeable.

8 out of 10

We tried several Open Source tools like Nagios and Zenoss, but as the environment grew we found that those tools wouldn’t scale the way we wanted. There was also a lack of Synthetic Transaction monitoring tools that would require large internal development effort. We chose Nimsoft because it covered Windows and Linux and most of the applications we wanted to monitor out of the box. Another large factor for us was the ability to customize the product, since we were used to using Open Source tools.

Initial setup was difficult because we didn’t know what we were doing and had to re-design and re-deploy. I would definitely recommend professional services for all but the smallest environments, as it would’ve paid for itself in man hours.

Initially, we deployed internally which was a mistake. We were directed to Aspire Technical Professionals and they were able to help re-design our implementation to be scalable and highly available.

I’m not sure the total ROI at this point, but as a service provider we generate revenue with the product so I’m sure it has paid for itself time after time.

I don’t handle the contract negotiation, but expect this isn’t Open Source so expect to pay for an Enterprise Monitoring solution. I’m a firm believer of “you get what you pay for” with almost everything. I’m a fan of Open Source tools for specific solutions, but a large multi-tenant environment needs an Enterprise solution.

Yes. SolarWinds, Tivoli, ManageEngine, and Accelops.

Reporting and the ability to customize threshold.

The dashboards and reporting features help users have a close eye on the servers; the ability to notify users that something might go wrong if you do not pay attention to this alert helps us to avoid incidents.

Dashboards

2+ Years.

The deployment is very user friendly over updates.

Yes, we did encounter on some stability issues earlier.

4 on a scale of 5

4 on a scale of 5

No, we did not use another solution.

The initial set up is pretty straightforward here.

We implemented ourselves (My team member and I were the ones who implemented).

If you are looking for something on a mid range budge with effective solutions, CA Nimsoft is something that you just consider first.

Probes and customization.

With some scripting we are able to integrate much better with our ticketing system.

Communication between hubs collector needs major improvments

10 years

No deployment issues.

Hub tunnels

No scalability issues.

OK

OK

Straightforward

Self.