DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

The most valuable feature is the very large probe number, over 180, for different technologies, that all comunicate their metrics through one product.

When you are implementing it, I think the most valuable tool is the Infrastructure Manager (a Windows client for probes management and configuration). Of course, there is also a web-based tool, but you cannot do it all from the web interface.

When you are using the product, I think the most valuable feature is UMP, with its dashboards, and alarm view. You can see the alarm state of your system, and pinpoint the most critical elements and metics in dashboards. This allows you to rapidly view and acces the alarm console for that specific element. It is fast and easy to use.

Not for my organization, but for our customers, they managed to monitor their infrastructure in a unified manner, more easily, and at different levels (management, operational etc.).

Although the products is easy to deploy, the implementation effort is still inconsistent. This is because you have a lot of different technologies and vendors.

I started with this product a year ago, and am still working with it.

None, but of course you need basic knowledge about the infrastructure elemets that you want to monitor, and for which ones you want to deploy probes.

CA UIM is a mature and stable product.

No issues encountered.

10/10

9/10

I have used and implemented the old product, CA Infrastructure Management, but CA UIM is the new strategic product in this line.

You can try it, or you can try the Snap (CA UIM Snap), unlimited in time, but only for 30 devices and with fewer features, by registering on the vendor site.

If you have a strong IT department, or some special request for monitoring, that is hard to shared with others, you can try to implement it yourself. Otherwise, it is better to have services (from CA or other companies). You just have to remember that it is harder to take on an implementation on the fly and correct what is already done, than have one done from scratch.

• Base set of probes cdm, ntservices, and ntevl processes
• NAS feature which handles all alarm processing
• Hub which handles all the inner message traffic of the product
• UMP which provides ability to visually see what we are monitoring.

It gives a good baseline as to how we go about monitoring our clients, as each one is different but can fall into a specific category of infrastructure monitoring. Our organization knows how to get started with each and every client.

The company has used it for five years, and I've used it for one and a half years.

Certain sites have very secure environments, and you must then setup rules so that the product can still communicate and function in the customized environment.

Certain probes require heavy knowledge on a specific technology before it can start working.

Every product has issues.`

No issues encountered.

I've never had to deal with customer service.

The UIM support team is excellent.

We were using a previous CA solution but it was EOL’d and UIM is the new strategic CA IM product, so we switched.

UIM does have a large initial learning curve for new users, and you must learn the basic architecture. Once understood, the initial setup is then pretty straightforward if you understand the overall big picture.

Initially we attempted to use a vendor, but in the end we did full implementation in house. The vendor was very experienced, but our environment was very tricky and after three attempts we decided to rollout ourselves.

• Ease of deployment
• Number of platforms you are able to monitor
• Collection of both long term reporting data and immediate alert data
• Depth of configuration of the alarm processor

UIM supports AS400, but it is somewhat limited.

I've used it for 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues with the recent versions, and v8.2 is very stable.

Only in database configuration. It needs a lot of planning before the initial install, and our database is over 2TB in size, and was not installed correctly, although this was my fault, and not that of CA.

10/10.

5/10.

We used Nagios in our early years, and we switched because of the power.

It was very simple.

It was done in-house.

I don’t love UIM, but it is the best selection for a multi-tenant infrastructure where SLA’s are a must. The original deployment was very successful, but this is not plug & play. At least one full time administrator is needed. With acquired experience, the product can do almost everything a monitoring product should do, but it is not all “out of the box”

Their concept of probes, where you have a lot of predefined items that you collect. Also, their baseline thresholds that speed up a lot the implementation, and the evolution of the monitoring system.

For example, once you have applied the SQL Server Probe, it collects all sorts of data -- from the log size to the time that each query is taken to execute on the database -- with the same click.

In terms of features, it is easy to use and implement, and CA provide solid support.

In the past we would spend months in meetings with a new customer, defining what they wanted to monitor, and most of the time we would come back home to see if that was possible to do. However, with CA UIM, we can provide our clients with a predefined menu of items to collect, and we can select those faster and more efficiently.

We have been able to automate the Active Directory user provisioning integrated with the HR systems. This means that was can provide users with a self-service password reset tool. Also, it has given us Log Management for our daily routines.

They need to improve in their mobile interface to enable access to the dashboards through that channel. Their application requires a lot of servers to run, so that architecture is also something that requires attention.

A module for keyboard and mouse actions would be very interesting, for actions that cannot be performed differently. Also, it would be interesting for them to enable SAP integration in the future.

We have been using UIM/Nimsoft for about two years now.

It requires a very skilled team to be able to deploy that application, and if you don’t invest in training and don’t go over a long training period, you might find it difficult to deploy.

The application requires a lot of capacity to run and grow, so it’s important that you be aware of the impact of the growth of your IT infrastructure on the monitoring system.

Capacity management must be done on a regular basis if your IT environment grows too quickly.

6/10.

7/10.

We used to use a Nagios-based solution that was cheaper, but the problem was that we didn’t have the proper support, especially for application management such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix, Amazon, etc. With CA UIM we were able to start monitoring those applications out of the box.

The initial setup was complex due to the training hours, as the technical team had to go through it to be able to use the application to its full potential.

We did it in-house.

I think that’s always something harder to measure, but I would say that we were able to gain some clients due to this change to CA UIM.

Since we provide services using the CA UIM platform, I would say that for a partner they have a very strong pricing approach.

We evaluated SolarWinds and Nagios.

First of all design do a analysis of what kind of process you can automate in your company, that way will be easier for you to capture value from a solution like this. It's important to pay attention to the infrastructure requirements.

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,