DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

We use UIM primarily for monitoring and managing all of our clients. As an MSP we need some kind of tool to be able to go out and do that. CA UIM has fit the bill quite nicely.

It's been pretty good. It does have its hiccups. It takes a fair amount of customization, but overall it's done what we need it to do and, when it doesn't out of the box, we are able to actually go in and tinker it enough to make it suit our needs quite nicely. So it's been doing a pretty good job.

It's the outcome of our being able to perform our job and gather the information we need in order to provide value to our customers. The real value is our being able to pull all the historic data that we need in order to gather every little metric and nuanced piece of information from a given device, a given piece of infrastructure, in order for us to generate alerts. 

If we want to notify our clients, or for us to turn around and maybe run reports to proactively identify an issue with a device, that may not seem evident at first. But when you have all the pieces of the puzzle together, and when you can see these metrics aren't necessarily lining up nicely and they're acting a little bit abnormal, we can put that together for a bigger picture and provide a recommended action.

The convenience of both the web portal as well as the thick client. We are able to go in and actually leverage the thick client for a nice, easy drag and drop solution. It works out really nicely, especially for our front-end team. The team that I am on is actually quite small, so we need to leverage our front-end team to assist with making changes, and actually running the software. Having the GUI, that simple user interface, really helps us to offload that work to that front-end team to help free up our time.

Usually it's reliability issues. Some of the components don't always function as intended, or don't function as you would think they should. 

To give a specific example, within this product there are individual probes, and each of these probes doesn't always necessarily output the same kind of information into our database. So when we try to collect QoS data, from one probe we might get a ton of information, lots of good stuff that we can use in our database, but then from another probe we might not get so much, or we might not be able to pull the things that we want to.

I'd also like to see more probes and more templates. More probes in the sense that we were coming across devices that we're expected to monitor and manage for which, out of the box, there isn't a nice clean solution. There are probes that are dedicated for certain devices and certain device types, which is great. But then there are times we come across nuanced products for which we have to develop our own solution. There are probes that exist in there that allow us to make a customized solution, but it takes a lot more time.

The other element is that there are no real templates, out of the box. Let's go with an example where we do have the probe, which is great, and we do have a really nuanced customer with a small set of devices that maybe not a lot of other customers use. There might not be a template in place, so effectively we have the tool in front of us but we still need to develop a solution. So it would be really nice to see a little bit more of something like a central repository of templates that we could use. That would help us expedite our onboarding process.

Stability is pretty good. As I said, it does have its hiccups at times. We use an on-prem solution, so for the most part it's pretty good. 

Our issue comes in scaling. We're hitting a point with our customer base where we brought on enough clients in using the software that we're starting to hit some interesting connectivity hurdles. As a result of that, some things can take one or two attempts for it to work the way we want it to; maybe probes closing out or a connectivity from our primary infrastructure right down to one of our client sites. It can take two or three approaches, but overall its pretty good. There just are those occasional hiccups. 

They're good. Their response time has been pretty good. They don't necessarily always have the answer I want, but that may be because the answer I want doesn't necessarily exist, so I can't fault them for that. But overall the response is pretty good. As far as the turnaround time, it's fast, the quality of the support answers that we get is usually pretty good.

There have been times where its been a little bit insufficient, in the sense that we might have needed to move it to a different engineer, or they may need to escalate it to go to their development team and get some answers, and the time frame on that can slow down a little bit. But for the most part, it's been pretty good.

I was not involved in the initial setup but we did a major refresher and I was involved with that.

It was pretty easy actually. It's a relatively simple project to set up. It's difficult to master but easy to initially deploy and configure, so I'd say it was pretty easy, off the bat.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• level of support
• reliability of the tool
• functionality of the tool and 
• cost, obviously. 

Know what kind of products you are going to be using UIM to monitor and manage, and ensure that the compatibility is there. Because if there is not out-of-the-box compatibility, it can take a significant amount of time and effort to make things work.

We are using it to monitor all of our infrastructure, network devices, and applications across our datacenters in Europe, Americas, Mexico, and Asia. It has performed pretty well considering there are quite a bit of devices. We have 2400 servers and quite a few network devices. It has been performing pretty well. We like it so far.

One benefit of it is, compared to the last tools that we had been using, we can make sites for all of our departments to look at their own things: the network team, the server team, the Linux guys, and the application guys. That is something we have not had before, and it is helping them get a view into how monitoring happens. It is bringing all the groups together a little more. 

• The ease of administering
• The probes
• The reporting on the interface. 

It has all been pretty easy.

I would like a credential management portion, since a lot of probes require different credentials. Some require the same one, but you have do it across a bunch of different servers and once you have like 2400 servers like us, you do not know where these probes are anymore and you do not know where you put in credentials. If they had some credential management interface, that would be the best.

The stability is generally pretty good. There is the occasional Q backups just because of how the hubs communicate. Like different hub versions tend to break that and some are better with it. It is hit or miss. For the most part, it is usually pretty good. 

Scalability is very good. You can scale it pretty much however way you want to as long as you have the servers to throw at it. 

They are helpful once you get to the senior engineers, usually. The first level has not been the most helpful, but maybe a lot of our issues just require higher engineers. I am not sure. 

We were using about four or five different solutions and everybody had to have all these different tools up at the same time. We were looking for one where we could just have one solution. 

Since we did not have any exposure to it previously, it was kind of complex. However, looking back at it now, it was pretty straightforward. 

We looked SolarWinds (they have an infrastructure monitoring solution), Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, BMC, and quite a few more.

We eventually chose UIM, because it was easier, looked better, and you could write reports really quickly. The overall package was better than we thought. 

I would recommend this solution to another company, as I am happy with it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reputation and 24/7 support.

The primary use of our UIM product is for monitoring Windows and Linux servers.

Provides a comprehensive monitoring solution for our open systems and also the mainframe. That is our biggest benefit. The comprehensive monitoring aspects of it with over 200 probes available and one robot.

The vast array of robots that are available.

We have a customized auditing feature that we have set up to ensure configurations are deployed to each server as per our desired model. We have 104 models and 104 packages. All of that has been custom written. If the product had something like that built in, I think that would be a benefit. 

That is an audit that goes to each server each night and verifies that the setup is according to our desired model for that particular server type.

We have a few customized routines we have had built for our scale. It is beyond auditing. We had to come up with a few alarm hubs and concentrated hubs for different segments which are not a standard use case. I would tend to think, in enterprise solutions, our use case would be sort of typical. So, we had to do some work to make what was more of a business class solution work at the enterprise level. 

UIM is very stable.

Scalability is good. We have had to do some customized horizontal scaling solutions that we fed back to CA, which we think they are incorporating, but it is scalable.

They are actually very good. Technical support is good. If we get to product support, the product manager is responsive. We have expressed some concerns and areas for improvement, and they were addressed.

We had no previous solution. It was the early days of Windows NT 3.5.

We decided to go with CA in the late 1990's, and we have been with CA ever since.

Initial setup was complex, given our business use case. We are not hosting standard back office solutions. We host a really complex set of solutions which we wrote. Another division handed us the opportunity to monitor their solutions as written, and UIM was very useful for that.

An opportunity with licensing that was presented back in the late 90's which gave us pretty much site license for any of our products. Then, once embedded in our operations and development, it was hard to dislodge. That was our primary reason. There are a lot of vendors out there. Everybody has a bell or whistle that is better than the next guy. It is what is integrated and what is your support kind of deal that you can do for me?

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: integration and support. It has alway been well-integrated and the support is good.

Infrastructure monitoring. Right now, we do not have an application monitoring setup. That is something that we are looking to get, so at the moment we are just using it to monitor the infrastructure.

We just got it set up a year ago, and then had a company move in between. So, we just started using it, technically, probably like three months ago.

Diagnosing issues is a lot faster. We can pinpoint what is going on more quickly than trying to figure it out. Trying to drill in it in other ways, especially with our teams being kind of split. We can all access it all at the same time.

It allows all of us to be able to see what we need to see very quickly and easily.

It notifies us quickly and easily on the 3D view. We can see when the monitoring lights show up over the racks. It is nice to be able to just see that at a blink of an eye if an alarm is going off, then we can just dial in from there.

It has been very stable. I love it so far.

We have not run into any issues. I will not know until we deep dive into it later, when we get everything up and running. We only have a few racks online right now. Until we get it fully deployed, I will not really know if we would be able to easily add or remove devices as needed.

We have run into a couple of issues, but our rep has been very readily available and responsive. So the issues were fixed right away. It has been great.

My co-worker, who is involved in the initial setup, says that, "Everything has been great so far." Straightforward.

From what I have seen, version 9 looks great.

Monitoring the servers, the infrastructure and we also monitor applications with a specific probe doing Synthetic transactions. We use a dirscan probe to monitor files to make sure that they transfer at the correct times, and it will send alerts if they don't. We use logmon monitoring and we use the event log monitoring processes. We monitor processes for up/down state, CPU usage, memory usage. We use the NT Services probe, the monitor services on the Windows boxes. That's to name a few.

Regarding performance, we've had some struggles with it at times, but we get a support case opened up and support has been very good at helping us resolve the issues that we encounter.

The monitoring of the applications to let our business know when things are performing and that they're up and available.

We have less downtime. We have alerting to let us know when disks are filling up so that we get that taken care of before it becomes an issue and is noticeable to customers.

In the UMP, certain devices will show up multiple times and they don't correlate correctly. That's one of the issues. 

Sometimes the probe, on its first release, we will find some bugs with it and notify support and then they escalate it to the upper level and they get things corrected.

The dashboarding. They're going in the right direction, getting away from flash and using the HTML5 with the Cabbie dashboards. That has been very helpful with us in developing dashboards. But maybe some additional out-of-the-box dashboards with different standard tools that people are using. 

The one thing that our company has started to use is MarkLogic, and they don't have a specialized probe for that. We've reached out to them and put feedback on the community trying to get votes on that. But so far, it hasn't gotten a lot of votes.

The stability is good. They have an HA feature, high availability. And whe we were setting it up with use of support, we decided not to even set up that functionality because it's very seldom that we have a problem with it going down.

Scalability has been fine. As the new servers are brought on with the new MCS tool, it allows us to get configuration on the servers put on in a faster time.

I'm happy with the technical support we've received, and their response time.

We actually had UIM before it was UIM. It was Nimbus in 2004. Then it went to Nimsoft, then CA bought it and then rebranded it CA UIM. When it got brought into our company, in 2004, we used it for Synthetic transactions, to monitor the email and different products on the web, and the response times to that. And then we were using a different product for our network monitoring. 

We wanted to try to eliminate some of the excessive tools we had so we moved our network monitoring into CA UIM at that time.

When we first moved on to UIM, and brought the network monitoring in, at that time, the event correlation product wasn't built in - so one event happens and then it triggers three or four other things. And when we were doing that, the product we were getting rid of did do that. CA had said that that would be on the roadmap. It seems like the roadmap has changed now, and they're doing more of the event correlation with Spectrum, but we don't own Spectrum. So we have a little bit of a struggle there with the event correlation, and it seems like CA is not doing the event correlation with their SNMP Collector probe. They've moved more towards Spectrum.

It was straightforward. I and another person set up how the servers are going to be set up and then we got approval through CA. We asked them if that looked good to them, and they came back and with what we had set up, they didn't have anymore recommendations. They thought that what we're going to do was going to be successful.

When our company is looking to invest in a vendor, our criterion is that we will try to stay with a vendor that we have a relationship with already. 

I rate it an eight out of 10 because the ability to configure the probes is much easier than with other products. Before we went with the UIM product, I had to evaluate other products and the configuration of those was much more difficult than with UIM.

I would advise, because they have the new SaaS product - and I have a feeling we're going to be looking at that at our company also - doing a demo of the SaaS product and see if that meets their needs.

Infrastructure monitoring.

It preforms well, I mean it scales well. Handles about 17,000 servers. So it does pretty well. 

• Basic infrastructure
• Moving into cloud monitoring in UIM
• Resilient
• Pretty stable

Also, I think it's the architecture, the way the hubs are designed, the way that it scales, that it can be grown. That's valuable, in a large enterprise.

The large library of functionality; not having to go to multiple products to monitor different things.

Being able to report on the monitoring configurations and find out where you differentiate from standards. If I've deployed 500 probes to monitor Oracle, and I want to know that they're all monitored the same, I have no way to do that now.

Stability's been good.

The biggest problem is certain what they call "hubs." Different releases of different probes can be problematic, to get the right versions to work together. Or to find out if they scale or if they don't. So you've got to do some testing.

Scalability is dependent on the probe that you're using. Some probes scale really well, some things don't scale really well. So monitoring VMware may not scale as well as monitoring a cloud architecture. You have to test what you're doing.

I haven't used tech support for UIM recently but I have used CA's technical support in general. I would say they're responsive but can take a little time, if it has to go back to development for a review.

It's pretty straightforward.

When investing in a vendor, what's important to me are 

• software quality
• responsiveness
• communication.

I rate it an eight out of 10 and that's only because I think it can be better. I think as a competitive products in the market, UIM is really solid. A few changes could make it better.

Make sure there are staff to administrate it, after it gets deployed. And ensure that after CA delivers, that you have the ability to follow through with the rest of the implementation.

Primary use case is we deployed a unified infrastructure manager, globally, for monitoring. By globally, I mean here in the US and in Europe. Now we are expanding to South America: Mexico and Brasil.

Scalability has been really good. It has been more than we expected, much better than what we were using before.

• The ease of deployment
• The ease in configuration, like alarm notifications
• Administration is easy, so the learning curve is not huge. It's something you could get comfortable with in a couple of months.

It's making the environment more visible. 

It's helping our management have really good visibility into what is happening in the environment. Things that were hidden are now visible. We're able to do this deployment on a mainframe environment, and they can actually see the day-to-day performance of the environment, get real data, and make modifications based on that.

We've talked to our vendor about the specific parts of UIM, specific probes, that we'd like to see improvements in. This would give us greater functionality. An example is logmon. We'd like to see some more functionality there. Maybe something that can capture an XML tag, data, things like that.

Overall we'd like to see a better console for the alarm view. Right now it's great, but there's some functionality that was lost from the previous migration. They are trying to integrate some of the functionality from the previous versions, which was lost when they migrated to a new format for showing that.
Since that's the most visible part of our tool, to our users, that would have immediate benefits, I would say.

Stability is fairly good. It's getting better every day.

There are some challenges with it as far as having a lot of users logging in at the same time. What they do is they log in to see what's happening in the environment, respond, and contact whoever they need to, to attack whatever issue came up. Sometimes the stability is not what we expected, but it's really good still.

There is a bit of lag that we're seeing. We just completed a migration to a higher version. It is better, but we are still seeing some unexpected downtime in the course of the day. The frequency of those incidents is going down every day. So, we expect that the stability will pretty much go up.

Scalability is great. It doesn't take a lot to do a deployment to a bunch servers, and you have multiple ways that you can do that. You can use native deployment method. You can use what the infrastructure team uses for deploying software. You can do a manual method. You have different options and that's awesome.

Support is great. We have a great partnership with our vendor, and they're very responsive to our needs. And they have escalation paths. So when they hit a snag, they always escalate to the back end and we get really good results from them.

Our previous tool, Microsoft SCOM, was not meeting expectations. The cost, the return on investment for it, was not there at all. With UIM, the ROI is way up there. With the other tool, the admin time versus the value you were getting was just not there.

I hear they've made improvements to SCOM now. But we went a different direction. And we're happy that we did.

it was fairly straightforward.

Our first deployment happened about six years ago. Once you get the hang of it, it gets much easier. But overall, approaching it as a new customer, I would say, it's not hard at all.

We did three or four different proofs of concept, and we ended up going with CA.

We considered an open source tool, it's called SNAG-View. We considered SCOM. There were two others we considered that are not coming to mind.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to us are 

• relationships
• response. 

Those two are the biggest things. We want them to be there when we're doing a major deployment. When things break down, that 3:00am call, they're there. That is the biggest thing for us: to have a close relationship with our vendor. 

And of course, knowledge that the vendor has of the actual product. That they have that technical talent within their team, that they can give that first-tier, third-tier, or whatever, support.

I would say you will probably see a lot of positive returns right out of the gate in the quality of monitoring that you are seeing; the type of monitoring data that you're getting from whatever it is that you're monitoring. I would encourage you to take a look at it.

We do E2E monitoring for service level availability of all of our applications. 

For our service level managers, it's performed a lot better than they expected. It's given them a lot more information than our old tool, which went end-of-life. We brought everything over to UIM. We gave them a tool that can give them everything they wanted, that they never had before.

From what I've seen so far, and what we're using, it's

• the data it collects and 
• the reporting capabilities.

For me, it keeps the service level managers off my back. 

It gives the service level managers, because they work directly with the application owners and the business owners, the ability to provide the metrics and the service level of the applications to the business owners. It's a win for both of us.

Because we have a lot of critical applications and we need to make sure that they're always available, I do scripting and make sure that the Synthetics stay up and are running all the time. It gives the business owners the knowledge that, "Hey, my application is up," and we don't have to wait for the customers to call in saying it's down.

Without deep diving into the infrastructure side, I really can't say because I only work with the Synthetics, end-to-end side of it. Right now there are just minor, little glitches, things that I see, but it's things I'm working with support on.

With the Synthetics it's more or less what a user sees in an application. There are some things that UIM can do and some things that UIM can't do. What it can do is great, and it's done a lot, and I've done a lot with the product that supports what we do. That's why I say it's a 10 across the board. 

The little things are, for example, maybe Windows.frames can't be seen within UIM, or within the side I'm working with. They say, "Oh, we're going to get that fixed in the next feature." Great, so we're in the process of upgrading right now. We're on 8.4.7 and we're getting reading to go to 8.5.1, which is the most current release.

Stability? Works great.

So far scalability is wonderful. We're looking towards broadening the scope of UIM within our company. We're staying with the E2E right now, but I think not too far in the future we're going to broaden it and go with more in-depth features. From what I've heard here at the CA World conference, it seems I'm the only one doing E2E. So we're going to get into the infrastructure side of it, which we're not currently doing.

Technical support is great. They've been wonderful.

The communication has been great. It also helps that, being a support person in my career in the past, I know what to fill out in the ticket and to help them. So we jive on what's needed and what's not. Putting things in the ticket that help them, up front, shortens the life of the ticket.

We were using a different vendor, different product and it went end-of-life. I call it "TM-ART" some people call it TMART, it is from BMC. 

We had to find another product.

It was straightforward, but we implemented about two weeks prior to CA World last year, when we got here and they asked, "How do you like it?" "Um, we just implemented, so we don't know." 

But for the past year it's worked great. We're still learning because we didn't fully implement UIM. The architect came in and said, "Hey, this is how you do it, this is what you need," and we took over. So, we're learning still.

We did a lot of research but UIM had everything that we needed. 

When selecting a vendor what's most important to us is:

• Does it do what we need? 
• Does it do what we want? 
• Do we have to do a lot of out-of-the-box modifications?

I give it a 10 out of 10 because it's doing everything we expected and looked for. Like I said, we haven't gotten into infrastructure, so I can't really rate it that way yet. But what I've seen in the pre-conference classes, it's going to work just as well. So, I would probably give it a 10 across the board.

Definitely PoC UIM. It is worth it. 

Our main use case is obviously doing base monitoring with the product, and also going beyond that doing URL monitoring. We are actually exploring more than what the UIM can perform with the current solution that we have in place. So, we are migrating everything over to the UIM. So far, it works well, even though we have not migrated everything over.

Obviously, the base monitoring and how we can essentially set up alerts to go to the board through Spectrum. However, that is pretty much our main use case for it. 

The alerts and thresholds that we set up within the tool, that's important for the business. If it were to meet that threshold, it goes to the board, which in turn, we can notify the application's owners swiftly to minimize the impact of a SEP-1. So, it is critical.

Just to have that overall picture when it comes to monitoring throughout the whole environment and be able to act on it.

The main complaint with the tool is we are attempting to migrate off of SCOM and the management packs that SCOM has for exchange (ED and SharePoint) it does not look like UIM and can't necessarily compete with those. Maybe, if that could be improved.

I would have to look up some actual use cases, but when we initially set up the 6-risk environment within UIM, it did not meet the needs for the application owners who actually manage the Citrix environment. They decided to actually go back to SCOM. That was the one main concern, and that is something that we will have to readdress with CA.  

It seems pretty stable. I have not had any cyclic concerns. There was an issue when we migrated to the latest version, but we had support that day to get it resolved and it was resolved within 24 hours, so that was a plus. 

When we upgraded to the latest version, the admin lost access to the management console. That was the issue and it got resolved really quickly. 

I do not know if I can speak to it.

The individual that manages the product itself used tech support. She received a response/resolved within 24 hours. She found them to be knowledgeable.

We moved from the HPE product suite two or three years ago. I was not a part of that, but the main complaint with HPE was the support was locking. That is really about it. 

We did migrate from a different solution, which had a similar functionality. I would not say that it necessarily added to it, but I received feedback from the admin who administers the tool itself that it is a lot easier to use and very user friendly for the teams.

While I was not involved in the initial setup, I have not heard anything bad about it either.

Splunk, AppDynamics, and CA were on our shortlist.

I started just a few months ago, but the company has been using it for about two years now. I have been surprised by the foothold CA has on the marketplace and how many products they actually manage.

I would definitely recommend the concept if it is something you are looking for.Just make sure that it integrates with the rest of the tools in your environment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Functionality of the product
• Ease of use.

What I like about CA compared to other vendors is they are not pushy. They are actually more supportive if we have any issues they will get the appropriate rep to assist. Our rep does not feel like he is a sales rep, even though he is. To have that good relationship with the people that you are responsible for is a big deal, because I have dealt with other vendors where they are kind of the sleazy, salesman type.

We are using it for the monitoring of our hardware infrastructure, and also for our applications' response times. So far, it has performed well. 

• The integration with Spectrum
• The ability to create an integrated console based upon the services which we are offering.

We have had previous experience with CA products, so it is another progression in our use and deployment of the CA suite.

• Ease of use
• Integration with the other CA products

We are working on the process improvement. We have a large deployment across multiple applications, so working with the applications team and obtaining velocity is a difficult thing. 

If there was a way to better harvest information from other sources to configure the components, it would make it easier to do.

For the past year, the tool has been quite stable in our environment, so I enjoy working with it. 

The scalability is good, because of our diverse locations and the large number of applications. However, getting the right components in the right area, we just have to think through it and engineer it.

It is difficult to get their time to instrument their applications. So, it is not the product that is difficult to work with, it is getting the people's time to work with us.

For technical support, we sourced knowledge from one of our in-house partners, which is a contract resource type of thing.  

This was our first implementation of this type of solution. We had done an internal proof of concept or proof of value. That is where we came up with using the tool. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

Because of our previous experience with CA, we did not really look elsewhere.

Plan well. Because of what the tool does, some companies do not really have a good service catalog, and without a good service catalog, taking the leap into the UIM space is going to be an interesting challenge. That has been one of our challenges, we did not have a good service catalog.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• The partnership with the team
• The quality of the products
• The reputation of the vendor.