This product is very flexible for the administrator. We can do whatever we want. It is easily customizable and upgradable.

We are using this product for all my customers and internal stakeholders. We did the following:

• Enabled a complete monitoring solution for their devices
• Integrated a ticketing system with an in-house tool
• Made customized report generation

• Alarm Management
• Alarm Correlation
• Jaspersoft reports

We have been using the solution for six years.

We had some issues with stability.

We encountered scalability issues in some areas such as bandwidth monitoring.

The technical support is very good from Europe and Australia, compared to the Indian support office.

The setup is very straightforward and flexible.

The pricing and licensing is acceptable. This is a very good product for small and medium size organizations.

We evaluated BMC and ManageEngine IT360.

Go ahead and choose this product.

The features valuable for me are scalability, redundancy, and the wide range of probes available for just about any platform.

Another major advantage is the easy configuration management. When you define standard “base” monitoring templates and on top of those, define “differential” templates, having a tool that allows you to manage these hundreds (and even thousands) of templates in an organized manner is an absolute necessity.

CA UIM not only allows you to manage the templates, but the new MCS module allows you to dynamically assign them to groups. This means that any node/probe belonging to that group will automatically receive the templates.

Note: At this time, MCS does not yet support differential templates, but it is on the roadmap.

When this customer did the PoC, the competition clearly failed in this area. Furthermore, the event management part (alarm server and alert console) is feature-rich. It allows for some advanced, alert processing and correlation.

Nodes are now monitored in a standardized way, thanks to configuration management. We are a lot more pro-active to solve potential issues, thanks to event management.

Different teams are using different dashboards according to their requirements. For example, the end-user service desk uses a high-level dashboard with the state of the most important applications, printer malfunctions, etc.

A lot of the functionality is available out-of-the-box without having to script it, although scripting it is still needed from time to time. This means new objects/metrics are effectively getting monitored quickly without a lengthy development period.

I would like to see the retirement of the heavy client (infrastructure manager) in favor of the web-based admin console. It is close, but it is not there yet.

Support for the PostgreSQL database platform would be nice. At this time, you can only choose between Oracle and MySQL when running CA UIM on Linux.

As a DBA, I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL. (This is my personal preference. By no means do I find MySQL a bad product.)

For this customer, it’s their first implementation. However, I have been using CA UIM since 2014 and its predecessor, Unicenter NSM, since 2004.

We had no stability issues. The built-in redundancy allows for maintenance windows for patching.

Scalability is one of its strong points. A manager server (hub) can manage a lot of nodes. Adding another hub is really straightforward. You just need to make sure you have plenty of storage for both the database and the primary hub.

The technical support is very good. You still need access to the old support.nimsoft.com site for downloading new versions of probes. Overall, it is very good.

CA support did have a bad reputation 10-15 years ago, but they made a lot of effort to improve it.

The customer was using Nagios, and still is for the network part.

The main issues were:

• The lengthy development periods (because you need to script everything),
• The difficulty of having any custom reporting/dashboarding capabilities
• The total absence of decent event management functionality: This is something most cheaper monitoring tools anyway don't have

The actual installation was very quick and straightforward. Of course, you can spend ages configuring/tweaking as the product has endless options. It all depends what you have defined and how complex your environment is.

Most of the time was spent defining the architecture: What probes go where, redundancy, tunnels for the DMZ networks, and capacity planning. I recommend spending as much time as required on this, as you will benefit from it later.

It is definitely not the cheapest on the market, but you can save a lot of money by carefully making a list of which probes you actually need and how many of them are required.

Often probes can monitor multiple instances or are included in other packs, so you don’t have to purchase them separately. Make sure to be precise. Your CA representative can assist you with that.

The customer did a PoC with two contenders: CA UIM and Microsoft SCOM.

Try to look beyond the price tag. You really do get a lot in return, especially when you have a highly heterogeneous environment.

I really value the underlying Java framework for development of custom probes.
The product has an API that allows heavy customization. This has allowed me to add functionality by designing my own metric gathering routines.

This product has one foot in the past and another foot in the future. As a result, the approaches to managing components are not unified; leading to added complexity to management.

Open source and acquired components are often bolted on and integrated poorly.

Out of the box, there were no scalability issues. However, this product has poor integration with ServiceNow; introducing unacceptable bottlenecks.

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

We did not use a previous solution but we are architecting an alternative presently.

Licensing has a lot of wiggle-room.

Please investigate other solutions so you can make an informed choice. CA adds technical debt to your organization.

The product is easy to configure. Simplicity is the most valuable asset of CA UIM.

Monitoring has been easy and streamlined. Its ability to integrate with CA SDM and its capability to receive SNMP traps from other tools, makes it simple to integrate.

Improvements could be made to the reporting and analytics features. The OOB report templates and analytics can be improved.

I have used it for 3 years.

There were no stability issues. It is a very stable product with agents not failing that often.

There were no scalability issues.

Technical support has been good.

Initial setup was straightforward. For someone with experience of any monitoring tool, read the manual once and implementation is pretty easy.

I found the product to be cost effective and licensing is not complex.

Go ahead and implement it. Keep it simple in a phased manner. Set expectations correctly. (This is not a synthetic or real user monitoring tool.)

• Ease of setup - install is quick and easy. For small environments, all components can be installed on a single server. Even larger, more-distributed environments are easy to install, given all required network ports are open.
• Automated robot deployment makes it easy to select targets for performance management.
• Justifiably, local and remote options are available for agent-based and touchless monitoring.
• Most probe configurations are OOTB best practices. The probe GUI is easy to navigate.
• A new feature, MCS, allows for monitoring policies to be created for groups of devices. You can monitor just about anything.

We are a managed services organization. Knowing about performance issues before our customers is key. To have reports ready at the beginning of the day is even better. Report scheduling is priceless.

I would like to see enhancements to core probes for bulk uploads. Some probes have the capability to monitor multiple targets. You either must enter them one by one or use scripting to bulk load the targets. I would like to see that functionality built into the probes.

We have been using this product for about seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

The technical support is excellent. 24 x 7 support is awesome, not to mention that their support staff really knows the product. What makes it better is that support and development work close together so that turnaround on bug fixes is expedient.

We previously used Solarwinds NPM but it wasn't as scalable.

Setup was easy.

Buy what you need. The product is worth every bit of its cost.

We did not evaluate any other products beforehand.

Plan and commit people and processes. Build a service, don't just implement a tool.

One of the most valuable features would be the out-of-the-box capability. It's extremely capable from day one. Not a lot of customization is required in order to implement it within your environment. I think that's just a huge resource win, from a time-measurement perspective. We're a small shop in a very large company. The quicker we can roll things out, the bigger wins, the quick wins, are obviously going to be beneficial to our environment.

We're utilizing the E2E probes as well as the URL probes in the infrastructure in which it's being run on. We're running about 100 VDI desktops and about 300 different applications.

It's provided us an opportunity to have visualization and insight into some applications that we haven't had before. A lot of the applications in the past did not have Citrix monitoring capability, which this has, or VDI monitoring capability. In the healthcare industry, that's really a big component of what we do. A lot of our critical applications run on the Citrix platform and, in the past, we just haven't had any visibility into how those applications were performing.

One of the biggest areas to improve would be the training aspect. There's a little bit of training out there available right now. I know it's a newer CA product. I think the training is a little rudimentary at this point. I think there needs to be some more advanced-level training available.

We've had it installed in our environment about a year now.

Stability has been spot on. We haven't had any problems. We actually performed an upgrade mid-cycle, and the upgrade went flawlessly with literally no issues. Correlation has been fantastic. We've integrated with several different applications, as well, for monitoring, alerting, things of that nature. No problems at all.

Scalability is huge. It’s not overly expensive, so I'm able to build upon it relatively cheap, which is a huge win for anybody, any company. As I’ve mentioned, we're running about 100 desktops right now in our VDI environment. We've scaled back. Even though that sounds like a big footprint, due to its advanced scalability within the actual environment, we were able to reduce the number of actual physical robots that we were utilizing from 400 to 100.

We haven't needed to use tech support. We do have some direct sales guys that we utilize, and those have been our primary functionality. I have used tech support for other applications within CA and I've never had any problems.

One of the primary triggers for investing in a new solution was the fact that our current system didn't meet the requirements and the needs as our company began to grow and take on new applications. Additionally, the election to sunset the previous product that we were utilizing made for a big push to look for something new.

Personally, when I’m selecting a vendor, I want somebody who feels like they've got something to lose. Obviously, if I go with your tool set, and you don't seem to really care about the upgrade or my pain points, and you don't feel like, "Hey. I've bought it and I walked away from it. You're stuck with it.", that makes the relationship difficult. CA is extremely committed. I think that would be one of the things: commitment to success. They're extremely committed to our success and I can't be more thankful.

Setup is extremely straightforward; very easy to implement. We set up our test environment in about 2-3 days, and then our prod environment took about 3-4. It's a little bit larger, a little bit more robust.

It's as next, next, next as you could make, I think, an implementation.

We actually vetted several other applications. We looked at Dynatrace. We looked at Login VSI. We looked at BMC's new tool. We did the gambit of running around, looking at different monitoring solutions. AppDynamics was included in that. I think on scalability, functionality, and ease of implementation, UIM won out.

There's always going to be room for improvement. Why I rate it this high is the ease of implementation, ease of use. I brought in several guys that never had any development experience. In 1-2 days of training, they were able to get some stuff knocked out for us; help us with the implementation process and the transitioning of it. Ease of use is huge. You don't have to be super-techy in order to utilize the product. Of course, to utilize it to its full functionality, sure, but day-one, out-of-the-box stuff is just phenomenal.

Basically, the most valuable feature is the ability to scale and quickly allow us to deploy an infrastructure management solution to our clients in a very timely manner, across the board, using many different technologies; so, storage, databases, OSs, and synthetic monitoring, things like that.

It allows us to create a baseline template for each of the different technologies. That allows to quickly deploy our solution set for that particular technology base to each different client. So, across the board, we have a baseline of measurable, simple deployment mechanisms.

I would probably like to see more out-of-the-box solutions that I don't have to individually go into, configure and set up myself.

With every new probe that is released, we have to come up with a good monitoring template to accurately identify the key metrics for that specific technology to monitor it correctly. We have to find SME’s for that technology, sit down with them, show them all the metrics that we can collect then ask what are the key important metrics that if this breaches a threshold, should we alert. This is very time consuming for all parties.

I've been using it for two and a half years.

It is very stable, I would say. Maybe, we had issues during upgrades, but it's been relatively very stable.

It's very scalable. We have no issue adding on additional clients because of just the way the product has been designed, it allows us to scale very heavily.

Technical support is excellent. I've been working with them for 10+ years. I have a good relationship with the support company. I know every support individual there and it is run in a very professional, friendly manner.

Upgrades are very straightforward. You have the wiki site, which tells you step by step. I do run through the upgrade in a test environment first before actually implementing in production.

I was able to quickly learn it and use it, deploy it, modify it to our specific needs, and it's been very reliable since.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the history of the company, how long it's been in business, what offerings in terms of support it offers, and really other customer feedback based on their personal experiences.