DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

The most valuable feature for us are the way it brings silo products together that we've invested in over the years, and it allows us to consolidate our views for our customers.

We started off with standard infrastructure – networks, switches, routers, firewalls – but as we've grown, our proposition has been able to expand to the cloud, internet of things, and big data. Although we don't use all of those capabilities from it today, the key thing for us is, we know it's flexible enough to do that.

The key things for us are: help bring people together, break down the silo teams, and then be able to see the customers' problem, the pain points, in a single place. It helps us make more-effective decisions and also the response time to fix.

I would like to see further consolidation of the tools from a deployment point of view. Make it more modular; drag and drop; being able to have a commercial model that also lends itself well with what we're trying to achieve for our customers.

It's not only about features and gimmicks. It's about making sure the features and products align to our customers’ outcomes.

I have been using UIM for about seven years now.

Stability is an interesting one. From a design point of view, if you understand the type of demand you're putting on it and you plan forward, which we've worked to learned to do, it becomes more stable. If you don’t know what you're doing and you try to do something with it which it's not really designed for, of course you have performance issues with many products.

So, it's really about knowing what you want to get out of the product and how you want to architect the product to meet your objectives.

I would say it is scalable. We use it in a multi-context environment. What I mean by that is, as a service provider, naturally we have customers who scale horizontally. So, for us, we've got a template-driven approach now. With the advent of virtualization and cloud, that's also allowed us to scale out much quicker.

Technical support is interesting. Initially, in the UK, we had challenges having to engage the standard process. But, with the advent of the online forums and the communities, that's allowed more open questioning and learning from others out there and the peers, not necessarily just from our own industry; from areas that are adjacent to our market but are also trying to achieve the same outcome. I think CAhave now created more of a flexible platform to do that.

I think there are areas where initial setup has become more simpler now, but in the early days, it was really trying to understand what we want out of the product because, without knowing what the requirement was, we were kind of grappling with lots of the features. But then, once we understood what we're trying to deliver and then we worked with CA; I think once we engaged with CA, they did really come through. They came forward and supported us along the journey.

I think organically we tried putting it in for various products and services. Over time, when we realized that we can harness more out of it, we made a decision to put more energy for our enterprise customers into tools that really give them more value. Rather than trying to invest in too many tools, we decided to actually work on fewer tools; we'll get more out of them.

Without being biased, I feel that the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is about the people and whilst there's always a tradition in an organization when you're working with a vendor, it's really important that you have engagement from all levels of your business, from product marketing, engineering, architecture, as well as from a commercial relationship.

If you have a transactional relationship, you will only get suboptimal results. What we've learned is to broaden the discussion with different areas of our partner-vendor and work with them at different levels to bring the best out. That collaboration is really important. That's, I think, changed a lot over the last few years and we're now starting to get the value out of the relationship.

I’d never give anybody a perfect rating. If you asked me about two years ago, my rating would have been lower. As I’ve mentioned, the collaboration has definitely improved things.

I definitely enjoy the interface and how easy it is to deploy monitoring rules and probes.

It has provided us with faster triage. It is easier to upgrade and work with. It makes my job easier. If I can do my job better, then the organization should benefit.

I would really like to see HTML5. I spoke with a couple of developers about it. I'd also like to see additional monitoring so we can push rules a little bit easier.

I haven't had too many opportunities to expand. We set it up such that I can expand in parallel quite easily. We haven't had the need to do so yet, but I imagine it would work out.

I have used technical support. They are great. I usually interact with them by the web portal, submit a ticket, and then I get a call back. My issues are almost always resolved by them.

We used eHealth, which was another CA product. We noticed that UIM was getting a lot more development than eHealth. UIM was kind of a future product. We spoke with our account representative, and we did a one-to-one swap for licenses.

I was absolutely involved in the setup. I had prior experience with a product similar to UIM, so I was very familiar with the architecture. From that aspect, it was easy.

It is definitely a different architecture than other CA products that we are using. I can see where somebody without this experience would find the setup a little bit complex. For me, I grasped the concepts easier.

I enjoy the product. It has done everything that we expected it to do.

When selecting a vendor, the most important aspect is that their goals are aligned with our goals. I look for a relationship that is symbiotic. I want them to understand that when we do well, they do well.

We mainly monitor services around the database applications, and things like that. The most valuable features of UIM are that it's scalable and it's relatively easy to set up monitoring on the servers.

The reporting part could be improved. We’re using other tools for that. Maybe we’ll continue to do that, but that is one thing we are missing; and the SLA, and what you can do there.

As I cannot compare it with others, it's a bit difficult to say.

It's very stable.

It is scalable. In production, we have about 600-700 servers.

It's mainly my colleague who is in contact with CA technical support. Things take time.

I think you should set it up the way that CA says you should set it up.

I believe that the fundamentals and the logic of how UIM is set up is very stable. We like that the fundamentals support providing metrics and alarms.

I feel it provides the essentials. That is, to extract data from an environment and present it through a front-end, using graphs and charts. It also allows for analysis on the collected data, which is crucial to most companies. I believe that UIM does a good job, of being able to manage all the steps along the way.

I haven’t been in my current position for too long. I definitely noticed that UIM provides a level of reliability in our operating center for the people who actually implement the alarms. When an alarm comes in, they're responsible for making sure the alarm validation is raised. It allows reliability and it gives us assurance that we have an accurate picture about what really is going on in our monitoring environment. That's reassuring to know. We know that when we get an alarm, it is because something is actually happening.

We're just hoping to see the growth in different functional areas so that it's a little bit more dynamic. The other enterprise suites that they're trying to bundle up are great. I think that the core functions of the product itself are great. I think it might need a little more work at the extremities, trying to hook up with other software. Right now, they're doing a good job at trying to implement additional suites and software. What I would like to see is that the quality of what is currently in place just be increased.

There are some components of UIM that are dated, or they're being left behind and some newer ones are being put forward.

I can't see any new features, and if I did, I don’t know what I’d be doing around here. Can this feature do my job here? But no, realistically, we depend on these systems that when we see configured, we know exactly what we're going to get. It's been improving. Still, I think there's a lot of room for growth

The stability for UIM creates that reliant backbone that we need. If there is anything customizable that needs to be done, that is being done by the other suites; but UIM is very good and it helps coordinate everything and provides reliability.

The scalability is great. I think they understand that it’s a concern because it's at the enterprise level. I think they're moving in the right direction.

I know that right now we're a little bit outdated in the product version that we have; but it's just part of the product, and we understand that. Moving forward, when we update, and when we do all these things, I know that the scalability has been opening up in different components within UIM.

Adding components, such as MCS, which enables you to configure your entire enterprise from one place, is a good thing.

I used to work for CA UIM support. I would be the one to talk to. Having worked there, and now coming from the actual implementation where I'm an enterprise-level user is a very up-and-down, roller-coaster feeling. It’s like I'm stuck in support because as much as I want to say that everybody is consistent, and every technical guy wants the best for you, it just doesn't happen that way.

When it does, it's great, and we really appreciate it. When it's lacking, we suffer a little bit and it creates a bitterness. We don’t do anything up front, but we keep a record of it. Technical support was not the best. We could use more. We're wasting money because we see it didn't produce here or wasn't responsive enough.

It definitely raises questions and concerns, but I know CA is very open to hearing customers' concerns and listening to feedback. I think they’re very open and understand that that’s an area they can improve.

I don't do the selecting processes. My boss definitely lets me know, "Hey, we want to read into this," and I go into it with a particular perspective after he gives me some goals and requirements. The most important thing is the goal of your company and what they are trying to achieve.

We have looked at other vendors but upper management is always trying to cut costs, and understandably so. We were looking at other solutions which might provide a level comparable to what we have with CA, where we have what we need, while reducing costs; but it's kind of tough. CA's pretty competitive. They're good. They're solid.

Make sure you have a good grasp on what you need to get out of the product, of course. What does this product do for you? Once you have a good understanding of that, it's really communicating with either the architect or whoever is going to implement it to make sure that it reflects the goals, the requirements, the SLA, and so on. Then you can do the configuration and implementation.

It has a wide breadth of monitors and probes. It enables us to monitor just about anything we come across. That's its strength: it's got a wide variety.

It's allowed us to narrow our footprint. We're getting ready now to retire some legacy apps that we use for monitoring, so it's allowed us to narrow our footprint.

• They need to work on the user interface. I know they are, but to me, that's one of the big things that is holding them back. It's not with the times. It's not real intuitive. You really need to work with it to figure out where things are.
• We need to be able to group servers and deploy different packages to them.
• You should be able to better organize the grouping and deployment. That's kind of where they struggle. They need to work on that area. I know they are, but that's our pain point. The organization is lacking.

I think it needs a little work in terms of stability. We've had issues with some probes crashing. It seems like there are really more bugs in a release when it comes out than there should be. I would think they should be caught in QA. That's what I've seen so far.

It seems to be very scalable. We have 6,000 servers, and we really haven't run into any scalability issues. We have thousands and thousands of monitors. But the number of alarms for event handling can be a little better. I know they're working on that. They may have another solution coming out that will help us with that.

Technical support has been fair, medium, or whatever the middle of the road is. I wish they were a little more responsive on some items, and be a little more knowledgeable on some items. It seems like we need to go through several layers before we get to someone who really can help us with our problem.

We're not just opening a, "Hey, how do you do this?" It's more like, "Okay. This is broken. How do we go about fixing it?" It seems like it takes multiple conversations to get what we need out of that, to get a fix.

We had many solutions and this one came down from management. "You're going to narrow your footprint," and the powers that be picked it for us. We had to go with that. It was already in. Other products were already in house, so this kind of lent itself to, "Well, here's another solution from CA, so deploy that."

The initial setup was straightforward for the complex tool that it is. There is complexity in terms of the more you deploy it, the bigger you get; and when you start to add layers, it can be complex. Overall, though, it was fairly straightforward.

I would do a proof of concept and go through all the use cases to make sure it's going to fit your needs. You should also work with the user interface first. Ask yourself whether it is going to be too cumbersome for you, given the type of environment that you have.

Knowing now what I didn't know then, having really good and responsive technical support is very important. It is not something you really think about when you are looking for a better tool, but you have to live with the decision for years. It's hard to evaluate, I know, when you're first deploying or first looking at new tools, but being able to evaluate that would be good. The scalability and the ability to cover the range of our different requirements is also important.

We find the flexibility and portability the most valuable features. We are using it for synthetics, E2E, and its ability to monitor itself. We're getting rid of one product and bringing UIM to take over. We're using it for our application SLAs. We're writing, synthetically, all these transactions that can perform to our service levels. We are monitoring application performance with UIM at this time.

Currently, the environment that we're using it in is strictly application performance. We want to be able to give the business visibility on how the application is performing, whether it's in the cloud, a simple URL hit, or a thick or thin client. We're using it within the Citrix environment also.

Right now, I don't have any new features in mind. We’ll see once we get in and start playing with it a lot more in depth. We do have another team that's looking at implementing it, so that may be something down the road on which we can give more information.

The product out of the box is great. We were very impressed with it. We have only used it for what we need so far; the SLA piece for monitoring our apps.

We heard at a recent CA World conference that APM integrates with UIM. Spectrum also integrates with UIM, depending on the release and can actually cross-correlate alerts. When we have APM and Spectrum and we get them on the right versions, we'll be able to link all three together. That would be an improvement.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

We have not needed to use technical support for UIM. It's been great.

The other product was at the end of its life, so we had to find something.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had the engineer on site to walk us through the way the environment would be set up. We had it set up in a couple of days. He sat with us and went over the architecture, the way it was laid out, what our goals were, when we upgrade, and what we could do in the future to make it more beneficial.

Because I don't know the bottom line, I'd say it was a very good investment that we made.

We looked at other solutions, but they really didn't meet our needs. Dynatrace is one of them and Micro Focus may have been also. UIM met everything we needed and more when you consider other areas and departments with whom we work closely. It actually helped them out as well. It's not just our department utilizing UIM. It's going to scale across the company.

Give UIM a try. Build out a PoC environment. Play with it. Utilize all the probes you can that you think would meet your company's needs. Take advantage of it.

When choosing a vendor, we look at technical support.

UIM is very configurable. You can do lots of things with it. Now that comes with a caveat, right? If it's highly configurable, generally speaking, it's not easily cookie cutter place-able, right? There's a lot of programming that comes along with it. Once you figure out that piece of it, you can do pretty much anything with it.

I don't think it’s very complicated. It takes time, just like anything, but once you figure it out it's pretty much the same for each individual section of the product. It's just applied in a different way.

Currently, my reach is just the Windows servers, but soon it will be all types of monitoring and automation, including Windows servers, Linux servers, and applications that live on those servers. They are the pieces that I'll be looking at.

Currently, without going into too many details, we are leveraging the product to perform self-healing. If there's an outage of some sort or maybe even a metric, if you know what metric to monitor, to tell you if something is about to fail. You can take action to prevent the failure. Instead of being reactive, we're being proactive. Even to the point of being proactive and realizing these are the metrics that tell me, “this system is about to become unhealthy”, and reacting to that rather than reacting to an actual outage.

I do a lot of coding outside and inside of UIM. The biggest, most annoying problem, if you will, is the ISE that's embedded in UIM. It is very limited in its scope and what it's capable of compared to even some of the more primitive ISEs that are on the market. Personally, I'd like to see more time spent on the ISE, whether that's going to be in their new product, which is Unified Management Portal.

I've heard from up the food chain that they're going to be changing it and it's going to be more integrated with UMP. But I'd still like to see more improvement on the ISE, especially from my perspective because I primarily work in automation. The ISE portion is very big in my space.

In PowerShell, for instance, their ISE is, in my opinion, pretty good for what it does. You can tab through all the options versus in UIM's ISE, in order to do that there's actually a pane on right hand side that you have to click through. Even then, what the actions that are listed there do is not described well enough.

UIM is pretty stable. Everything has its quirks. As far as the monitoring platform as a whole, I've worked with a lot of different programs and it's pretty stable. It's up there with the top.

I have yet to run into anything that it couldn't scale. We've scaled it massively since we've started using it.

Technical support is very responsive. They're quick to escalate an issue that they don't know how to solve themselves. Where other companies fail, I think, is getting a customer to somebody who actually knows how to fix the issue. Whereas with CA, it seems like every time I open a case, they're very quick to find out what the actual problem is and get somebody in contact with me that actually knows how to fix the issue. No matter whether that's somebody actually on the technical support team or if it's a senior principle consultant that's outside of the technical support team. It seems like they're always very responsive to get that done.

For the most part, initial setup was straightforward. It's very one-step-after-the-other to get the initial basic monitoring portion of it setup. Then, obviously, there's a lot more things that it can do after that. That takes a learning curve.

Choosing UIM wasn't my decision. That came from above my pay grade.

Last words of advice. It's a great tool. One way I painted myself into a corner was when I first started using it I thought that it only can do this this one certain way. With UIM, the one thing I've learned is there's hundreds of ways of doing it and they're all right. It's just a matter of which way gets you there the fastest I guess.

I would say the most valuable feature is the consolidation of multiple data sources into one centralized repository for ease of administration and data analytics. For example, we have net-flow analysis, we have performance management and then we also have CA ADA (Application Delivery Analysis). Prior to CA UIM and CA Performance Center coming along, we had to look at all these systems individually. Even though when you look at it from the application layer, the network layer, and the system layer, all of these layers talk and rely on one another to provide a service. So, if one of them is having abnormalities, it's difficult for engineers to identity the root cause. This now gives us a single pane of glass to identify the root cause a lot quicker.

We are monitoring your typical router switches like Cisco and Juniper. We are also monitoring firewalls of various sources, VMware and all sorts of appliances. Also, we actually monitor applications, systems and services on the infrastructure as well.

The biggest thing is taking care of business. So, we’re good as long as business is happy and we can keep business doing what it needs to be doing. That means they can support the customers by cutting down on outage times or forecasting peak demand seasons with data analytics and stuff like that. Prior to technologies like this coming along we found ourselves being reactionary. With technologies like this, we can be proactive and begin to prevent failures before they happen. It's almost like looking into the future to a degree.

I would like to see integration into more data sources. For example, integrating facilities information such as temperature and other environmental variables, because heat can actually impact server routers. For example, environmental wouldn’t necessary align with an OSI layer, but it impacts all of those particular layers. So it'll be just like security would be another layer.

No technology is perfect, but CA is doing a really wonderful job of providing products that are reliable, scalable, and dependable to entities all over the world. People have to pay for this as well. If CA was not doing something right, I would not have seen 20,000 users at CA World.

In regards to scalability, I think that's a tough question. You really have to look at the implementation. If it's properly provisioned, then there's no issue. If you're sitting on a VM host and guests are competing for resources amongst that host and that host is not providing enough resource, then, yeah there's going to be contention there. As far as the system itself, it is very scalable.

Technical support is great. They're really great with the turn around time from submitting a ticket and getting an answer back for most issues. Most issues are not new under the sun. So it's just a matter of looking into the knowledge base and making sure your own system is provisioned properly. Then they'll feed you back information and stuff like that.

CA UIM was really the first time we’ve had a dashboard type of technology in our infrastructure. So prior to that, it was all siloed for the most part.

I was involved in the initial setup for the most part. I participated in gathering requirements and working with the account managers at CA. Then once we decided to procure, we took it to the software delivery life cycle, going into development, the DevOps type of model.

Some aspects of it can be complex. It's all about your learning curve and your dedication at the end of the day. Add to that having a great team to support you internally and then to reach back into CA.

I haven't considered any other vendors. I have individuals in the organization I support who were looking at other opportunities or products. But I would tell them, "Hey just give me an opportunity to allow this product to work." A lot of times, it's not the product, it's the people. It's the human. Granted, no product is perfect because humans aren't perfect, but again they are not far off from what they're touting themselves to be able to do.

Definitely insure to manage expectations you do a proof of concept and then executive buy-in. If you can get executive buy-in, you're good to go at that point.