DX Unified Infrastructure Management Reviews

Monitoring infrastructure and network devices: UIM can monitor devices such as switches and routers, and infrastructure such as memory, CPU, disk health.

Most of the time, we need to restart the monitoring server when deploying new features. If it is possible to enable new features without restarting the managed server, it would be awesome.

I have been using it for two years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. It is very stable.

Technical support is 9/10.

I have been using this from the beginning.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it.

It is very reliable and easy to implement.

The UMP portal is easy to use and provides complete details of infrastructure monitoring, without needing to use IM. You can easily do a lot of monitoring configuration tasks.

There is nothing we can't monitor with this product and do so in a very easy and efficient manner.

Customer support is good, but sometimes needs bit of urgency from a CA engineer to look at the issue.

I have used it for six years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10.

I have never used another solution.

Initial setup is quite easy. Installation and configuration both are straightforward. I’ve never found any complexity with it.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated other options. Most of the other tools do not have this product’s most important features.

Go for it, as it’s quite stable and many organizations are moving towards it from their old product.

Monitoring: Time to Threshold (TTT) and Time over Threshold (TOT)

I work with enterprise-size IT environments with 10,000+ servers. These features help to reduce the event noise to a level that operation teams are able to manage. Rather than sending alarms directly from the server agents, TTT and TOT use predictive analytics on the metric data, which enables greater flexibility for event thresholding.

Visualisation: Unified Service Manager (USM)

USM is the core web portlet within the Unified Management Portal (UMP). From here, it is possible to dynamically group infrastructure components together, which is very useful for multiple reasons:

• Dynamic groups propagate all events from the infrastructure within. This allows for service-orientated, technology-based and business views, which greatly increases visibility of the entire IT infrastructure in a single pane-of-glass approach.
• Dynamic groups allow for sets of infrastructure to have monitoring applied automatically in a type of ‘policy-based monitoring’.
• Dynamic groups allow for configuring sets of infrastructure to be placed into maintenance mode, either on an ad-hoc basis or scheduled period.

USM allows the operator to drill down into the dynamic groups, to device views where event and metric data is combined to clearly visualise the current operating status of the infrastructure.

We are currently migrating from an IBM Tivoli solution. CA UIM will improve effectiveness of monitoring, increase visibility of IT infrastructure, reduce time to fix (MTR) and lower solution maintenance. In a large organization, CA UIM has the capability to reduce overall FTE substantially.

Parts of the Unified Management Portal are not written in HTML5. I would like all components (Portlets) to be HTML5. This would increase the speed and responsiveness of the site, and possibly improve the appearance.

Improved network monitoring and topology mapping: Although this functionality does exist, it requires enhancement. CA UIM is very accomplished at monitoring the majority of IT infrastructure and is capable of collecting and alerting on the vast majority of metrics across network device vendors. However, the configuration of network device monitoring could be improved. The latest SNMP_Collector, and ICMP (ping) probes only allow for monitoring of discovered devices and are configurable via the web-based Admin Console. The previous equivalent probes were less dynamic but more flexible, being configured via both the Admin Console and the client-based Infrastructure Manager. A combination approach of dynamic and manual network device monitoring would obviously be more beneficial.

As for network topology mapping, this is achieved via disparate pairs of discovery_agent and topology_agent probes located in each network segment gathering device information via ICMP, SNMP, Telnet and SSH. This mechanism actually works really well, but it’s the way the data is collated, interpolated and represented in the topology views which requires attention. Having some predefined views to depict different network layers, the ability to show routing of traffic or bandwidth utilisation would be great. Also, it would be nice if more detailed device information was available via a mouse-over.

Note: I have not used the topology mapping in UIM 8.4, but I’m not aware of any significant improvements.

I have used it for eight years.

One thing to note with this product is that in my experience, when configured and spec’d out correctly, CA UIM is very stable and fully scalable.

Scalability and security comes from a hub-based architecture. Hubs can be scaled horizontally and vertically, and can connect across DMZs or similar secure zones via the use of UIM application-layer SSL tunnels.

The internal UIM agent deployment mechanisms aren’t necessarily suitable for enterprise customers. With the use of BladeLogic or similar software deployment tools, it becomes a very easy and uneventful process. One thing to bear in mind is that the Unix agents are required to be installed as root, or root-equivalent, user to avoid potential issues.

The product support in recent times has improved significantly. I have had issues resolved competently and within a satisfactory timeframe.

The only bugbear is on occasion when reporting a product defect, CA respond that it is working as designed and ask the customer to add an ‘idea’ on the forum to be voted on by the users.

For example, I noticed that when using the process monitoring probe, the Windows memory usage metric was collecting how much memory the process was using as prescribed, whereas the Linux memory usage metric was collecting the ‘virtual’ counter and not the correct ‘resident’ counter. I was initially told that this was by design but after some discussion, CA admitted this was a defect and swiftly added the correct counter to the probe.

I have evaluated and used many monitoring tools, from open-source to enterprise-class solutions and everything in between. They all have good and bad points, but scalability and flexibility seem to be most discussed, followed by stability and security.

CA UIM comes out on top very often as it excels in all four of the above criteria, and is also easy to deploy and comparably simple to operate.

• Scalability: Addressed elsewhere.
• Flexibility: Is achieved via the use of UIM’s REST API available for custom integrations and the ability to build custom monitoring probes using supplied SDKs.
• Stability: Difficult to prove in a POC; however, I can testify that when implemented correctly with appropriate self-monitoring, the tool does not tend to fail without outside influence.
• Security: The solution infrastructure can be connected securely and effectively hardened. The solution is fully multitenant compliant, which means inventory, metrics and events can be isolated between groups of operators. This is particularly useful for MSPs who allow customers to log on and view infrastructure status or service levels.

Several products I have evaluated claim to be multitenant compliant, but are in fact only able to monitor multiple ‘customers’, but not segregate the event and metric data.

CA UIM can be used as a standalone monitoring solution in many small- and medium-size organisations. It tends to be integrated into other CA products for large and enterprise-size organisations, where greater/granular application transaction monitoring is required, more in-depth network monitoring necessary and full service views are essential.

For an enterprise-class infrastructure monitoring tool, I would suggest that it is very straightforward to implement after some basic training.

To paraphrase an unnamed CA UIM Sales guy, ‘When discussing CA UIM implementation times, we tend to talk in weeks and not months’. This was in response to a potential mid-size customer asking how quickly they could get up and running.

For a moderately large and complex server and application monitoring solution, I would suggest that CA UIM would take at least 25% less time to implement over an equivalent IBM Tivoli solution.

I have been involved in both in-house and vendor team implementation scenarios over the years. On this occasion, I'm virtually the sole resource responsible for implementing a 10,000-server solution.

It is likely, almost imperative, that someone new to CA UIM should seek some professional assistance during the design phase, either from the vendor or an independent consultant. Failing this, a CA UIM training course is advisable.

As with all monitoring solutions, prior to implementation, make sure to perform a requirement-gathering exercise, encompassing topics such as 'Infrastructure Functionality', 'Security, Encryption & Resilience', 'Presentation & Reporting', 'Event Handling', 'Integration', as well as all the various types of monitoring such as ‘OS level’, ‘Application’, ‘Database’, ‘Storage & Virtualisation’, etc.

The requirements under each of these headings would should be associated with one or more 'use cases', in order to validate functionality or compliance.

Without the above, it is difficult to know if you have successfully implemented the solution, and what areas are lacking or needing improvement.

The pricing model is modular and based upon level and type of monitoring by quantity.

Create an initial design document to help plan your implementation and identify potential issues beforehand. This document will inevitably evolve throughout the implementation and will provide a reference and a guide.

• CA UIM Solution is very easy and fast to use, it offers both agent-base and agent less monitoring options. UIM have lots of monitoring options that help us to manage our Enterprise heterogeneous monitoring demand.
• Database monitoring - helps us with monitoring critical database instances. We have many different databases from various vendors -- Oracle, SQL, Sybase -- and UIM helps us with managing all of them in one place.
• Infrastructure monitoring - Helps us to manage the data center, critical Ci's and v Center.
• Application monitoring probes - we are using Middleware application probes for monitoring critical apps.

It helps us to monitor critical servers, applications services, etc. We have many databases, hundreds of probes, and thousands of applications. This tool helps us manage all these and gives us insight into what's going on in our infrastructure.

There are several areas for improvement, among them are --

• Reporting capability - We're unable to drill down to the specific data that we'd like. We're also not able to get some data, such as trends, that we want when trying to determine root causes of issues in our applications. This is particularly frustrating because we have so many applications that we use and depend on that we need to know with some certainty what the issues are affecting them.
• End-to-end application monitoring probes function - We're quite large with over 500 probes, and there's no ability in UIM to monitor all of them through our many, many applications. We're relying too much on middleware applications to do this.

There was no issue with the deployment.

There has been no issue with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it.

8/10

I've used them many times, and they were OK.

It's very easy to implement and use. If you want to onboard devices and applications, it's just drag-and-drop. Very user friendly.

In-house.

It has helped us cut manual efforts and reduced manpower. It's helped us with automation. ROI 50%.

This is very good product for monitoring as it has lots of functionalities and probes.

I can use the Drag and Drop feature to build dashboards within minutes.

CA UIM needs some improvement with performance reporting (if we compare it to CA eHealth).

I have been using it since 2014.

No problems; it’s easy to deploy and manage.

CA’s technical support team is very supportive.

My customers were happy with CA eHealth. However, CA announced it would stop selling eHealth to new customers, so we did not have any other option but to sell CA UIM.

Installation is easy and straightforward.

I implemented this product. As I’ve written, this product’s installation is easy and straightforward, so I don’t have any implementation advice.

This product is expensive compared to other vendors (SolarWinds, ManageEngine).

Just follow the prerequisites, and a step-by-step installation guide is available on wiki.ca.com.

• Easy deployment of probes
• Configuration

• Simple architecture
• Lightweight software, which uses less hardware resource

Event correlation: Compared to other tools, it has less out-of-the-box correlation. I agree that any type of customization can be done by LUA scripting. However, an advanced correlation option should also be included out of the box.

I have been using it for two years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

The NAS probe has a performance issue. When there is huge number of incoming events, NAS fails to process them.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

The solution provided by CA Support (Nimsoft) is not fully trustable or reliable. Sometimes we have received good advice.

Technical support is 5/10.

We previously used Tivoli and CA NSM, which are outdated and are no longer supported. Hence, the organization decided to use UIM.

Initial setup was simple.

I implemented it myself.

It’s easy to implement. A good solution for medium environments.

There is a large selection of Application specific probes available. We are primarily a Microsoft shop, and most all of our needs are covered with what is offered. This relies on backend sources such as PerfMon counters, event viewer, services and similar. It covers our basic monitoring needs in this regard.

We use this in a Multi-Tenant environment as an MSP. Prior to UIM deployment, we were using SCOM which was overly complicated and difficult to manage. UIM fulfilled our needs at the time by allowing simpler deployment and management.

Although it is better than SCOM, it still needs major improvements to usability. If you need a rapid deployment solution, this is not the best tool for that job. You can create Super Packages which allow you to pre-configure Probes, but it still requires a lot of invested time to set up and still needs customized to each environment if they are not identical. UIM and its agent/probes rely on JRE7u45. Support is not offered for any newer versions at this time. I would like to see better rapid deployment options, interface updates, and less reliance on Java.

We have been using this solution since before CA bought it from Nimsoft. I have been using it for about a year.

We have run into instances where probes are no longer supported and are integral to our monitoring, and there is not a bulk solution for replacing with the new supported probe. If you are using the SSL Tunneling in the Hub Probe, Support has been unable to identify a method to monitor the tunnel status which is built into the Windows Service. Many times, the tunnel will experience communication issues and being queueing thousands of alarms, alerts, qos but we have no way of being notified until we notice we are no longer getting metrics. The Hub probe has not been reliable for us in the past several versions across various sites and we often need to work with their developers to resolve issues. SAN and Networking appliance compatibly is severely lacking (Dell EQL, Nimble, StorSimple, Cisco ASA, and more all have issues or have no support). You can custom create via SNMP MIBs, but this requires manual implementation.

Support has been very responsive to our requests. They understand the limitations of the software and do their best to accommodate our needs and issues, but the software just doesn’t seem to be meant for smaller businesses and needs a lot of hands on attention.

We previously used SCOM which is similar in many regards. This was the first product we evaluated and chose it mainly because they offered to customize it to fit our needs. Other vendors were not as responsive to our requests, although I feel they may have been a better fit overall.

It was not straightforward. There are many modifications you need to make to text based configuration files that are not well documented is deployment instructions. We have multiple CA solutions that were not easy to integrate. This required and still requires time with their developers to resolve issues.

We had an outside company assist with the installation. I would recommend getting as much hands on time as possible with an expert. UIM is not intuitive, there is a high learning curve.

If you have a large scale deployment or resell services and have a dedicated administrator with java dev experience, pricing may be suitable for you. CA is one of the more expensive solutions, and not one of the best in its category.

UIM is showing its age, and need a major overhaul to keep up with competitors. I would recommend using other solutions.

Custom Dashboard is one of the best features of the product because it allows you to bring great value to people who are not technical. It gives them visibility over their infrastructure and the ability to cross-reference that information with business data. It's also good for big screens to show the power of the product, providing a great vision of the orientated services.

With the SLM feature, you can transform any collected metric into a Service Level Objective that affects a Service Level Agreement. You can then predict when your SLA will be below the specified marks.

Since it supports a wide range of different monitoring technologies, it allowed us to turn off GUIs from other tools and consolidate them into it, making it a single console, plus the dashboards do a great job of showing us what is happening.

With the increased amount of data it has to collect, a different approach to data storage would be nice, perhaps something similar to a NoSQL instead of a relational method. But this is something to be studied, of course C.A will choose a method that is capable of delivering performance and integrity.

We've been using it for almost three years now.

No problems at all so far with deployment, but you just need to follow the documentation carefully.

No problems at all so far with stability, if you happen to have a problem, just open a support ticket and C.A will try to help you as fast as they can.

Depending on the amount of data you intend to collect, the database to store it all may get large. Other than that, the product supports big numbers regarding scalability.

Customer service is good, most of the times you get the answer you need really quick, it will have situations that you'll need to wait for a longer period for solution (cases that require development), but it gets resolved at some point.

I hardly had any unsolved problem. They usually reply within SLA, but the solution may take some time depending on the difficulty of the problem.

I’ve used other monitoring solutions before. I chose CA UIM because it’s pretty good at what it does, makes your life a lot easier with fast deployment options, and CA is always improving it a lot.

The initial setup was straightforward, really fast, and simple. It was just "Next-Next-Finish" for Windows installs or as simple as just answering some questions on Linux installs.

We implemented it ourselves. My advice is that you should always read the requirements and compatibility guides before implementing as it has everything you need for a smooth installation process. Don’t try and guess the OS and DB versions by yourself or try to use the latest releases. It may take some time for the last release support, but the product is usually up-to-date. Always read the manuals before going full hands-on with some probes because it can save you a lot of time.

I have a rough estimate that the ROI is around 30%.

You should always send your number of devices and other relevant information to a representative partner or CA directly, because CA UIM has some differentiated methods depending on what you have in your infrastructure, but they provide you with the correct questions so that you have the needed amount of licenses.

The product is one of the best in the market. I can say that because of 10+ years of experience with monitoring solutions for infrastructure. Even more, it's better when you start talking about the enterprise level because of its great scalability. But this product is simple enough to be used by small-to-medium and medium-to-big companies. They offer also a free version called SNAP that anyone can try it out.

The cohesiveness of the product. It's versatile and easy of use.

We're monitoring servers, network devices, storage components, load balancers, phone systems, virtual infrastructure, applications, etc. The various SDKs are great and have also allowed us to write custom probes for anything else we've needed.

Again, the ease of use and the administration, I'm a single UIM administrator, and I can administrate the whole product from reporting, systems monitoring, network monitoring, it's a very practical solution.

Maybe a little bit more on the reporting side. It does integrate with a product called iReport, but that's very cumbersome to use. It's a very full featured product, but something you'd have to work with every day to fullyleverage.

Like with any big product, it's had it's ups and downs. The last few releases have been outstanding. The stability has really come along way in the last few years.

We've increased the product's footprint twice and it's rose to the challenge each time. We've integrating multiple other companies that have been acquired with this product. It's just been a fantastic solution.

The tech support has been very well. Sometimes it takes a little time, if it has to go thought the back end support. For the most part, very happy with it.

We had numerous solutions. We had SolarWinds, we had WhatsUp Gold, we had a lot of different things like that. With CA UIM, we were able to roll all those into a single monitoring platform. It's not nine different products that are configured to work together, it's one cohesive central standard product.

We actually used a CA support to help us roll out the initial product, and it took the learning curve way down. I was able to watch and ask questions. I was really engaged in that process with them, so that when they left, and it was deployed, I was able to pick it up and I've done multiple deployments my own since then.

When selecting a vendor I'm looking for: support, are they going to be there if I need them, the maturity (are they mature enough that it's not going to be all over the board), and consistency.

I think I evaluated fifty different products before we went with CA UIM. It was just the out of the box functionality was there. They had probes for everything in our infrastructure. Linux, Windows, it works just as well on either. We have a heterogeneous environment. Everything was there.

The deployment and everything went really well. The biggest feature we've seen is the ability to track availability. Availability reports, how's the product performing, not just up down like ping monitoring. We can get in there, we can pull metrics, wherever we need them, it's just very easy to use.

It is probably an 8/10, just because there's always room for improvement. A solid eight because it's always been able to do anything we've asked of it. We've done custom integrations, written custom probes, and it's always there, anything we need to do, it's fully capable.

Recommendation to peers: do your homework. Really get in there, really look, set up a sample. Again, I can not say enough the cohesiveness of the product. It's not multiple different piece meal products that have to be configured to work together, it's all one product, under the hood, and it does what it says it does.

• Scalable monitoring
• Integration of all monitoring on one tool.
• Simplicity on creating dashboards.

Optimizes delivery of managed IT services with CA Nimsoft Monitor.

Implementations, operations and technology departments are benefiting most from this tool.

3 years

Yes, at the first time of implementation, we encountered many issues with the tool, all due to a wrong configuration of the disks on database server.

Yes, it was unstable for couple months due to the main component that inserts the QoS data on Nimsoft database.

No

On scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), 4.

On scale from 1-5 (1=worst, 5=best), 4.

Yes, the main reason for change were high support costs and a difficult management tool.

It was complex, due to the configuration that we already had with another tool, implementing everything again took us longer than planned; it really is a difficult tool to configure, specifically in our infrastructure.

Vendor Team, the provider level is poor, finally was configured by a CA Engineer.

CopperEgg, Splunk.

Discuss whether it is feasible to do so through this tool, because the administration is complex, I recommend that due to the integrations with network monitoring, servers, SAN, VMware, etc., it's worth buying.