SYSVIEW Performance Intelligence Reviews

Almost all of the features are valuable but specifically z/OS (base), CICS, IMS and MQ.

The TCP/IP feature is used a little, and the CAPTURE feature occasionally, helping a lot when dealing with some issues.

One of the most important usage for us is implementation of alarms based on product-provided metrics (especially on loops). In CICS monitoring area, we even use autocancel functions based on threshold settings.

Perhaps the IMS monitoring part could be improved (at least according IMS specialists).

I have been using it for over three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Most issues have been minor errors or performance issues (most of those were handled by appropriate parameter settings).

I have not encountered any scalability issues; setting is quite granular.

Technical support is very skilled and helpful.

I previously used the BMC MainView family of products. We switched to CA mostly for cost reasons.

Initial installation and setup is quite straightforward but after that, some customization and planning is necessary if you want to get the best out of the product. But the customization part (or parameters for customization) is quite well documented.

Before choosing this product, the IBM solution was another option under consideration.

In previous releases, the default setting was consuming too much CPU perhaps, but since 14.1, this was tuned quite well. Still, I would advise checking the interval setting in SCHD* parmlib members in case you want to keep CPU usage by SYSVIEW as low as possible. Using ZIIP is also good thing, where applicable.

Our data center uses this as the main product for mainframe system monitoring for hundreds of clients. The integration of CA OPS/MVS to alter and automate the action by threshold setup is the most valuable feature of this product.

We are targeting the standardization of our mainframe system monitoring product for clients and CA SYSVIEW is our first option, and packaged into our total solution for our mainframe service. Our client can use this product without additional cost while other products additional costs.

I would expect this product to be integrated with mainframe Linux system monitoring which is more popular in our mainframe solutions.

I've supported this product for about six years. My company has been using this product for 20 years. We're planning to upgrade to R14.1 in next half a year to support our z/OS 2.2 upgrade.

In general this product is stable and no major issues are reported.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

9/10 - I can always get quick responses for our request and for new release issues we get dedicated experts and coordinators to support our upgrades.

Our client used IBM OMEGAMON and other monitoring products previously. We recommended that they convert to CA SYSVIEW which is our global standard, and has a lower cost and full functionality of our standard mainframe solutions.

It is straightforward and we can bring up this product with most default values. We have packaged this product to our SOS repository and this makes it easy to implement to all regions automatically.

I am only technical support and have no idea on pricing and licensing. We have a dedicated team for this.

We are evaluating the IBM OMEGAMON product which many of our clients are using. We recommended that they consider CA SYSVIEW first with no additional cost. For IBM OMEGAMON, there is an additional cost involved.

I recommend this product to others due to its easy implementation, comprehensive functionality and good organization of documents.

The CICS option is used very frequently. For myself, I mostly use the z/OS part. I also really like the XSYSTEM functions in case I'm having trouble logging on to an LPAR.

We have automated the monitoring of our CICS regions and CICS transactions. This leaves much less manual monitoring for the CICS people than before.

The creation of dashboards could be made much easier, such as the way it is done in BMCs MainView for example. Currently, you need to do some programming to create dashboards, which is time consuming and error prone. A dashboard you can create in seconds in MainView takes much, much, more time to create in SYSVIEW.

We have never had any issues with stability. The product runs without any problems. On the rare occasion that there is a problem, the recovery is really good, so there was never an outage of SYSVIEW at all.

We have had no issues with scalability. Additionally the product needs fewer CPU resources than other products.

The technical support is very good. You always get an immediate response as to who is taking care of your issue, and you get regular feedback of what’s going on. Normally the cases are solved in a much shorter time frame compared to competitors.

We previously used Omegamon. I think we switched because of financial reasons. Probably CA made a quite good offer, but this was before I started here, so I don’t know about the details.

The setup is not really complicated, but there are many configurations options, where you can easily get lost.

I can’t say anything about pricing and licensing as I’m just the techie and have nothing to do with contracts.

The decision for switching to SYSVIEW was made long before I started here.

Start with a small and easy configuration and get it running. Make yourself familiar with the product, then switch on additional features one at a time and get familiar with it. Otherwise, you may get lost in options, features, and parameters. The product is quite comprehensive.

The CICS and DATACOM optional components are the most valuable.

We particularly like the versatility of the product. It can be used in REXX, batch or interacting with automation, CA-OPS/MVS interaction is particularly good. For example, OPS/MVS will trigger events that will check SMS storage groups through SYSVIEW and email reports on volume information

It needs better documentation explaining the different possibilities of what you can do with the product.

I've been using it for over 15 years.

We've not had any issues but it's worth testing the product out fully before implementing live into production.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

8-9/10 - CA's whole support offering has improved vastly since the 90's.

To reduce licencing costs, we merged other products. We needed SYSVIEW as this was the best if not the only monitoring tool for Datacom. We used SYSVIEW to replace CA-LOOK, SAS, MAINVIEW, and could also be used to replace SDSF.

The initial setup is very easy. It is a bit tricky if you have to perform customizations, as migration can be tough, but things improved a lot from v13.0 as you can now have in-house written information in your own libraries and transfer them to the new versions much easier.

We find the predictive analytics to be the most valuable feature. We are using this a lot with CA Workload Automation iDASH and it is really making a difference for everyone involved.

I wouldn't say that it's improved the way we function, but that doesn’t mean it won’t and we really feel that so far it’s working well.

It's a complex solution, but we haven’t run into issues yet. I have heard of issues from others, but we haven’t seen them. Then again, we are not yet using cross-instance job dependencies in Workload Automation, so we're not sure whether there may be an issue there.

It seems stable enough at this stage, but we haven’t unleashed it fully yet. It seems like it will do well.

It is totally scalable. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use it. Scalability is an essential requirement.

Technical support is knowledgeable and has improved greatly over the years as previously it wasn’t great. When we open even low-priority cases, they respond quickly.

We originally wanted to use JAWS, but we figured eventually that we would go with CA because of what they had to offer.

Initial setup was complex.

We compared it with JAWS. We chose CA because it just had everything we needed.

Have a good service contract. We can call on their engineers to come as we paid for a certain amount of time and you need someone to show you.

The most valuable thing to us about SYSVIEW is the overall scale of it. They have a lot of jobs with a number of conditions that go into the overall job management. This gives it the ability to scale and deal with various job dependencies.

It's intuitive to use and you don't need a lot of expertise, but you need to know how to manage it.

I think some of the messaging from SYSVIEW could be improved. For example, how do you know if there’s a real issue that needs to be addressed? Is there something that identifies a problem in your configuration? Is there something for which you may need pro services?

While we do have consoles, what we attempt to do is to get those alerts integrated or reported into our monitors, and it wasn’t a very clean integration. We tried things like syslogging, but this required a lot of massaging and it's still not perfect.

After the complexity of the initial implementation, we've had no issues with deployment.

The system is extremely stable.

When making that call to technical support, the triage is sometimes a little rough to get you to someone who will effectively help you. When trying to solve some performance issues, it was better for us to engage and get them side-by-side. There were times when we had to go outside of CA with known experts.

We migrated from our older solution to this one. This is much easier to manage. Our previous solution was heavy with a lot of baggage which required a lot of resource commitment and getting experts in.

The initial setup was complex and accompanied with the fact that we didn’t have a lot of latitude. Also, our workload manager gave us added complexities, so we didn’t get to do a lot of greenfield stuff, requiring a bit of massaging.

I would say first and foremost, understand your business rules and understand what you are trying to accomplish and your requirements to the fullest. Then make sure they are articulated so you can make a good decision. A lot of time, folks look at a product pipeline and not looking at their requirements.

Being able to see and to have oversight of everything that happens on the job is critical, and this is what we get with SYSVIEW.

It's really great to be able to compare historical reports, as it really helps our organizational functions. This feature is hard to find in other products.

I think we are going to 12.2 really soon. I'm looking forward to being able to use more than one job name to grab more information at one time.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It’s very stable and very fast. So far we are very happy about this and we hope it continues.

It is very scalable and has adapted really well over our years of usage.

We seem to get our answers in a timely manner so technical support seems to be working well. We have no complaints.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. We use the CSM to implement it time and time again, and overall it’s just extremely quick and very user-friendly.

It’s definitely better than SDFF and JCL as they are going nowhere. I haven’t used any other products, but if you want to keep looking back and to see historical data and find out about yourself, then this is the product for you.

A lot of what I use it for is compiling and debugging, and I think it’s beautiful. It lets me know what went wrong with jobs that I've run for testing.

Using SYSVIEW means we have to bug our tech support a lot less. It lets us see what’s running, what conflict we have in jobs, and where we don’t have to bother.

Any functionality that I thought it could improve on is in the most recent release. It is a complex system, though, as every view has a different setting panel. This can be overwhelming for someone coming in, but once you get a grasp of it, it gets easier.

We've had no issues with deployment.

We have never had any trouble with stability.

We've had no trouble with scalability.

Technical support has been very helpful. But the community of users has been particularly helful. Someone even helped me ASAP, which was huge.

The initial setup was complex, as this is a complex system. Each view has its own settings panel, which can be overwhelming.

You should have at least have one person who is up to date with the current release. This can help a lot with setting up the solution and implementation. I also recommend to work hard on becoming familiar with this product, as it is complicated at times.