BMC TrueSight Operations Management Reviews

We are using it to monitor open systems and some iSeries systems.

TrueSight has helped to reduce IT operations costs.

The solution has also helped to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect app performance. The solution has application monitoring called Application Performance Management. It's an improvement on the old, traditional TMR. It's integrated within the TrueSight solution. It will notify regarding application performance and report issues with applications.

One of the valuable features is the integration of the monitoring and the Console access.

We manage our open systems. Using the TrueSight platform we can monitor server performance and notify the customers using the integrated ticketing for events. We can let them know if there are any issues with a server, or application, or database.

The solution's event management capabilities are a strong point for TrueSight. They are based on the previous BMC Event Manager which was very stable and pretty powerful. It was an excellent product.

One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy.

In addition, it needs some details such as auditing inside the product - there is no auditing for the policies.

It's pretty stable. TrueSight uses a major BMC product called Patrol, and Patrol has been around for many years. It's one of the best products and it's pretty stable.

In addition to the traditional Patrol Agent, BMC TrueSight added the predictive functionality so we can predict a trend instead of having a static threshold. We can let people know, in addition to what is happening, what is going to happen. We can predict that and have the ability to do a cost analysis.

BMC's technical support is pretty good. They do have ups and downs. In the past, it was very good but there was a certain period of time where they had support from overseas, from India. The quality of support was not as good as the traditional one, but I do see that it is getting better now.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. The documentation was pretty good. The deployment was not very buggy, and the Patrol Agent was pretty stable.

We deployed it ourselves.

We did a comparison with a different product on the market. We had a CA product which I believe was called Spectrum. We compared BMC with that and InSoft. We felt that the BMC product was much better than CA's product. We also had an HPE product in the old days, and BMC is a better solution.

We had BMC for a long time. We had multiple products which we compared, and BMC is a better solution, so we removed the CA product. BMC is better in terms of support. It takes fewer people to support, it's easier to configure, and easier to change the configuration. It's also easier to change the special settings. And it's easier to maintain.

BMC products are very good. All products have pros and cons. For example, all the enterprise monitoring solutions are not really set up for multi-tenancy. BMC products are very stable and the support is good, and the configuration, especially, is easier to do. I think it will come down in pricing, although the cost is not something I am not involved in.

We started using TrueSight in the early stages. Like every product, TrueSight, as a new product of BMC, was going to take some until BMC improved it, got all the bugs out, got all the features added. It's not perfect but I do see improvement. When a product is in its infancy, it will always have some issues. I do see BMC trying to improve that. It's getting better now. It's pretty stable. It's a very good tool for traditional open systems and mid-range.

I would rate TrueSight Operations Management at eight out of ten. It's not a ten, because, as I mentioned, it is missing some capabilities in HA solutions. In the past, we had load- balancing HA. Now, it has to rely on an external load balancer to achieve HA. 

But I have to say that my view is limited because we do not have the whole suite of BMC products. There are certain things we do not own, like automation and deployment. If we had the full BMC suite, I would probably give it a ten.

My customers use it to monitor their enterprise and define their services. With a lot of the AIOps features and things like Service Impact Manager, my customers are able to reduce their mean time to repair (MTTR). MTTR is very important for companies who are reliant on their critical IT applications.

Sometimes, a lot of customers, if they're not using the products, don't know that they have an IT issue unless a customer contacts them, and says “I've got a problem.” With TSOM, they are able to be more proactive. The IT department gets alerted more quickly, and sometimes, they can resolve issues before the customer even knows that there is an issue.

This solution helps our customers to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect app performance. It has good monitoring all the way from storage up to the servers. Now, all the things I'm seeing in the cloud are very good, as well.

A lot of the integrations with all the other BMC products are fantastic, because it has a great discovery tool which can model applications and integrate those into TSOM. Then TSOM, once an alert is detected, can automatically create tickets in the ITSM system, which is Helix.

Its event management capabilities are very open and flexible. I haven't seen a use case scenario with a customer that we couldn't actually solve the problem for, so it's really good. There are some interesting things that happen in an enterprise network (things that people don't normally expect), and the event management product is very flexible. You can solve problems as far as your imagination can go with it.

I would like to see a little more out-of-the-box event correlation and expanded AIOps type capabilities. Where you can train your artificial intelligence operations to be able to memorize an issue once you encounter one scenario, so if you encounter that same problem, you can get to the root cause very quickly.

It is very stable.

It's very scalable. It is horizontally scalable. Right now, I'm hearing good things from the product team that they want to do some things as far as vertical scalability, as well.

I really don't have interactions with support myself directly. Some people who work for my company, they do that. 

The technical support does a good job. I used to be a BMC consultant back until 2013, and in those times, the support was very good.

It does help reduce IT operations costs. A lot of times, people are doing things manually. They might have a network operating center where they just monitor screens all the time, so you can reduce labor costs. From a scale perspective, if they have thousands and thousands of servers in their data centers, you can determine which ones are more critical over the other ones and focus on the critical pieces, not the pieces which don't matter.

I have customers who use other products. Sometimes, they ask me to evaluate other products that they're considering.

I am working with one large company right now who is looking at the ServiceNow Event Management product, and it's a little immature right now. Therefore, I told them about that. There are also other products that feed into the ServiceNow product set which are very expensive and very difficult to implement. This is one place where I have made the recommendation of BMC, specifically over ServiceNow.

Understand your use cases. Take a look at the use case to product fit. I don't really recommend many other products. We are sort of committed to the BMC product set because it's good. We have a lot of experience with it, and came from a company who was acquired by BMC Software. The product manager for that company, April Hickel, she's done very well. She is the product manager for TSOM now. I know her, her innovative capabilities, and her whole team. I've been working with them for a long time, so I know not only that the product is good, but the roadmap is good, and the people behind it are very good.

If you have a good imagination you can solve anything, but you need the right tool to be able to apply that to.

I use the solution to monitor servers, databases, Windows, Linux, and web services. 

The solution helps my customer monitor the Oracle database for logs. 

The solution should improve predicting events and flaws in service. It also needs to improve integration with other systems. 

I have been working with the solution for four years. 

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is stable. 

The tool's support is good. 

Positive

I would rate BMC TrueSight Operations Management a ten out of ten. 

We do work as independent consultants, but mainly the focus is on a crisp and reliable base layer for Service Level and Business Service Management with a working CMDB. In order to map the data and events correctly, you have to have a solid foundation.

The Event Management is outstanding; still is the most interesting part of the product.

The sizing (which is difficult), the maintenance of it and the upgrade paths. This is a difficult area which is not easy to cover, as every client has a different approach of implementing the product.

Stability is mainly a sizing issue. The product needs to be correctly sized and architectured. For this, you need skill and experience. If you follow this advice, you will have no issues. If you implement without a plan or architecture, you will be lost.

This is related to stability. You need to know what you have, then all will go well.

Customer Service:

People buy from people. If your account rep is a good one, all goes well. You cannot answer that easily. I have seen light and shadow, as one could say.

Technical Support:

Support has room for improvement. Very often, you find yourself answering the very same questions over and over again. I would give it a 6-7.

Some of the clients I have came from other solutions; mainly because they were outdated they switched, or because they were discontinued. The same applies in the other direction, especially if the clients had the wrong account rep.

Initial setup seems to be easy. The deeper you go, the more you need to know about the product, especially about its agents. Some functions are under-represented, especially the Agent Consoles, which are a little too basic compared to the old versions. So you still use a mix of versions which leads to no savings in hardware at all. HA setups are complex (best to use VMotion). Ports are not that well documented. Again, experience is the point. If you know the products under the hood for a long time, you will do good; otherwise, you might run into problems. This is the same for lots of products in the area. If you know what you do, all goes well.

We normally do these kinds of implementations; I am a consultant, not a real end-user, as the clients no longer have the expertise on board (no matter which product they use).

Monitoring is like an insurance. If you have it, you feel safe. If you do not have it and run into an accident, you wished you had it.

Use conservative figures. In terms of hardware, monitored servers and also effort. The product is not cheap. But as with other products, you get what you pay for.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated other options, and we still do. Mainly, it ends in a mixture of tools, and using open source-based tools reporting up into it, like Zabbix, OP5, Nagios XI or something like that.

Estimate enough time for the implementation. Never trust anyone who tells you that you will be finished in three months. Calculate at least one year for all tasks.

Monitoring applications and servers. We also monitor individual pieces of management software, like WebLogic.

Proactively monitoring 24/7/365 on all of our servers. This allows technical staff to focus on other areas and our operators can monitor the systems.

The tailoring of the knowledge modules has been particularly useful as I can streamline the agents to only report on critical events.

The knowledge modules could be more lightweight in size. At present, the installation packages can be quite large.

Our company is currently moving to consolidate the different programs we use. We regularly use Patrol and TrueSight, both are BMC products, providing the same functionality although completely different solutions. We are evaluating which is the right product for us and we're taking everything into consideration because the economy is not great and we have budget issues. Our business requires several complex configurations of systems; web servers, databases and processing environments. All of them must work together under proper performance and this is where we need a complex product like TrueSight. 

The business event manager tool that consolidates detailed information from a single instance of equipment is the most valuable thing for me. It provides support for the business tools and the IT services which come from several systems. Some are replicated and service tools provide the same functionality for some things. The end user service is made up of a lot of systems and it's what I'm interested in, and how I discovered that BMC TrueSight is good for us. I don't use the event management or monitoring capabilities, I work with user management capabilities. 

I think the solution is overly complex and requires a lot of resources. 

I've been using this solution for around 18 months. 

I haven't noticed any issues with stability. We sometimes have to call for failures or questions but on the whole, it's fine.

There are no concerns about scalability, it's performing well. We have deployed it where we have the most critical applications. We have changed our approach to new architecture and mobile. Instead of big servers, we have now deployed formal servers for web services. We're working on increasing the number of servers available. Our only concern is that it requires some investment at the beginning of the project and we have budget concerns. 

We don't use BMC technical support directly, we go through a partner. 

I am involved in the planning and the development of the solution, so from my perspective the initial setup is a little complex but not in itself, rather because managing the user services requires access to a CMDB. To get the best from this kind of product requires other processes and tools to be aligned with it. The consideration is that these tools provide very good functionality but getting the benefits requires other processes and tools. Our deployment is still in progress, we've been working on it for six months using a consultant from a third party, a BMC partner.

We haven't yet established what the final cost would be for licensing this solution, we're still working on that. 

These kinds of products provide benefits if you have other processes that require alignment with other IT solutions, like in sales and deployment and CMDB. Without that, you don't get the full benefits. At the end of every phase we stop and check the software products before starting the next phase of the project.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We use it to scan and monitor our server environment. This allows us to monitor devices which are introduced as they are spun up, to see that there are no unknown devices, then we can verify uptimes as well as patching as another source of keeping devices in compliance.

Allows reliable access to server hardware info, uptime statuses, current patching, and much more. This allows us to make sure we have an updated inventory, as we feed this into our inventory system along with info from Atrium CMDB.

The ability to pull hosts together to show what processes are running, so it can be used for change management.

More modules for less popular applications and better documentation. Documentation can be great at times, but lacking in other areas.

We utilize BMC TSOM to monitor our entire infrastructure and all applications that lie therein. Our infrastructure is hosted both in our datacenters and in cloud hosted services (AWS and Azure).

It has provided us with a single location to host all events to be viewed/monitored by our NOC. This has greatly helped them to streamline their processes.

TSOM's ability to consolidate alerts into a single location and provide filtering of alerts is great. It is very helpful to be able to apply rule-based routing to alerts as well.

• BMC's solutions for cloud monitoring (monitoring of AWS and Azure resources) are very poor in stability and customization. 
• BMC's online documentation is often incorrect or incomplete.