BMC Helix Discovery Reviews

The solution can be used on event management flows to automate items. It has mapping capabilities to help the organization to see what they have in terms of infrastructure. You're able to see if there's an outage or certain KPIs, and so on. It can do many useful things.

The data models are the most useful aspect of the solution.

The product has been quite stable. 

There are plenty of item capabilities that make the solution excellent.

The technical support is excellent and extremely helpful, even though they know we are not continuing with their product.

The scalability is pretty good.

The deployment is very fast.

The monitoring tools could be more stable. Their TrueSight offering isn't as good as it could be.

I've worked with BMC Remedy products since 2008 and Helix Discovery since it was deployed in 2019. It's been approximately one and a half years. 

The solution is a giant when it comes to enterprise service management. With ServiceNow Discovery, you have to have it in every region or in every data center, with a mid-server available in order to be able to scan the devices. Right now, we have only 2 servers. Once we move to Service Now, we'll have 27 mid servers in all of the locations to be able to scan what we can scan today using Discovery.

The scalability is much better in BMC Discovery rather than Service Now as you can integrate with basically everything - including APIs and tools. While in ServiceNow, you have to build patterns to be able to do the same tasks. It's not as out-of-the-box.

We have approximately 185,000 users. Ours is a massive worldwide company.

We will not increase usage. Unfortunately, our plan is to de-install it in January.

Technical support has been great. 

We use premier support, which BMC offers, and I have never met more professional people than those who work in India. They are great. Even now, when they know that we are going to de-install their product, they are helpful. They reach out to us and offer help, even inside information, like how should we do certain tasks. They offer so much help. I'm impressed with them.

While we are still working with BMC products, we are going to switch now to ServiceNow.

For BMC Discovery, it took approximately two to three hours to be able to open all the ports and firewalls and stuff like that and to install the application. The application itself took five minutes, and therefore it was not so hard. 

If you compare it to ServiceNow, it's approximately the same. Mostly, it was internal processes that slowed us down. The installations themselves are very, very fast.

I have a team that backs me up. I'm working as a service asset and configuration management lead. I've got a managed services team sitting in Bangalore that helps me with the operational side.

I handled the implementation myself. I did not need the assistance of any consultants or integrators or any outside help at all.

We do need to pay a licensing fee, although I'm not sure what the exact cost is. You have a floating license, which does not cost anything. However, when it comes to fixed licenses, such as licensing for administrators and stuff like that, you have to pay.

I can say that they are far less expensive than ServiceNow, which is quite costly.

We're just customers and end-users. We don't have a business relationship with BMC.

We're using the latest versions of the solution within our organization.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployment models at this time.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten overall.

Our use cases are service desk and service management.

We use it for all ITSM processes.

The license model could be more flexible and cheaper pricing.

We've been on BMC for over ten years. We use on-prem Delight, DWP build of BMC Helix Discovery, which is version 22.06.

It is a stable solution. The stability is okay. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement. 

Scalability is really costly. So, it's not really scalable for us. We're a company of 5500, but we have maybe 150 to 200 licenses. 

We plan to increase the number of users. 

The customer service and support are okay.

We have BMC Helix, but we're looking to replace it with a fresh service.

The initial setup is complicated.

The deployment can't be done in-house, so we used an integrator.

We need five admins and engineers for the deployment and maintenance of the solution.

The solution is really expensive. We have a yearly license model. 

If we want to do anything extra, we have to pay extra costs.

Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

I use BMC Helix Discovery to search for devices on a network and monitor networks.

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that it is easy to install and deploy. In general, BMC Helix Discovery works properly. The solution helps solve problems, so I have never witnessed any high-end problems.

I faced some minor problems with the product, but BMC updates Helix Discovery every month, which makes the product work very well.

The solution's scalability is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are needed.

I have been using BMC Helix Discovery for a year and a half. My company has a partnership with BMC Helix Discovery.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

My company provides support services for BMC Helix Discovery. My company has deployed BMC Helix Discovery in twenty different companies.

My company can be considered as an enterprise-sized business.

My company provides support services for BMC Helix Discovery. Though my company has dealt with various cases related to BMC products, we have specifically dealt with any scenarios related to BMC Helix Discovery.

I rate the support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I don't know if my company used another tool before BMC Helix Discovery.

BMC Helix Discovery is easy to install.

I rate the initial setup a seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model. The solution can also deployed on the cloud.

The deployment phase takes a lot of time if you use the cluster version of the solution. The deployment process takes around half a day if you download the product on one server. In general, using the product's cluster version, which includes three machines simultaneously, takes a day and a half.

I don't know about the prices attached to BMC Helix Discovery since it is an area dealt with by managers.

I don't know if my company was involved in any evaluation process before selecting BMC Helix Discovery. I came to know about ITSM tools in detail only after joining my current company.

My company loves using the solution.

Big companies usually want to learn about their inventories, so they use BMC Helix Discovery. There are other software products or ITSM tools similar to BMC Helix Discovery in the market to deal with inventory. In BMC Remedy ITSM, you can raise two support tickets at once. BMC is a software in which all its products are linked and work together.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

I sell the product as a part of the pre-sales team in my organization.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its application dependency mapping.

The product is not fully automated. The solution should add a little more automation for vertical mapping.

I have been using the solution for seven to eight years.

The solution is one of the best products in the market when it comes to stability.

The solution is scalable. I rate the scalability an eight to nine out of ten.

The licensing fee is very low.

I have sold service management tools like BMC Helix and ServiceNow.

The product can be deployed as an on-premise solution or cloud solution. Overall, I rate the solution an eight to nine out of ten.

BMC Helix Discovery is used extensively for security, software assets, and typical CMDB usage.

The most valuable feature of BMC Helix Discovery is it operates well. It is well known and has gained recognition for its software.

I have been using BMC Helix Discovery for approximately 10 years.

BMC Helix Discovery is a stable solution.

A couple of years ago, we started scanning the public cloud parts from the solution. It's a good setup. BMC Helix Discovery is scalable.

Everyone that has access to the CMDB can run reports for their systems, we have approximately 2500 users. We try to keep the users of the system as low as possible because it contains all our data on our infrastructure. We don't want everyone using it, but then we have reports that we can run with the authorization, and that way we can access data for the systems that we own or running. 

The support from BMC Helix Discovery can improve, it takes a long time before we receive any feedback. It can take days to months sometimes.

The initial setup of BMC Helix Discovery is straightforward. The full implementation process took approximately three to four months.

We had consultants that helped us implement BMC Helix Discovery and then once they completed it they handed it over to us to operate.

We have two people that do the maintenance and support of the solution.

We have seen a return on our investment many times over. We run the software audits in 15 minutes when it previously took months because we needed to contact every responsible person and ask if they are running the software. Now we can click a report and receive all the software deployed in the company. It is huge savings

We are on a three-year agreement with BMC Helix Discovery to use the solution. There are not any additional fees other than the standard license.

I rate the price of BMC Helix Discovery a three out of five.

My advice to others is if they have a business use care for this solution then I would recommend it.

I rate BMC Helix Discovery a nine out of ten.

The modeling, service mapping. The start anywhere application mapping approach is actually a really good solution for those who use map services.

The CMDB could be improved. Getting data from the CMDB is the greatest challenge. 

Also, integration with the system, the platform itself, can be difficult. For best results, you need to integrate with internal vendors. 

I have been using this solution for roughly six years. 

BMC provides great support. As managed service support, they are gold. It's not the product itself, it's the managed service. They make this product; they can do whatever you want. They can build everything — it's perfect.

BMC is available for a reasonable price compared to ServiceNow — it's half the price. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

BMC Discovery for our customers is a tool that you can put in your data center to discover all the different data center tooling for servers, physical or virtual, storage, etc. Or, BMC offers a cloud-based solution, which can also do the same level detail in your data center. In addition, it now has the features to be able to go and discover things on Azure, AWS, GCloud, etc.

If a customer has a spread out enterprise support center, then maybe they have a main data center, a backup data center, and a colocation, so they need to be able to know what's in each environment without having to go to five or six teams, like the network or storage team.

Having one solution, one pane glass, saying, "Here is what's in A, B and C." It helps with a level of capacity management decision-making, "Do we need to grow this solution? Do we need to reduce this solution?" It helps with understanding disaster recovery and business continuity. "If we lose data center B are we still okay?" In terms of supporting our application and our customers who use these applications.

One of the customer areas that I deal with is healthcare. One of our customers had split their electronic health records system across three data centers, and they needed to make sure that each module of the EHR was still up and functional regardless of what was going on. So, our Discovery solution was able to go into the data center and show all the different pieces which made up that software, then where that was in terms of if they were doing virtual server migrations and being able to track the assets related to all that to show a service model. This helped a number of areas: financial management, disaster planning, in the areas of general change management, and recording incidents against the service.

1. It is agentless, which means you don't have to install anything on all the different pieces of hardware that you are looking to discover.
2. It now comes with a very flexible deployment solution, whether you want to keep it inside your data center or want to have the cloud, depending on if you're cloud forward or not.
3. The speed at which it's able to collect a wide-range of information, then make it useful for you, like asset management, knowledge management, and incident management. 

Those would probably be the three main tenants of why Discovery is valuable to a customer.

I would like to see the ability to scan some of the newer cloud platforms. I know that BMC has them on the roadmap, and they are coming soon, but they can't come fast enough. Being able to scan more of GCloud, Alibaba Cloud, or whatever the public clouds that our customers are buying, we need to make sure that Discovery can find them as well.

There should be more education to the customer that while you can set this tool up and walk away from it, just like any other IT tool, it requires care and feeding as your environment grows and your technology library scales out. You need to sit down and think about how do you manage your asset library. Sure, you can collect everything, but is there a business case for everything you're collecting? Maybe there is some rudimentary training, or some rudimentary thought leadership, which needs to be provided around it. Because while you can discover everything, it doesn't mean you should.

The stability is great in the sense that it comes in two different versions. There is the standard scanner, then there's the Collector. 

With BMC, you're allowed to deploy in an on-premise solution, or even a cloud-based solution, with as many as are necessary. Therefore, being able to scale up or scale down, depending on the size of your environment or migration of environments, is very flexible.

Let's say that you started with one data center, and you have outgrown it, or maybe you're going from data center to a fledgling cloud deployment. Being able to scale up across those is really the key factor of the way BMC designed the Discovery tool. Because it comes in a scanning tool and a consolidation tool, you can put as many scanning out as you need, and if there are maybe specific firewall rules and you need to scale up to yet another system, you needed to scale out over the WAN to another data center, or to cloud, you have that ability. It's not going to introduce a large hindrance into your environment or to your admins to be able to support it.

I have not used the technical support.

As a partner, we are able to provide the technical support for our customers. So, being able to either provide implementation, best-practice consulting on an existing solution, or we even offer a level of manage services. For example, if a customer for some reason, either through downsizing or depth of knowledge, needs somebody to run it entirely for them, we have the ability.

Customers decide to invest in a solution because a number of different reasons:

1. They want to support the work they have already been doing in their operations or service management by having an automated tool that on a regularly scheduled basis goes out and says "What's in the data center? How's it configured?"
2. Sometimes, they use it for security configuration management, making sure that all the patch levels are on the right thing. 

It just depends on the maturity of the IT service management and the operations management of where they start to see value in knowing what and how it's configured inside their environment.

The initial setup is amazingly straightforward because BMC provides the entire system as a virtual deployment. So, it comes as a VMware appliance, then your data center admin, or whoever it is, can actually just import the system and apply a static IP address, then the system is already installed and up and ready to go. I don't know of any other system that comes as packaged as well as this.

If a colleague, or even a customer, is sort of entering the idea that they are looking at Discovery, the first thing is BMC offers a trial. You can find a hundred endpoints. It is very low-impact to download and input it in a development environment.

Try it out. If you need further insights, you can go to BMC. Make sure you understand your use cases and business cases before you implement something like this. Know why you are trying to collect this specific attribute of this specific server and put it in your CMBD. If you don't have a use case for the information, there's no point in building up large amounts of data if you don't have a reason to.

Our customers do like to have that proof-in-the-pudding test, whether it's going beyond just the general demo, having us come onsite, implementing the solution in front of them, then running a level of Discovery with them. There is no better test of a Discovery tool, or an asset management tool, then to go to a customer and say "Here you go. This is what we found on your data center."

The competition is from Microsoft System Center. While it is agent-based, it has a level of being able to look at Windows systems just like BMC Discovery would. However, it does lack the ability to go into network devices and Linux systems.

The other one that we see in the market is a solution from ServiceNow called Discovery, which is still a fledgling solution. However, in another five to ten years, it might give BMC Discovery a run for its money.

From what I've heard and I've seen, the BMC Discovery solution has been in the market for over 15 years. The library of things that you can discover without having to make a custom pattern is very vast. It grows each month. BMC works with Microsoft, HPE, and all those different companies to make sure that the library is up-to-date and is all-inclusive as possible. Along with that, being able to scale to meet the demands of custom-made solutions and the ability to integrate with other BMC technologies, and even non-BMC technologies.

One of the things that sometimes people forget is the BMC Discovery tool can integrate with any CMDB. It's not just for RMDB. 

Whenever a customer says "I wish the solution had the ability to find this device," I can generally say "Well, it can." That's why I'm so proud that BMC sells this tool and I'm able to provide it. It's because whenever a customer says "Can you find this? Can it discover this?" Yes, it can. I have very little experience where a customer has asked me "Can you find this," and I'm not able to find it.

In terms of the tools that BMC sells and tools like this on the market, there is no match. It is a ten out of ten.

The use cases for BMC Helix Discovery would depend on the specific business needs of our customers. So, it varies based on their requirements. The typical BMC-ServiceNow scenario is when BMC Discovery collects data and passes it to ServiceNow CMDB to support IT and Business processes managed there.

BMC Helix Discovery can be a valuable part of the overall architecture responsible for discovering CIs and sharing the CMDB data with other systems, especially when the organization already works with the BMC platform. However, if the IT and Business practices/processes are managed in a platform like ServiceNow, then the discovery solution directly in this platform offers a more straightforward solution (one CMDB data model, no integrations needed, seamless connection to enterprise disciplines like Digital Portfolio Management).

Next to a horizontal discovery, there is also a capability of dependency modeling enabling us to see relationships between CIs.

There is still room for improvement in terms of stability and scalability. 

I have been aware of BMC (Helix) Discovery's existence since its appearance on the BMC platform. I have been working with ServiceNow for the last eight years so I'm rather using ServiceNow Discovery.

Since I am on the system integrator side, we are using the latest versions of the products.

The stability of this solution is above average but not perfect.

It is a scalable solution. The number of users depends on the specific customers we are working with. BMC Helix Discovery seems to work well for small to mid-size organizations.

From my perspective, the initial setup is quite easy.

The deployment of BMC Helix Discovery varies from customer to customer. I see it as a product that can be part of the solution from an architectural perspective.

First and foremost, it's important to understand the whole landscape of the implementation in the enterprise environment. Whether it's for ITSM or business management, you need to be aware of the target landscape and other systems in place and how the systems are interconnected. Integration of data into the system is crucial, so it's essential to assess how easy it is to integrate the data. 

Overall, this should be one of the key architectural principles to consider as any integration represents an increased complexity. There might be benefits of decentralized solutions in terms of multiple systems cooperating to provide their best value together, but there is also a huge advantage of having an enterprise platform as the real "one system of records" and "one system of action" when the provided solution is robust, scalable and modular (e.g. ServiceNow). It is also a matter of knowledge management - what knowledge do you need (and can afford) to maintain? Two platforms = two sets of knowledge.