The initial setup is quite complex. BMC works quite well for a medium-sized estate. We had to split up our big environment into smaller estates. Then, we had to rearchitect the capacity and streaming of events to ensure that it started working. It's not something straight out of the box. It requires a lot of setup.

The initial setup was complex, no doubt, by the time you bring in Professional Services, if you opt to. We didn't follow the standard model because we didn't want them to come, drop in a configured system and say, "Here's the book on how it works," and then walk away. We wanted them to participate in every aspect of it. We brought a lot of it on ourselves, where they told us what to do and we did it. We worked with the Pro Services to do it, so we took longer than it probably should have but we knew more about it than we would have as a result. It's a very flexible product, which means it's a very complex product. We had enough servers and monitors that we had to bring up a multi-tiered, large number of TSIMs. It was because of our service models that we introduced a lot of the complexity ourselves.

Because we're pushing full sets of service models out of our CMDB and into TrueSight to use as a service model, we have to put them at a top level of a TSIM so that all the other TSIMs that feed into them can show up as impact models. We went to a three-tiered architecture with presentation on top, a service management infrastructure manager in the middle, and the integration managers below. So a lot of the complexity in our particular configuration was due to the fact that we didn't want to have to figure out where those services belong, or which piece belonged on which TSIM. We wanted to punch them out to the top and then let TrueSight worry about it. So in the long run, it was complex to install but it is much easier to maintain. 

The deployment took about three months. There was one person from BMC and about five people, altogether. We had DBAs involved and we had the hardware guys involved and the network guys involved. It was probably three people full-time but, off and on. Every aspect of some department that would touch this thing was involved at some point. 

There is a team of five employees and myself who are not only maintaining it but doing all the monitoring configuration - working with users to collect monitoring requirements, setting thresholds and writing custom MRL and PSL.

At the cultural level, it used to be when we first started it up, people would say, "I have my own monitoring tool and I don't need you people. I'll do my thing." Now, they're saying, "You're doing things for these other people, can you, can you help me out?" It's really grown organically, and we've had to put a team together so quickly that there has not been what should have been in place, which is a major deployment plan, where all of the pieces would fall together. We're starting to work on that now.

It's very straightforward from a setup perspective. We were able to install it and get it running relatively quickly. That's not the hard part. 

The complexity comes in because, instead of it being what I would call an off-the-shelf product, TrueSight is a series of products with an encyclopedia of tools and they all add benefit. But getting those tools to work, that's where the complexity is; knowing exactly which piece to pull and to connect. An example would be putting filters in place. That took us a while. 

If you look at an average installation, it takes three to six months to get up and running. We got up way faster than that, but it has taken us about a year to get the engine to run at the capacity its capable of. It's like gas mileage where you have to drive it properly to get the right gas mileage. That has taken us some time to do. But once we got there, we have certainly been getting everything that's promised.

Park Place was up and running within a month to two months. Our production product was probably nine months out. That's when we started figuring out the filtering. We brought everything in and opened all of the spigots up, and we had all this volume coming in. With BMC's help - they were very helpful in this capacity - we were able to turn the valves to the proper flow, so we weren't flooding the thing every day.

Our implementation strategy was to put it up in a proof of concept first in a DevOps environment because our goal was to bring it out to customers. Once we got it into production, we started bring customers on as PoCs. We did about six months' worth of bringing on the customers, making sure we could bring it out and get its sea legs. Then we started deploying customers as fast as we could. And that's when we went from 10.5 to 10.7, and now we're moving to the new platform with 11.3.

The initial setup was not difficult.

The initial setup for BMC TrueSight Operations Management was easy, as long as you have an excellent team to do it. The most crucial part is that BMC provided good documents with easy-to-follow steps for setting up BMC TrueSight Operations Management. It's easy when you follow the documents and processes thoroughly because that makes your job easy.

I was not part of the team that deployed the solution, but I do have deployment experience. You have to check your infrastructure availability, particularly how much infrastructure you need, how many servers, and which infrastructure you want to monitor. Next, you must decide whether it'll be a small, medium, or large infrastructure. BMC will also recommend the VMs, OS, RAM, CPU, etc., and then you have to select. When everything's ready, the BMC side provides all you need to install, and then you can deploy one after the other. You must follow the steps but also pick out components you want to use according to your requirements, as BMC TrueSight Operations Management is similar to an umbrella with multiple components. Yet, you won't need to use all parts. Once you've finalized the components, you can get the VM sorted out and do the installation, and that's it. It'll be pretty easy to follow from there.

Back in the day, the initial setup was very complex. As it stands today, upgrades are really very easy. It's basically just a matter of refreshing old hardware, turning the system on, and making sure that it picks up all of the agents. Setting up today is infinitely more simple than it was even three or five years ago. 

BMC is innovating even further and working towards containerization so that we won't have to do upgrades anymore. We'll just overlay. They've really taken into account how to consolidate consoles so that there aren't so many bits and pieces. That has made it easier for them to do upgrades. Installing the system or deploying the system only takes a couple of weeks in an organization of our size, where it used to, when we originally did it, take four months.

The latest one that we did, we had all the technical bits and pieces done within four weeks. Then we slowly rolled it out as we sunsetted particular agent groups. The total roundtrip was six months to have it fully deployed and embedded and working in the system.

At this point, we do an upgrade every three years, and every five to six years we're upgrading our hardware. This year we actually went fully virtual. Our engineering organization still takes a good bit of time to build servers. We were able to get virtual machines within weeks of the initial setup of the product, and we were able to roll to virtual machines, versus physical machines, relatively simply. It was basically a point-and-shoot install. We pulled over all of our policies and procedures that were already canned - and that was another thing that was more of a challenge in years past because we would have to redo them. This time, all that got pulled in and we were up and running within weeks.

The initial setup of BMC TrueSight Operations Management was easy and manageable.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution's deployment was carried out phase-wise in our company, because of which the deployment was done within a month.

The initial setup of BMC TrueSight Operations Management was easy.

In the visibility manager of the application, there are some certification issues when it comes to the installation phase.

The solution is deployed on-premises.

The solution's deployment process can take around a year and two months, to be precise.

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. Although, its infrastructure is quite complicated as it has many components to maintain.

We got it up and running pretty quickly. We had it up within three months because we had to buy hardware and build the whole infrastructure, so it was a little more than just installing the software.

Then we did what I call a controlled deployment. We had about ten to 15 customers in a pilot program. We ran that over about a six-month period before we went live in production.

The initial setup for BMC TrueSight Operations Management is straightforward, but it's not that typical when deployed on-premises. It depends on the environment of the customer, the infrastructure, and how dependent it is. It also depends on the complexity of that environment, and what kind of tools they have in their network devices.

There can be a number of things that could make the setup straightforward or complex, e.g. If the environment is very clean and only have one or two volumes when they're using Cisco or SP, then it's easy to improve, but when the variants are too much, then it could take time.

The setup is okay. It is not complex. The time taken for deployment depends on the project and the size of the customer.

The ease of setup depends on the environment but is straightforward as long as prerequisites are in place. 

A simple environment is easy to setup. 

A complex environment with multiple data centers and touch points will have a complex architecture. It is important to make sure that service is available across the environment with a zero mean time error and that takes time. 

I rate setup an eight out of ten. 

It was complex. I wish we had put Professional Services into the deal. Being a service provider, we are attached to companies all over the world with very strict auditing and security requirements. Therefore, designing the architecture to work in that environment was fairly complex. I was just talking to a product owner about the problems that we still have.

Once we get the architecture, the deployment went fairly smoothly. The policy creation and management were much more complex than in their previous products. It is probably more powerful, but not as easy to administer.

They have rolled things, which were multiple products separately in the past, into a single product. They've had to do some consolidation, or adjustments, to be able to merge them quickly to get their product to ship. This left some things missing. Some features that used to be there are gone. Features that we used to use. So, there are pain points, as we figure out how to work around the new gaps.

It's a complex system. We were dealing with a highly customized Remedy system which caused us a lot of issues. We had to wait for a Remedy upgrade to occur before we could deploy our systems. We were at this for about a year, and most of that time was waiting to get the Remedy implementation in place. Once the Remedy implementation and upgrade were completed, there were a lot of challenges with our CMDB data and the integration of the CMDB to a service model along with the publishing of a service model. 

We have Remedy, a service model, TrueSight Operations Manager, and TSIM. With a lot of technologies in play, making them all work together has been challenging, since each one of them is a fairly sophisticated technology. BMC could do something to make it easier.

It took about three months to deploy the core technology which solved our problem. We have been waiting a very long time on the Remedy upgrade, which was over a year. However, this was because our company had highly customized the prior Remedy version. Without that in the equation, the technology took us around three months to deploy. 

We are still enhancing it. That time frame was just to get it deployed. To make the full use and benefit of it, that will take well over a year. Both the technology and the organization, who is using it, need to be matured.

Right now, four or five of our core products are monitored and feeding this environment. Because we've been successful at it, we anticipate integrating more of our products and the monitoring of those products into our system. We have already built the integrations for the different monitors. It is just getting the different teams to want to use this system. That's why it's an organizational maturity thing. We could take them on very quickly, but there has to be a willingness on their part to do so. Part of our strategy is to make them want to use this system. That's on the event side. 

On the service impact side, we're working with senior management. This Friday, we have a demo with the CIO with this technology, because he is the one who is putting the pressure on the different application teams to onboard with us.

We have a multiyear onboarding strategy, where we're onboarding more applications and integrating them into this particular environment. Today, they are being monitored by their own support teams, who are now beginning to see the success that we are having. The challenge that we are having organizationally is, when we onboard their applications, we expose the issues of their products through Remedy tickets and outages. A lot of times, these teams want to hide that. So, we have political issues, as well as technological hurdles to deal with.

The initial deployment depends on the customer environment. If the environment is small or medium, the solution can be deployed fairly quickly, and similarly if the customer wants to deploy a standalone setup. But for a large customer, especially for customers who want to deploy the solution in a clustered environment, in a high-availability environment, or even in a DR environment, it's very complex to set up initially and it takes a fairly large amount of time to implement.

The initial setup means setting up the components, setting up the basic monitoring. The advanced configurations take extra time. For a small or medium environment, we can do the initial setup in a couple of weeks. A small to medium environment is where they are monitoring between 50 and 300 or 400 servers and IT infrastructure components, such as storage devices or hardware.

If you go above a few hundred devices, it becomes a large environment. For a large environment, it may take anywhere between two and four months to set up, depending on what kind of deployment the customer prefers: whether they want high availability, a  clustered setup, or a disaster recovery setup.

We do have standardized deployment configurations for customers and we recommend that customers use them. We are BMC's most prominent partner in the Middle East, so we have done quite a few deployments and we have created standard templates for deployment, for small, medium, and large customers. Generally, the customers leave it to us to decide the implementation strategy and then we use our standard deployment template for the given environment, and that makes things much smoother and faster. We already know which component to install when, what configuration should be done, and how much time it should take, ideally. And tasks can be initiated in parallel, like agent installations.

The time taken for deployment depends on the deployment size and the environment. The installation process and configurations vary depending on the customers' environment. The initial components must be installed based on the customer's requirements and server availability.

The complexity of our environment demanded the complexity of the implementation. More than half of the effort that we had in implementing monitoring was based on the way we did our program. We were basically starting at zero and bringing teams up to speed, evangelizing, educating, getting people onboard.

The implementation of TrueSight itself was just a software implementation. It had its bumps and bruises. None of us were versed in BMC software. There were some learning curves as would typically be expected for any application of this scope, magnitude, and impact.

We had an overall strategy of doing proofs of concept for various, widespread technologies. We took that success and did a wide-to-narrow type of advertisement. We told everybody what was going on and then we brought more specific people into the room and said, "These are good targets for you to implement." During and after that evangelizing and advertising, we started implementing tier-one applications as an onboarding effort. We did that in a deep-dive fashion where we would sit down and interview these teams and really come to understand what makes their business service tick. A lot of our evangelization effort was actually in changing the focus of operations teams to think from a business service perspective. That paid off in dividends later when people were more interested in monitoring the actual functions of their applications rather than just the infrastructure of their application. We've been able to change mindsets over the course of a number of years. The first two or three years we were doing implementations. That was when we did most of that work.

From there, we worked as much as possible to allow folks to implement their own where possible, rather than centralizing it, so that people could keep up with their own demands. We were somewhat limited in TrueSight due to some of the RBAC controls not quite being what we wanted as far as delegating out administrative privileges for implementation. But because we were able to turn requests around pretty well, that burden wasn't too heavy.

From tier-one apps, we kept going and kept educating, bringing people to the table. When new applications come to our company, we still reach out and educate new teams, bring them to the table and use the onboarding process we built and solidified over the course of the first couple of years.

During the first three years, we had two-and-a-half FTEs for implementation. That was for the full program, not just the TrueSight component. It included all those interviewees, all those educational components, all the training, etc. The full program. The actual pressing of the buttons was about half of that. Once you stand it up and start connecting things, it's a matter of administratively using the tool to execute.

It's straightforward. For complexity, I would rate it 1 out of 5.

This is a straightforward solution all around and there are three ways that you are able to install it: a silent installer, a command-line installer, plus Linux OS and Windows installers.

Depending on the project requirements, basic installation takes about five days for standalone setup. In the event that there is an HA setup that needs to be taken, an additional five or so days can be added to that time.

We have implemented this for a bank that has their entire infrastructure monitored by BMC and they have about five thousand users.

The solution gives clear instructions of what systems are required. You are able to simply plug data as a virtual machine in your environment and they have the option of going to the cloud. In the cloud version, you can easily enable the subscription and start working, deploying, and integrate with your environment.

On the client side, I do not have to configure or update anything on the software. It discovers what is running on the client-side system and it automatically does everything.

The initial setup of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is easy. It takes approximately 15 minutes to do the installation. 

The initial setup isn't straightforward and is a bit complex to implement. It really depends on the environment. I have implemented several accounts within one or two months if prerequisites are met or already in place. You need more than three people to manage and maintain this solution.

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

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.

In general, it is not easy to install. It's complex. There are too many components, and you must set them up and work with the infrastructure team on permissions and file reports. Because there are so many components, this becomes more complicated and difficult, particularly in terms of infrastructure management. It is not easy to install.

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.

Yes, the setup after the design of the solution was pretty straightforward. The vendor has a lot of free Webinars where they will explain the best practices to design a solution and the best ways to implement it. These guidelines can be used to build custom guidelines for the customer.

The setups were not complex but there was a large amount of pre-deployment and planning that went into the solutions.

The initial setup is straightforward and easy to implement quickly. You can receive all the data, and you can have a lot of dashboards covering all the details like how much traffic, the OS, the federal ID, client ID, and location. If all of this is the same, you can create tables, dashboards, server ID, and client ID.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took us about eight months to implement.

If the system meets the prerequisites requirements of BMC TrueSight Operations Management then the process of deployment is not difficult.

It’s bit complex.