BMC TrueSight Operations Management Reviews

We use the solution for operations monitoring purposes.

The solution's event management feature works best for us. It catches all the events from other monitoring products. Further, it produces incidents and notifies the DevOps team of the analytics.

The solution's reporting, monitoring, and configuration features need improvement. Presently, it is challenging to produce insightful monitoring data.

We have been using the solution for more than ten years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have 20-50 solution users in our organization.

There are times when the solution's support service could be better.

We used SAP Solution Manager and Microsoft SCOM earlier. Later, we switched to BMC for its approach to consolidating relevant information.

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

We require two or three executives to deploy and maintain the solution.

We purchase a yearly license for the solution. It is not very expensive.

I rate the solution as a six.

We're actually hosting the software and providing services to our customers based on all the capabilities that are within TrueSight. We are a very large, global, hardware maintenance provider for data centers. We mostly service the high-end data storage and networking equipment that you would find in data centers and in cloud environments. 

A couple of years ago we started on a journey to really improve our ability to maintain and service our customers. This was all about connectivity, getting connected to those servers and storage platforms. We wanted to get connected to everything that we were maintaining around the world so that we could really implement a "diagnosis before dispatch" approach.

With this solution, we gather all the data from a server that has failed, and we do all the troubleshooting, the problem and root-cause determination - we call that triage - before we ever send a field engineer or anyone to the site. So when we do send a part or do send a field engineer, we know exactly what the root cause of the problem is and what they need to do to fix it. 

We are using this solution to scale our business and to drive greater efficiencies. The other side of it is that it's much better for our end customers because they no longer have to monitor their own environments for hardware failures. We do that for them. They don't have to recognize that a server has failed. They don't have to pick up the phone or send us an email to open a ticket and send us files to help us troubleshoot the problem. We're really reducing a lot of the effort required on the customer's side to manage their IT environment using this tool because we can detect the failure, we can troubleshoot it remotely. And, when we do implement the corrective action, we're pretty certain of the root cause, based on the technology and the capabilities of TrueSight.

It has improved our time to repair. From the time we get the incident logged to the time we get the customer back up and running, it has improved that by 33 percent or greater. It has also improved our ability to fix it right on the first call. It gives us the root cause of the problem, and it automates that whole triage, it gives us the part number of what's failed. We're now at somewhere around a 97 percent first-time fix rate. And that's only going to get better as we get more experienced with the product. And that's important to our customers. When we come out, we're going to fix it right on the first call and not have to come again and again and again. That's really important to the uptime of their IT.

We have a graphical representation of this very thing. It shows the old way of service delivery, in which the customer first had to recognize they had a problem. Once they recognized they had a program, they had to call in or email and open a ticket. Once they opened a ticket, the whole troubleshooting process would begin. We were often calling them as many as eight times per ticket, just to get information about the failure. That was taking a lot of time from the customer. After that, we would have to dispatch someone with the right part or the right solution, and oftentimes we either brought the wrong part, or we had to bring a handful of parts, which was costly for us and would drive up the cost of the service for the customer. And often there would be a repeat call, because we might not have brought the right part or have sent the right level of skill out on that call. That was the old way of doing it.

The new way of doing it for the end-customer is that we call them to let them know we have spotted a problem with their server, for instance, and that we're working on it. We don't have to bother them for log files or diagnostic logs or any of that information anymore because it all comes packaged with the alert from TrueSight. The customer really only hears from us two times now: once, when we open the ticket to let them know we've seen a problem and again after we've resolved it.

Another example is that many of our customers have equipment in co-location centers and offsite data centers, where they don't even have anyone to see that there's a problem. Now, we are driving a lot of efficiency for them. They don't have to send people out to check on problems anymore or pay somebody who is running the co-lo to go out and check on something. We're able to see it all remotely through the monitoring tool. That's another huge benefit that we've heard about from our customers.

The solution provides us with a single pane of glass where we can ingest data and events from many technologies. In terms of our IT ops management, we have a unique deployment. We actually have it running in our own shop. Everything that we deploy to our customers we deploy internally first. But we've really licensed and implemented TrueSight to drive our services business. We're supporting all of our customers' data centers with the product. We're not connected to all of those yet. We just officially launched the solution in January of 2018. We've got about a year-and-a-half in production with the product and we're getting good adoption. The real answer to its effect on our IT ops management is not so much our internal deployment. It's more about the deployment that we're leveraging for all of our 16,000-plus customers globally.

We've had a number of cases where, through the analytics in TrueSight, we've actually been able to predict failures. For instance, we've already had a couple of cases where, if we see a hard drive on a storage array is going to fail, we'll actually send the part out ahead of the failure. That allows us to replace that drive before it fails - and on the customer's planned downtime. In the old model, it fails, it's down. The customer waits for us to come out, swap it out, and bring everything back up. In the predictive model, we know it's going to fail, we send the part out ahead of the failure, and we replace that drive on the customer's scheduled downtime. The more of that we can do - and as we expand beyond hardware into operating system, application, and the other layers of infrastructure - we'll be able to exploit the machine learning and the AIOps to a greater degree than what we're doing today on the hardware side.

The way we talk to our customers about the functionality of the solution across IT ops management to support business innovation is that because we've significantly reduced the amount of time they have to spend managing service tickets, they have more time to focus on their digital strategies. We say, "Hey, we're giving you some time back. You don't have to spend all this time interacting with your service provider. You're just going to hear from us when you have a problem and after we've fixed it. We won't bother you for log files and all those things." We're actually giving them time to allow them to do more value-added work, like working on their strategic initiatives and their digital transformation initiative. I think we'll be able to expand on that as we go forward.

The ability of this platform to monitor the very diverse assets that we maintain around the world is its most valuable feature. We service over 350,000 data center assets. These assets come in the form of servers, storage arrays, networking devices, etc. We've calculated that we service and support over 36,000 data centers around the world.

We're not really tied in with the manufacturers, but we support a vast array of manufacturers' equipment, like HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Hitachi; and I could go down the line. We have a very diverse install base under contract and TrueSight can connect to all of those and monitor all those different platforms. Many of our customers have as many as 20 tools in their IT environments to try to monitor all this stuff. We can do it all with one, and we're hosting it for them. So it really gives us the ability to take some of that burden off the end customer.

The other really important thing to us, and the reason we chose TrueSight, is not only to monitor and to capture failures and alerts when things fail out there, but to do what we call "automated triage." No matter who manufactured the equipment, when we get the message that tells us something has failed, it always looks the same. Whether it's EMC or Dell or IBM, whatever the equipment might be, TrueSight always returns the event in a standard format which gives us the manufacturer, the model, the serial number. It even gives us a list of what has failed, whether it's a hard drive or power supply, for example. It even gives us the part number of that specific device in that specific machine. That really helps automate the troubleshooting and the triage process. That's a big feature for us.

The solution's event management capabilities are proven. We always like to say it performs as advertised. We evaluated over a dozen products before we chose TrueSight, and we found it to be very good at monitoring at the hardware level, which is core to our business. The ability for it to capture those failures, to capture all the events from that very diverse set of equipment which we maintain out there, means we are very impressed with the performance.

In terms of the breadth of the solution's monitoring capabilities, I've already addressed the different types of products, the different manufacturers. The diversity of what we service out there is amazing, and it can really monitor just about everything that we maintain out in the field. But the other aspect of the breadth is the fact that not only does it do hardware really well, but it's really going to help us start to add to our portfolio of services. We're going to be able to use this to monitor operating systems and applications and software and networks, and even all the way to end-user experience. Ultimately, we're going to be able to move into other areas of service, based on the breadth of what it can do in the total IT infrastructure.

In production, we have been using it for about a year-and-a-half.

We're in a very stable environment now but it took a little time for us to get there. That's because of the multi-tenancy, the scalability, and the volume of traffic that we're driving through their platform. They're very different than what they're used to. It's potentially hundreds, potentially thousands of customers, with a lot of equipment in their data centers flowing through. We are now in a very stable place in production. We feel very comfortable going forward, scaling it out, and adding thousands of customers to it. It took us a little bit of time to get there and we needed a lot of support from BMC, but we feel good about it right now.

We have a unique use case because BMC typically sells this solution into enterprises that are deploying it within their IT, versus to a managed services provider like us where we're supporting thousands of customers. Multi-tenancy and the scalability have been challenges along the way, as we've grown. But BMC has really been a great partner helping us address those things.

Building that kind of scale and multi-tenancy into the product would serve companies, the way we're deploying it. It's a little different than what BMC is used to, but that would be one thing I would put out there. If anything could have gone better as we were ramping this up and adding a lot of volume to it, I would say it's the scalability. That would be one thing that could be improved.

BMC's technical support has been great. They've been by our side. They've been working with us. They could have just said, "Look, our product wasn't built to do that. Good luck." But they didn't. They stuck with us and they're still with us today helping us optimize and do things better. They've been a great technology partner for us.

Most of the storage products have a native "call home" feature. It's like email alerting, so when a hard drive fails on the storage array, it will send an email. A lot of the manufacturers did that for the warranties. It would send them an email and they could take care of the warranty claims. What we did was redirect those emails to us, because most of what we do is after the warranties have ended on a product. We were getting all these emails from potentially thousands of things that we were maintaining out there, and every email looked different. Emails from HP looked different than those from EMC which looked different than the ones from IBM or Hitachi. Everything was in a different format. It took a long time to sift through these emails to figure out what was actually wrong, and it was very inefficient. That's how we were doing monitoring.

We also had a little black box that we built internally that was using SNMP and some other technologies. But a lot of customers don't want some rogue hardware in their data center. It's a security concern. So that was very limited in its deployment. Overall, by and large, we really weren't monitoring. We were very crude in our methods and there was a very limited number of things that we were monitoring at the time I came in.

That's when we started thinking, "You know, if we either build or buy a world-class monitoring platform and get it connected to everything, we could really differentiate ourselves in the market." That's what led us to start evaluating some commercial, off-the-shelf things like BMC.

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.

We had a consulting firm that worked with us, a firm which BMC had brought to the table named Column Technologies. That experience was not good. BMC had said these guys were one of the best partners they had, and they probably are. It could have been Column Technologies, it could have been anybody that they brought in. 

Our implementation was so unique and different compared to what they were used to. They were used to going into an end-user and helping them get this solution deployed within their own IT environment, to manage their own back-office IT. But that's not how we were doing it. We were putting it in as a service platform to manage thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of devices, potentially. So the implementation was very different.

BMC had to work with us pretty extensively on how we were configuring and putting this in to make it work the way we needed it to work. I'm not going to pick on the consultant that much or criticize them too heavily because this installation was very different than what they were used to doing.

We got a lot of support from BMC because it required it. We needed the guys who built the product to help us get this thing implemented in such a way that it would support our business model. Ultimately, we solved those problems and we're in good shape now. But there were some startup issues, that's for sure.

I don't know that I have a number available. When we embarked on this journey we had some business-case assumptions about what our internal savings would be. We've got a little more work to do to come up with those numbers. We need to get more volume deployed before we can say we have a reliable percentage of OpEx reduction.

Pricing is all volume-driven. I think we were paying between $80 and $85 per license. That's per unit, for a perpetual license. You pay it one time and then, every year, you pay 20 percent of that for annual maintenance and support. 

But now that we've grown, we've purchased tens of thousands of licenses and the cost per license has gone down to something like less than $30. 

I wouldn't call it an agent cost because the way they price it is based on the number of things you have connected. You can connect hundreds of things to a single agent but you're paying by the number of things. That's how you use the licenses. So it's really priced by endpoint, not by agent.

When we were just starting the journey, we looked at ScienceLogic, Centerity Monitor, and we looked at CA. We also looked at the Microsoft product. Those represent a handful of the products we evaluated.

If we had to do it all over again, we would have spent a lot more time in the early going on planning the architecture, on how we were going to build this out. That could have saved us some pain, once we got it up and running and started adding customers and expanding it. If we had spent a little more time with BMC, planning architecturally how we were going to design this to support the scale we needed, it would have helped. That was a lesson learned. And that would be some advice I would give. Depending on how you're planning to use the tool, make sure you spend some time looking at the architecture in the systems and the architectural design of how you're going to implement it to make sure it's going to meet your needs. Make sure it's going to scale appropriately and do what you need it to do.

Our goal is to get this solution connected to every single customer that we're maintaining equipment for, because of the efficiencies and the improvement in the end-user experience. When I say we support over 350,000 assets in 36,000 data centers around the world, that is our maintenance business. We're working to connect TrueSight to all of that. We have sold - not quite yet deployed, but we have sold - about 33,000 licenses, which means assets. We've deployed just under 10,000 of those so far. So we're making good headway and we're very pleased with how it's performing so far.

One lesson that we've learned is that we're now in a great position to expand our portfolio of services which we offer to our customers, well beyond hardware. Without this technology, we could never get there. Prior to us putting this in, it was all done manually. Phone calls, emails, people driving to the site to try and diagnose problems. It was very manual and inefficient and not scalable the way we were doing business. And we were growing so fast. There's no way we could have scaled to where we're at today or scale to where we want to go, even in our core business.

The other lesson we're learning now is our that customers are asking us to do more and this technology is going to help us do more for them and expand our business. It will enable us to expand our portfolio of services. That's our biggest lesson. When we started out it was really all about driving operational efficiency in our hardware maintenance business. And now we've learned we're in a very good position to move into other services, based on what the capabilities of this platform bring to us, beyond hardware - into application monitoring and operating system and network and all the other pieces of the infrastructure. We can start to support them going forward.

It has completely changed our way of thinking about our strategy going forward. It's amazing.

At this point in time, I'd rate it a ten out of ten. We've got something really unique here. We built some integrations, some things of our own around it. And we're feeling really good about it.

If you have a TrueSight umbrella, it is a capturing tool that used to be called BPPM (BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management), or Patrol, and it proactively monitors your IT infrastructure, e.g. the data center containing your server applications, or database, middleware, or network devices.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is used for proactive monitoring where it has a connection with the email engine, so you can receive alerts. Through this solution, you can monitor your infrastructure, understand where the problem is coming from, and more easily understand your infrastructure. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is a firefighter that will help you when problems come.

There are many features that are most valuable in BMC TrueSight Operations Management.

First, its proactive monitoring feature is highly developed. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is an intelligent tool that's able to understand day-to-day operations and consistently gives alerts. The alerts are not automatic for some activities, e.g. some alerts are given monthly, while some are given more frequently.

The consolidated dashboard where you can enjoy a single pane of glass to look at the full infrastructure from the servers to the VMs, to the clouds, to the application, to the database, to the network devices, including having a topology, and having a tendency map of the topology of key offerings, is also a valuable feature of this solution.

There are still many things that can be improved in BMC TrueSight Operations Management.

They need to dig deeper into the layers of application monitoring. They're very strong in server and network monitoring, but they're still lacking on many of the sites, and there's still much work to be done on cloud monitoring.

These are the areas that need improvement for this solution.

We would be expecting additional features in the next release, as they always come up with good features and updates during version upgrades.

I'd like to see more features in the application side as they are lacking, when compared to AppDynamics or other competitors who have advantage over application monitoring features.

On the Cloud side, what I'd like to see on the next release is for this solution to be 100% on the Cloud, rather than it being a hybrid model.

These are the things we are looking forward to in the next release.

Our company has been a partner of BMC for almost 18 years, and that's the amount of time we've been using solutions from BMC.

This solution is 100% reliable. It's stable.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is easy to scale. It can easily take any load, and any of the tools out there. It's an enterprise level tool.

We contacted BMC technical support several times. The L1 and L2 support team need improvement in terms of product knowledge, but most of the time, they're always available and always trying to help us out.

There were many cases where there was a lack of response, or a longer response time. If a product defect has been found, for example, the case has to be escalated to a senior or another department, e.g. R&D, which means we have to wait for a response from that senior or from the R&D department, and that usually takes time.

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.

BMC TrueSight Operations Management is not on the cheaper side, but its pricing is on a case by case basis. Small, medium, and large-sized companies can afford it. Its licensing model is simple and based on the devices. You get the licenses based on the number of servers or network devices.

There are no hidden costs from BMC. They are very transparent with their customers. Everything's in front of the customer, including charges. They are really transparent. What we say and what BMC says, we make sure to deliver to the customer. Everything's very, very clear, including pricing and charges.

I evaluated AppDynamics.

We are a partner of BMC Software, RiskNow, and Atlassian.

We have experience with all end-to-end BMC tools, starting from BMC Remedy ITSM for automations, to their operations management tool: BMC TrueSight Operations Management, which is used for monitoring, etc. We recommend these tools for our customers to use, except for application monitoring, as we didn't find a good tool for this on the BMC side, so we went with AppDynamics, then moved to Cisco. We are also looking into Dynatrace and exploring if our customers can use it.

We're always recommending the latest version of BMC TrueSight Operations Management to our customers, and we keep on upgrading if a new version is available.

Most of our customers have this solution deployed on-premises. If it was deployed on cloud, then we wouldn't have to take care of the upgrade, because it will be done automatically. Though cloud deployment is picking up, most of our customers are still deploying on-premises.

Apart from being a reseller of this solution, we also perform 100% implementation and other processes for our customers. We do end-to-end customer management.

After deployment, BMC TrueSight Operations Management only requires normal maintenance, or it can be taken cared of under managed services. Maintenance of this solution is hassle-free. It's just normal updating, e.g. patching.

This solution works well for any company size: small, medium, or large. It can take the load off any enterprise, no matter the size. It can be onboarded for a very big conglomerate without any challenge.

My advice to others looking into implementing BMC TrueSight Operations Management is to first find a partner for this solution. Once the implementation is done successfully, they can start using it. This is a beautiful solution and it works 100%, but it will still depend on how you're using it and how you're taking care of it. You need to take care of it so you can use it for a long time.

I'm rating BMC TrueSight Operations Management a ten out of ten.

We use the solution for infrastructure monitoring.

It is a very stable product.

The solution could improve its price.

I have been using the solution for some time now.

I do not see any complaints about the tool’s stability.

The tool is scalable. A small team of two to five people manages the product in the organization. The number of users in operations depends upon the size of the environment. When we operate, we need a team to monitor and take action. It is a completely managed service.

I haven’t received any complaints from our customers regarding the technical support team.

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

To deploy the solution, we need to install agents, install the software, ensure that the servers and the prerequisites are ready, and ensure that the setup related to integration to the endpoints and security is ready. The problem is not in the setup and installation of the product. Usually, the problem is related to the infrastructure and facilitating access to the product through security procedures. The administration of the solution is easy. A couple of people can manage it.

The pricing depends on the requirements of the customers and the additional functionalities they need. The product is suitable for enterprise customers, not for SMEs. The tool is very flexible with its pricing. I rate the pricing a six out of ten.

We require market standards to understand the improvements needed in the product. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to monitor assets and infrastructures for customers. We have 500 technicians who load asset details and monitor hardware or SMP-based devices. 

The out-of-the-box format allows us to integrate any components within the toolset console and provide an end-to-end solution for customers. 

The event management tool builds correlation logic and protection algorithms into a field of events that is valuable when a data center goes down. Some event management tools are built-in and some are customized to the environment. 

The dashboard and performance graphs should include a way to automatically schedule and export reports.

The licensing category has single endpoints and entities but should also include CMDB and other integrated components. It should be capable of providing which countries need more licenses and what endpoints they use to narrow down information for developers. 

BMC Helix is the SaaS solution but it is not yet mature so some features are missing. It is difficult to transition customers from TrueSight to Helix when the same customization is not available. For example, the solution provides control for building custom knowledge modules in the repository and bringing them to the server endpoints. However, Helix does not allow control over the repository and instead manages it within the solution. The customer should have complete control like they do in the solution because the SaaS format can cause data privacy issues.

I have been using the solution for eight years. 

Technical support is good and responsive. They provide advance notice of updates and actions. 

I rate technical support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

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. 

We implement the solution for our customers and have certain guidelines that we follow. 

For example, a customer interested in mounting dashboards will not be given complete access because we control user-level access for them. We determine if the customer wants to view events in the console or if they want to see the performance of their hardware. We then provide a set of guidelines and documentation that includes those specific features. 

We give customers the level of access they desire rather than complete access to the entire solution. 

The solution is based on endpoints and knowledge models which can get costly. 

Pricing is a little bit high so I rate it a six out of ten. 

There are many options in this category, each with its own pros and cons. 

For example, ServiceNow might have some beneficial features but might be missing others that are available in the solution. 

For us, it isn't so much that the solution is better than others but rather that its features are the best fit for our needs. Use case is important and we feel the solution is better for operations management than other tools such as ServiceNow. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My company is a data center service provider. We host and manage IT for all types of different companies, using TrueSight to manage and monitor the health performance availability of all our customers' environments: networks, servers, databases, websites, and all their back-end IT.

Right now, the focus is pushing DevOps and AIOps in our more traditional data center management. We are not using it in the cloud space today. Therefore, the focus is the traditional data center space, but for us, that is a very large space.

One case that we like to use a lot: We have a customer who uses F5 load balancers, and they were managing them with CA products. Those load balancers were generating around 11,000 tickets a month. Just moving them from CA to TrueSight, and replicating the same rules, they went from 11,000 tickets a month to 400 tickets a month. TrueSight did a much better job of doing the same thing. Then from there, we were able to tune it. We got it down to about 40 tickets a month. While this is an extreme example (I don't usually see this type of improvement), it shows the power that is there.

We are able to more quickly identify problems and get an engineer on it to restart services, etc. It is not fixing the customer's bugs. They've got buggy apps, and it goes down all the time. It is just that we can get them back online faster.

• It is breadth. It covers so many different technologies which can roll up into a single console.
• The noise reduction for ticketing works much better than we have seen in a lot of other companies. 
• We're starting to get into the machine learning pieces to further enhance the intelligence of events.

Continue to improve the maturity of the product overall. 

I definitely would like to see more improvement in the self-diagnostics. I need to know when anything is not working or collecting, long before our customer finds it.

I would like to see continued improved integration with some of their partners. We use a lot of Intuity software. While the connections are good, they could be better. We use App Visibility, as part of the TrueSight suite. Previously, we were a big BMC TMRT customer previously. They gave up a lot of features of TMRT to get App Visibility in. Features that our customers used. They still complain about this weekly: When are we going to get this report or view back.

When we took this issue back to BMC, they said, "It wasn't an upgrade from TMRT. It's a brand new product. It just happens to be serving the same market." From my user standpoint, we went from BMC TMRT to BMC App Visibility, giving up all these features. For us, it was an upgrade that we lost features on. I need that stuff back, at the end of the day, as a service provider. The customers need to feel comfortable that the data is there. They need to have accurate SLA type reports. The SLA reports that we get on TrueSight today are unfortunately worthless. They go to the whole integer. So, they all show 100 percent, when we've got contracts which are 99.996 percent and are now rounding to 100. Well, if we were at .9995, that's an SLA miss. Things like this are a problem. We have to do all this manually on the side. We can't roll this back, as the versions that we used to use are long out of support.

The biggest issue is probably the gaps in the reporting that I need for my end customers. That is a very public and embarrassing, I can't give you the report that you need. Also, the reliability of the ISNs needs improving. Having a customer find a machine that stopped collecting before we do, that is not what you want when you're a service provider.

We have been a BMC client since 2001. We've been through many generations of the product.

The stability has a bit more maturing to do. There is still room for improvement. Overall, it's pretty good, depending on which layer you're looking at. At the highest level, which is the presentation server, we find that we have to restart that every two months or so, just because it stops responding. I would like it to be a bit better. We don't have any real understanding of what's causing that. The next layer down is the infrastructure manager level. That's probably about the same, every couple of months it stops responding. As you then go farther down to the data collection layer: the ISN level. Those aren't as stable as they need to be. They will go for six months fine, then fail three times in a row in two weeks. It doesn't give us a good alarm, and unfortunately, we've missed an event. Then, the customers notice something, and that didn't pass its events. So, a little more maturity is needed here.

It's scaling fairly nice, but not as large as we would like. We are not seeing the type of scalability that BMC claims. For example, they say that you can run 900 agents against an ISN. We find the ISN stability goes down when you hit 500 or 600. So, you're only at two-thirds of the capacity. I forget how many millions of things that the TSIM was supposed to be able to handle. We are no where near that capacity. We're spinning up more TSIMs because it's just not scaling as advertised.

Technical support is a mixed bag. Some tickets go in and are handled very quickly and well. However, we have had tickets which go in and have been out there for months, and some of them were fairly complex. They will go up to Tier 2 or Tier 3, then park. I'm assuming that we're running into a software bug, or something, but those tickets that stall out are frustrating.

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.

We did it ourselves. 

Globally, I've got six engineers and 12 operators who worked on the deployment. This is a sizable group. However, I'm currently supporting global operations of a couple hundred clients, and they're major clients. 

TrueSight has helped reduce IT operations costs. From a software standpoint, I have been able to eliminate a lot of other tools, saving approximately half a million dollars a year in other maintenance costs. That is easy savings. The more important one is the labor savings: more reliable, simplified tickets. 

The time savings are recognized by the operations teams, not my team. Therefore, it's hard to know the time savings, but if an operations person takes at least 15 minutes to analyze a ticket and their ticket volume is reduced by 10,000 a month, then TrueSight does save time.

We've been reducing ticket noise five to ten percent annually every year, and it has been cumulative. This means less tickets, noise, and operator intervention.

It is a large, complex product. So, there is a commitment of manpower to deploy it, as it is not a cheap product.

We license per named endpoint for most of the products: servers, network devices, databases, etc. You pay for the initial license and maintenance. The way that my company looks at it is we figure out our monthly costs over five years, and right now, we are between five to six dollars. We need to get that down to about four dollars. That's included in the maintenance.

There is a big upfront cost when you buy the license, then there is annual maintenance. We look at, if I bought a license and paid for maintenance for five years, then average it out, what would be my monthly cost. We have had some of the competing tools come in around four dollars. This is coming in as a premium, which is why I don't have it deployed as I would like it. Therefore, we're in negotiations right now. If I can get it down to the four dollar range, I will triple my deployment in a year and a half. If they could could me to the right price point, there are 10,000 to 15,000 servers that I would install it on.

As we've acquired other companies, we've picked up pretty much every other tool set out there: CA, IBM, SolarWinds, etc. We have played with pretty much everything. The BMC TrueSight platform wins probably 80 percent of the time if you look feature by feature. It's a good, strong platform. It's ability to run on all the OSs that I've got is a huge thing. We do a lot with IBM iSeries, and a lot of vendors don't cover that. So, this is a big positive on the platform.

Being able to roll everything up to a single database and single feed out for reporting are all very big positives. The same type of consolidation rules under CA, if you write them in BMC, they just work when they didn't work in CA. Things like that make BMC great.

You really want to plan out your policy and architecture in great detail before you start any deployments. It is a complex product. You don't want to have to go redo it. Pick a small environment, test out your plan, test it out a second time, beat it up, and once you're happy with it, then go nuts by deploying it everywhere. It's great once it's there, you just have to get past that design hurdle, because there are things that aren't necessarily intuitive.

I have a mixed bag impression of the usability. The end user experience is mostly good, as it's a very clean interface. There are some quibbles with it. You have to drill into a lot of layers to get into the data that you want. However, when you hit "Back", it takes you all the way back out of the tree. Then, you have to redrill into all those layers. That is a bit of an annoyance for end users. From an administration side, it is still sort of heavy, and policies are very complex. Therefore, it takes a fairly senior level engineer to build it and get it to work well. But, once it's working well, I can monitor tens of thousands of things.

Definitely get multiple references from each of the clients, since all salesmen lie. They all promise the possible best scenario, and I have found depending on the client that you get very different experiences. So, the claims that the BMC sales guys have made are all achievable in a perfect environment. No one has a perfect environment. 

Claims from CA, I have found to be outright fabrications, such as, "We can do this." Then, we buy the product. "Oh well, you actually need Professional Services, and you're going to need like three years of custom coding." Millions of dollars down the drain with them. 

Other vendors have different levels. They all come in very rosy, and sometimes too much. So, talk to people who have really done it. Take their advice. Don't assume that they didn't know what they were doing. There are a lot of good engineers out there. If the company is struggling, assume you will also struggle.

From a senior management perspective, they want to get an understanding, when there is an outage, what is the impact of that outage across the entire suite of the company's products. We have an Event Manager that integrates all of our monitoring tools. Since we are a large company, we have about 26 different monitoring tools in use. The idea is getting all of them into a framework which can feed such a model that displays the impact of an outage.

We have one application, which is fairly large. In the past, we had Level 1 and 2 NOC support teams who were responsible for watching dashboards. When they saw an issue in the application, they would call Level 2 or 3 support and escalate the call, if necessary. Now, through the use of this product, we have been able to reduce the headcount by five people, as we are able to eliminate the eyes on the glass. We no longer have people watching the dashboard. We have events which are processed automatically through the system and get to the right people. We had six people in L1s, and now have one. So, we reduced five out of six headcount, which is pretty significant. 

Also, the average length of time used to be 45 minutes before we had the right engineer on the line, fixing the problem. Now, it's probably three to five minutes.

The solution affected our end user experience management very positively. Our application teams are very excited about what we're doing with the reduction in headcount. More importantly, the automation that it has brought to us has streamlined so many manual tests, The teams are very happy with the way things are going.

The solution will help us maintain the availability of our infrastructure across a hybrid or complex environment. Right now, we can get to an event scenario or problem quicker than we used to. We are right on the cusp of releasing our service impact modeling. This will help us tremendously because we have a multicloud, as well as an on-premise environment. Any component should show the impact across its applications, regardless of where it's located. It has definitely helped in these environments.

We have improved our ability to get to a root cause because of the way their tools work. If you follow it down to the lowest level of the diagram, and a problem happens, it lights up a certain model in red. However, if you go down to the lowest member of the tree, you'll see who is the lowest person. So, if it's a database saying, "I'm out of disk space," then it may create all types of chaos. Following that tree down, you'll see the lowest level is the database server, and it has an event disk space issue. Then, right there, that's the root cause of all your application issues. So, it has helped us get to the root cause more quickly.

We're just now gaining momentum on the adoption of this product. We have seen with a database out of disk space, because we can get to the root cause quicker, we know what the root cause is. It can be remediated faster, but we can also eliminate the number of people who have to be on outage calls. There is no need to have network people on a call if it's a database issue. We let them deal with other things, so our operation becomes more efficient. The database people know exactly what the problem is, and quickly.

The most valuable feature is the event management piece of it. We have it integrated with a number of our different products. Thus, we can create events into a single Event Manager, which will create a Remedy ticket for us. This is a huge feature for us.

We have 26 different monitoring tools. The way this product works it allows us to define a custom event call. We can take all of our monitoring tools, and say "If you can put an event into this specific format, then we have a way of creating a common event across all of our monitoring tools." By doing that, we have a single back-end process that acts on all of the events. So, we only do a data transformation upfront when we are receiving events. This simplifies our back-end.

The solution has helped to reveal underlying infrastructure issues affecting app performance. We constantly have network issues. The network team had been capturing them, but it wasn't integrated into any impact model. By integrating them into an impact model, we could now catch and see the impact of them to our applications. 

It's a complex system. The implementation is fairly challenging. They have done a good job lately of getting videos out there. We would like more videos and self-training, though. Right now, you have to go to BMC's training classes to get a good understanding of the product, and those training classes are very expensive. While I understand they are a business and trying to make money, a lot of their competition has training available via YouTube. There is much more accessibility to competitors' training. 

In a large company of our size, we need multiple people in our company trained. So, I have to take the training classes. Then, I have to go and train the rest of my organization. I would prefer to say to the other people on my team, "Go to this link and..." Or, "Here's a list of training sessions that you can go to which are online and that are free." I think it would help the adoption of their product in the marketplace, personally.

It's a far more complex technology than I perceived at the beginning to deploy. I would have thought that the integration between their products would have been more seamless than it has been. This is what has made it a lot more complex than I anticipated.

From a technical standpoint, some of their products still have a dependency on Oracle Databases, and they are very well integrated in the cloud for a lot of their components. There is another database technology called Postgres, which they are partially integrated with. However, if they were to get all of their platforms integrated into Postgres, it would be much less expensive for companies, such as mine, to go to high availability, etc. The architecture really needs to be upgraded. I know they're doing a lot of this, but they need to keep doing it, and accelerate their process, so they can remain competitive.

Stability of the product is about a seven out of 10. As far as stability goes, it has mostly been very good. With some of the newer stuff on 11.3, we have to call to support a lot of times and get a patch sent to us because certain things just don't work. Those pieces would have hurt stability, but once you get it running, it's very good.

The overall scalability of its platform and the ability to support its website is pretty good. We have a couple people on our team who seem like they are pretty proficient at it. They can do things rather quickly. 

I don't use PATROL. It is pretty good if you use their native products, like PATROL for monitoring. We integrate other monitoring tools into TSOM, so we don't use PATROL. I am familiar with it though, and I have been trained on it. I feel like it's pretty labor-intensive to manage. For example, if I have a number of different classes of servers, there are a lot of screens that I have to fill out, deploy, and push out to my systems. There has to be a more efficient way to do this. My company is always pressuring us to be more scalable. It is not very scalable in the administration of its monitoring. It could be better.

For TrueSight Operations Manager, there are a limited number of people who use it, no more than 15 to 20 system administrators and support personnel, who are mostly in administrative functions. The reason that there are so few users utilizing the system is because all the events are automated. Most of our support teams and users look at Remedy, and there are over 3000 users looking at Remedy. So, a lot of the users of our overall system have no need to look at a TrueSight console. Their work is done through the way we have designed the system. They get a Remedy ticket and what's called a PagerDuty notification. They know when they get those two things that there's an issue along with all the information's contained within those two systems. They don't need to go to the TrueSight console. 

The technical support team is very good. I wish there where more the people. This includes the ones who I work with on the phone, as well as their field technical people. They are very good. 

I don't know if their technical support differs from their project team, but we are constantly revolving people in and out of our project because they get different assignments within BMC. Thus, I wish there more technical support people who had more longevity on our account. We will have a CMDB person assigned to us on the project from BMC, but in just three weeks, we'll find out, "Oh, that person has been reassigned, and they have to go to another account, where they have to do something different." We are constantly having to retrain people coming in from BMC. So, there is no permanence with their people on our projects.

This issue of changing technical staff is not limited to BMC. However, their resource pool seems sort of small.

We are constantly facing issues with having to call support because things didn't work as we expected them to, and I don't know why that is. We use BMC Atrium CMDB product (service impact model) and publishing service impact models seems to be challenging and problematic. We are constantly calling support, who gives them a bug fix, which fixes the problem. However, those bugs shouldn't have existed in the first place. If there is a bug fix in it that somebody knows how to fix, it shouldn't have happened in the first place.

BMC is one of our longest running partnerships. We have been using Remedy for many years. We have been using parts of this system since 1998. However, we have never put it altogether in the way that we're doing now. We didn't replace anybody else. We had used their products before, but not to their full advantage.

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.

We did a lot of it ourselves, since we had the knowledge in-house, specifically on the event management side. We were an ADDM environment. So, we had bits and pieces of technology knowledge in our company, but in order to pull it all together, we used Wipro, as well as BMC in India to drive this. That's still the case. We're still using them to get this whole thing deployed in various pieces. 

Overall, our experience with BMC and Wipro has been positive. However, there have been challenges because the technical people have moved from our account to another account. We have a rotating team of people, which gets very challenging for continuity.

For deployment and maintenance of TrueSight, we need about four people. For the whole enterprise solution, we need 25 people for 24/7/365 support.

We have reduced headcount and shrunk the mean time to resolve. That's how we justify the expense of the product. It has really worked out.

It has helped us reduce IT Ops costs. We were able to replace the headcount of five out of six Level 1 technicians. We repurposed those people to higher level tasks. Without this solution, we would not have replaced that job function.

We did a five-year, multimillion dollar deal.

We haven't licensed the solution's machine-learning and analytics to deploy artificial intelligence for IT ops.

We looked at some of their competitors, but because of the technology and the base of knowledge that we already had in place, it made sense to stick with BMC. We decided to focus on making their products integrate the way they were supposed to and were designed to. That's what we've been doing since we had the knowledge and license in-house.

We also evaluated ServiceNow and BigPanda.

On the pros side, BMC and ServiceNow were very similar products. My biggest concern with BMC was they seemed to be declining in market penetration versus ServiceNow, which has been expanding considerably over the last several years. That was my biggest concern with moving forward with BMC. The pros with BMC were that we already had the knowledge in-house and the technology was proven for us. We knew it was fairly solid, so we felt confident that we would be successful with it.

One of the other differences between the two companies is the marketing organization from ServiceNow was a lot more consistent than from BMC. We probably get more calls even today from the ServiceNow account rep than we do from our BMC team. They show up every once in a while, and they do a big dog and pony show, then they go away for a bit. So, I don't think their marketing is as strong as it should be, or we're not a big enough customer for them. However, with the amount of investment we have in their product, they should be around more often.

There is one piece of BMC technology that we decided not to use. That's their Atrium Orchestrator. We use a different third-party orchestrator called Ayehu. We just found the Atrium Orchestrator from BMC to be too complex.

Make sure you have knowledgeable people on your staff. Give yourself plenty of time for deployment, if you think it will take three months, make it six months. Look at past companies' experience on time to deploy, knowledge, and staffing requirements.

The solution's event management capabilities are very good. In some ways, they are based on very old technology. I first started using it way back in the late nineties and the basic core of the product does not appear to have changed much since then. Back then, it was a very good product. So that's not necessarily a bad thing. The other things that the company has done since then. Its enhanced the website portal, which I have a very positive impression of. 

The website is fairly new, and it could be a little bit better. However, if I were to compare it to some of the other tools out there, it has a much nicer GUI and presentation. The web presentation is much more advanced than BMC's TSOM server.

We still have multiple panes of glass. E.g., we have an Event Manager screen along with a Remedy screen. We're getting closer to a single pane of glass and have fewer panes of glass. Where we had a lot of dashboards before, we now don't have anything, as we've replaced all of them. So, there are no panes of glass in our support. So, if you are a support personnel at our company, you are not looking at a screen. Instead you are looking at your cell phone, because we reach out to you when there's a problem and you don't have to look at anything.

We are using about five percent of our environment. We have what is called a limited deployment right now, because we have so much integration and automation going on. We needed to mature the support teams and the rest of the organization as a whole in what we're doing. Once we have achieved that, I anticipate a 100 percent of our applications are going to be feeding this system. After that, we will greatly extend our use.

TrueSight Operations Manager includes infrastructure monitoring, as well as application performance monitoring. The premier use case that I have seen, over the last few years is infrastructure monitoring, along with network monitoring. The overall use case is monitoring of IT infrastructure, including the network; monitoring, alerting, and event management.

Occasionally we have seen a couple of customers who are interested in the application performance management as well.

The actionable alerts that we get from monitoring the infrastructure or application are the end-result of the monitoring. Most of our customers are interested in those alerts and in having a ticket created out of the alerts in their ITSM solution.

I have deployed this solution, along with other BMC solutions, for many customers across multiple verticals, like healthcare, banking, and telecom. I have done eight to 10 implementation projects of TrueSight. Our company sells BMC Software solutions and we implement, develop, and support them.

In a project that we're working on for a telecom company, at the time we started implementing TrueSight Operations Management, the number of alerts or events, and subsequently the number of tickets from those events, was really high. After applying the intelligent thresholds in TrueSight, and doing all the event management to correlate the related alarms and deduplicating of the alarms, and suppressing unwanted alarms, we have been able to reduce the number of events, and hence the number of tickets, by almost 60 percent.

Before that, their data center NOC team was overwhelmed with the number of tickets and the number of events. By applying the intelligent thresholds, which are called signature thresholds in TrueSight, we have been able to reduce the noise and the false negatives and even false positives. We have been able to give them only the most important actionable alarms and tickets. This has freed up a lot of time for productivity for the network operations team. They have been able to focus on different things, along with their regular stuff.

It also helps maintain the availability of infrastructure across a hybrid or complex environment. Because TrueSight can monitor network devices, databases, storage, cloud environments, and a mix of on-prem and cloud, our solutions keep checking the availability of all the devices in the infrastructure and they alert you when there is an issue. So it definitely helps in maintaining the availability. You can also configure predictive alerts or intelligent thresholds or predictive thresholds. Using them, TrueSight will try to give you an alert before something goes wrong. It will look at the threshold and it will look at the trending data for a particular metric, and before that threshold is crossed, it will give you a predictive alert saying that this threshold may be crossed in the next 15 minutes or 30 minutes. So it helps maintain the availability of your environment.

In addition, it helps to reveal underlying infrastructure issues that affect application performance, if you're monitoring an application using TrueSight APM. You can monitor an application and record the important transactions in the application that you're interested in. That is called synthetic monitoring. For example, on a banking site, the user login could be the transaction you record.

The app visibility part discovers the application automatically, and it can even monitor at the code level. For example, if there is something wrong in a transaction, maybe on the HTTP response or at the Java or .NET code level, it can indicate where the problem may be in the application. TrueSight also has Probable Cause Analysis. If you are monitoring your IT infrastructure completely, it can correlate the alerts and give you the most probable cause of a particular alert. Again, this can help you figure out the underlying issues in the environment.

The TrueSight solution has built-in intelligence. It uses its analytical engine, an AI engine, to look at the performance data for anything that it's monitoring and it creates a baseline of the performance. Then, it gives you abnormality alerts based on the baseline. Even if your threshold is not crossed, but the baseline of that metric is crossed, it will intelligently give you an alert saying that this metric is trending above the baseline. There may be a case where the static threshold has been set too high, but TrueSight has the intelligent analytical engine that can analyze the trend or the baseline, and then give you an intelligent alert. The Probable Cause Analysis uses the analytics engine to figure out what the probable cause may be for a particular alert. BMC is making good progress in terms of AI.

Mean time to remediation is related to the Probable Cause Analysis and integration with some other components like orchestration or executing a remote action. It definitely helps in reducing the mean time to remediate, but it depends on the expertise of the administrator of TrueSight. In my current assignment we have implemented TrueSight for a large customer in the Middle East, and we have quantified how much we have reduced the meantime to remediate. For the top-priority incidents, we have reduced the MTTR from 12 hours to 1.5 hours.

One of the most prominent features and values of the solution is that it helps to reduce IT operations costs. If you are using Operations Management and TrueSight Capacity, you can get a real picture of how much your IT assets are utilized, and how much of their capacity is saturated or underutilized. It gives you a very clear picture of your entire IT infrastructure, including your network devices and your cloud infrastructure. Your entire infrastructure is monitored and optimized for capacity, and that helps you save costs in your IT operations. I would estimate savings of 20 to 30 percent. I haven't calculated it myself. There are much higher numbers claimed by BMC.

The event management part of TrueSight Operations Management, in my experience, is probably the best in the market. You have endless flexibility. You can build your own rules, you have the MRL language, and you can implement any kind of logic on the alerts. It may be correlation, abstraction, or executing something as a result of the alerts. You have almost the whole range of options available for event management using the available customization. I've seen a couple of other solutions, like IBM's and HPE's for event management, and TrueSight Operations Management is far superior to them in event management.

The breadth of the solution's monitoring capabilities is a major selling point for the solution because it is incomparable. You can monitor almost any kind of server, all types of storage, network devices, databases, and even do application monitoring. You also have the option to develop your own Knowledge Module. If something that you want to monitor is not available, you can build your own Knowledge Module to monitor whatever you need. We also have cloud monitoring solutions, which are doing pretty well now. We have AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and container monitoring. The breadth covered by BMC for monitoring of IT infrastructure is really extensive. That breadth of monitoring is really valuable because we can cover almost any monitoring use case that customers come up with.

Also, the end-to-end, automatic ticketing — from generating an alert or an event, to doing event management, and then creating a ticket from the event, as well as automatic closure of the ticket or the event from the ticket — this whole end-to-end flow, is a major selling point. Most of our customers who have on-premise ITSM solutions use BMC Remedy. It is the most popular on-prem solution for ITSM. When customers have Remedy ITSM, it becomes a really good decision to use TrueSight Operations Management, and to use the out-of-the-box integration between the two solutions. That way, the ticketing is done automatically from the event and vice-versa.

In addition, the solution provides a single pane of glass where you can ingest data and events from many technologies. That's one of the major selling points that BMC is pitching for TrueSight Operations Management. You can monitor everything: servers, networks, databases, and your applications. You can also implement capacity optimization and the Presentation Server has a single console, a view and dashboards, where you can see everything in one place.

Previously, BMC called TrueSight a "manager of managers" because TrueSight can be integrated with almost every other monitoring and ticketing tool. For example, in my current project, we have integrated at least 20 other monitoring and alerting systems with TrueSight, and all the other systems are sending their events or alerts to TrueSight. Then, in TrueSight, we are doing the event management to reduce the noise, and filter out unwanted alerts, and get only the required alerts. Even for other integrations, TrueSight acts as a single pane of glass, where you have all these disparate systems. You can integrate all of them with TrueSight and get all the events and alerts in a single window.

In terms of root cause analysis, BMC TrueSight has a couple of modules like Service Impact Management and the Probable Cause Analysis, which work together to help you identify related events. This module, on paper, has a lot of promise, but it is actually really complicated. There are really small pieces working together and you have to have a lot of expertise to get any value out of the root cause analysis piece of the solution. For that reason, most of the customers don't really get much value out of the root cause analysis part of TrueSight.

There are other areas with room for improvement as well. For example, the monitoring part requires four or five different types of agents to monitor different things in your infrastructure, which makes things very complicated.

In addition, to implement the Operations Management solution alone, you need a lot of hardware; a lot of servers and a lot of hardware resources. If you compare it with other solutions in the market, like Dynatrace or AppDynamics, the implementation of those products can be done using notably fewer servers. If you want to set up a standalone TrueSight Operations Management for a customer, you need at least 10 servers to implement Infrastructure Management and Application Performance Management. To do the same implementation for Dynatrace or AppDynamics or SolarWinds you only need three or four servers maximum, for the same environment. So the number of resources required for implementation is very much on the higher side.

The complexity of the solution is, again, a challenge. There are so many different components that it becomes almost a nightmare for the operations teams to do the administration and apply hotfixes, patches, and to do daily operations for the solution.

It's too complex, too many servers are required, there are too many different components in the solution, and a lot of agents are required.

Apart from that, some of the intelligence features could also be enhanced. For example, the AI part of TrueSight Operations Management should be enhanced to compete with other products in the market.

I've been using BMC TrueSight Operations Management for the last nine years, approximately.

Once the solution is deployed and the fine-tuning recommendations are in place, the solution is very stable. In my current environment we haven't seen any issue whatsoever in the last year. We have at least 20 servers running various TrueSight components, and none of them has had any issues in that time. So in that time the availability has been 100 percent and it has been 100 percent stable.

It does scale well, but my concern with the solution is that when you want to scale it up the complexity increases. That is mainly because of the number of different components or software pieces that work together.

The multitenancy mode of TrueSight has a lot of room for improvement. It's like if you have a building and there are many apartments in it, you can have multiple tenants in the same building. If you want to add a tenant, you just give them an apartment in the same building. But with TrueSight, to set up multitenancy, you have to set up separate "buildings" altogether, instead of compartmentalizing into "apartments," which makes everything much more complex.

I have been using BMC support for many years. Generally speaking, support is very good and, comparatively, it is much better than the competitors' support departments. But over the past couple of years, the technical expertise of the support team has consistently gone down. 

Generally, the response from BMC support is excellent. You get a response almost immediately. And if the support team is unable to resolve your issue, then they coordinate with their development or customer engineering team very quickly, which is the best part.
If you are trying to get technical support from Microsoft, for example, if the support team is unable to resolve your problem, it can take months to get to a higher level in the support hierarchy. And reaching the development team of the solution is almost unimaginable. But with BMC, this is one of the best parts. If your issue is not resolved by a support team within a stipulated time period, they immediately reach out to their development team and they usually fix the problem.

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.

I would advise that you really give a lot of thought to how much you want to monitor and what the anticipated growth in monitoring requirements will be. These things should be considered in the planning phase and, accordingly, you should decide what type of environment to set up.

The licensing depends on the data streams and the event streams. If you are monitoring all the metrics for the monitored devices, the data streams and event streams will increase multifold as well. Therefore, filtering is very important in TrueSight. If you are monitoring the memory utilization for a server, for example, that alone has 20-plus attributes in TrueSight. If you let in all 20 attributes, the number of data streams will increase. If you're really interested only in the utilization metric, you may also be monitoring 19 metrics that you are not interested in and they will add to the data stream and the licensing cost will increase.

Consider scalability very carefully: how much you want to monitor and what components are very important. Then, depending on these two things, filter out unwanted metrics or attributes. If you do a good job at filtering the data, then your licensing costs will be manageable.

I'm not aware of the details of the licensing models of TrueSight's competitors, but our business team says that the cost of using TrueSight is higher compared to its competitors. But that often comes down to the filtering and the sizing. The filtering has to be done very carefully to bring down the licensing costs. 

The licensing module is good and fairly self-explanatory. It's not very complex.

There are different pieces which are licensed separately. For example, Service Impact Management and Application Performance Management are licensed separately. Large customers buy the entire solution with all the features but they don't necessarily use all the features, especially the Service Impact Management. The latter is very difficult to implement and to get value out of. My advice is to consider what features of the solution you are going to use and then just pay for those features, instead of paying for everything without even using it.

Without naming particular competitors, I can give you general pros and cons of TrueSight Operations Management, when compared with them.

One of the pros of TrueSight Operations Management is the breadth of the IT infrastructure monitoring capabilities. TSOM can actually monitor any component of your IT infrastructure, along with your applications. It does very deep-dive monitoring and you have many more metrics, compared to any other solution, as far as I'm aware. It gives you more in-depth diagnostics and performance data. 

Also, the support from BMC software is better than its competitors. 

The complexity of implementing TSOM — the number of components required to set it up and the number of servers you need — is one of the cons. And the number of different agents you need to monitor different things is another con.

TrueSight, as a solution, is a very large suite nowadays. In the last year or so, BMC has made the Orchestration module a part of the TrueSight portfolio. Then there are the Server Automation, Network Automation, and BladeLogic Client Automation pieces that are merged into the TrueSight portfolio. If you consider the entire TrueSight product suite, which includes TrueSight Operations Management, Infrastructure Management, and Application Performance Management, and you have TrueSight Capacity Optimization, TrueSight Orchestration, and TrueSight Automation — if you combine all these solutions you can see business innovation. You can automate a lot of mundane and repetitive tasks. You can automate a lot of administrative functions. You can integrate a lot of different components using Orchestration, and that helps reduce the human cost involved. And maybe you can use your human resources for more productive or more creative tasks, for things other than repetitive activities. So TrueSight can help businesses to innovate.

Overall, I would rate the solution at eight out of 10.