The major advantage of the product is estate management. I can have one policy across an estate. It is a little comfortable.

From a TrueSight perspective, we love the Capacity Optimization. We manage to collect almost all our capacity information through agents, without having to deploy a capacity agent. We've already saved some money. We're now provisioning more for obsolescence than we are for expansion because we now know exactly what we've got. One of the nice things about it is that we've now put Capacity Optimization in all our plants and mills, where the money's actually made.

The flexibility of the MRL is great. The various abilities to use native KMs to connect to a lot of things that we're doing with the hardware monitoring into the consolidated stuff, like SharePoint, is great. We're using native monitoring capabilities for all our server hardware, for visibility for applications, for URLs, for webpage response and accuracy, and for monitoring network throughput in a lot of particular instances. We're using lightweight protocols for pinging, for DNS, for LDAP. We use the scripting KMs for a lot of stuff that we have to script ourselves. We're also doing a lot of SNMP polling for devices. We've got some places where we really couldn't use a traditional agent and we deployed a Java agent that we wrote. For example, we might be monitoring UPS's out in the field using a Raspberry Pi and pushing that data back up. The problem with UPS's out in the field, when you have thousands of them, is that you don't know that the battery's bad until the power goes out. This gives us the ability to enable them to report back via SNMP.

The fact that they have a very integrated relationship with Sentry Software, the Knowledge Module, is valuable. We have one Knowledge Module that we're using today, which is the Sentry KM. We're bringing on the operating system Knowledge Module. The richest feature for us is the number of Knowledge Modules that we can load into the product to add breadth of service to the customer. It enables us to move up the operational stack from hardware, to operating system, to application, and to cloud. It's one presentation layer, one path with these Knowledge Modules, which we can add to it to get greater breadth.

That enables Park Place to provide one pane of glass over all those layers - hardware, OS, app, and cloud - which gives us a really good opportunity with the AIOps piece to get root cause analysis. And that's what our customers want: one pane of glass and a detailed root cause. If you've ever been in a data center when something goes wrong, the first thing they ask is, "What happened? What went wrong? Why did it break?"

It's the Knowledge Module which is the biggest feature that benefits us.

We can translate events into readable language. We use the product because it is a neutral system. It works irrespective of the operating system we’re running. If a new version of virtual monitoring comes up, BMC will support it in about six months.

What I like best about BMC TrueSight Operations Management is that it allows you to do granular monitoring and improves VM load.

The solution's event management capabilities are fantastic. We do a best-of-breed. If, on the network side, they use a different tool, we pull all that data in so that we have a single console. It's kind of like the monitor of monitors. We're able to aggregate all the different types of data sets, whether it's log data, app data, OS data, infrastructure data, or network data. We're able to aggregate all those events and then correlate and be able to say we're having an event. Just because we have one or two alerts doesn't necessarily mean that we're having an event. It's when we get several of those that "trip the wire" that we're able to say, "Okay, we are having an event." And the tool allows us to aggregate all of that so that we're managing event-driven versus alert-driven.

The breadth of the solution's monitoring capabilities is also fantastic. A lot of IT organizations that I talk with use a conglomerate of tools to manage their monitoring and it ends up being pocketed. We don't have that problem because we are using it as the monitor of monitors and therefore we are able to take advantage of all of its bells and whistles. As well, we can feed in additional alert data, crunch that, and react appropriately and accordingly, proactively versus reactively. We'll get several low-level alerts saying, "Hey, this may be an issue," and we're able to proactively look at that before it becomes a critical outage. We use almost every aspect of the tool, with the exception of some of the automation because we haven't gotten there and found the need for it. But we're rapidly starting to take advantage of those pieces as well.

A use-case example would be if we have a drive filling up on a particular server for a particular application. If that's a known issue, we can actually orchestrate through the automation component of TSOM to be able to say, "Hey, when we see this type of alert, go try one of these three things and if that fixes the problem, go away. And if it doesn't, go ahead and escalate that as a ticket and we'll have a human go touch that server and remediate the issue." So we're right on the cusp of beginning that journey.

In addition, the entire root-cause analysis functionality within the tool is quite useful. It really comes down to how admins want to leverage it. There are what I call "old-school admins" who want to get on the box and solve it themselves. Then you have the "new-school admins" who go straight to the monitoring tools. It clearly shows you root cause analysis: This is the probable cause, and then they're able to go remediate it more quickly. We use that extensively within the operations team and the products team, which is the team that I own. I don't think the engineering team is quite there yet, but they're beginning to see the value of wanting to see that data and start using the tool themselves.

Regarding mean time to remediation, when I took over this organization, I and the rest of the group were working about 100 hours a week, just trying to keep our major systems running. It wasn't until eight months later, when we actually implemented a more mature monitoring system, that we turned the corner and people were working 60 hours. And now it's somewhere between 40 and 50 hours a week, which is much more maintainable and realistic in the industry. We were doing everything we could to keep those systems running, and we had no idea what would be in the next box of chocolates that we would open up, back when we first started this. There's a direct correlation with TSOM and the BMC product sets that have helped us be successful in working smart and not hard, like we did back in the day.

The most valuable features of the solution are alert management, alert generation, and event management.

The most valuable parts of the solution are its end-user monitoring feature and how it allows monitoring applications and transactions.

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 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.

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.

It is a very stable product.

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. 

• 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.

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. 

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.

The solution has major features that enable users to use the tool more effectively. The tool is flexible enough to be customized based on customer requirements.

We have many operational teams, and for any given team their requirements are different. One team is more reliant on infrastructure monitoring, because they are processing-heavy. Another team might be more reliant on endpoint monitoring where we're ensuring that the third-party endpoints they rely on are up and available. Another team may have fairly immature applications, so that they would rely heavily on log monitoring to catch all the errors that may come up. From a consumer-function standpoint, there isn't any feature that stands out. They're all important because all of our consumers are important. 

From an administrative standpoint, what stands out in TrueSight is the ability to implement quickly. When they have a requirement to monitor something, we're able to turn that on quickly in their environment. We're able to set up new apps within a day. Most of the work in monitoring is working with the teams, evangelizing, educating, and making sure that they're bringing their smart requests to the table so that they get visibility into their business service. If the implementation wasn't as easy as it is, it would hinder and probably decrease the adoption of monitoring. But because we can turn requests around pretty quickly and adjust things as teams need adjustment for their different release schedules, administratively, we're able to respond and keep pace with the business and the technology that they're implementing. That is a critical function for us.

Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers.

I like everything about this tool.

The most valuable features are the rich reports, high performance, and the look and feel of the WebEx webpage are very good.

The most valuable feature of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is the dashboard presentation server.

Signature baselines, which have allowed us to fine tune many of our events and significantly reduce the number of events generated.

I like the event management part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's very good. I like it.  It's a great product, but there are some things that could be improved, such as the dashboards.

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

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

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

TrueSight Operations Manager is a combination of different components (applications) like Presentation Server, Impact Manager, and AppVisibility Manager and IT's Data Analytics, but it provides a seamless integration and a holistic view with Application and Infrastructure Health views.

It provides common administration, and a Single Sign-On Platform with RBAC, which eases the cross launch between multiple tools and saves the need to configure users for all the different components and improving monitoring views.

I believe that the ease of use and UI is great. The ability to fulfill the role as a manager of managers is fantastic. We integrated a number of other monitoring tools into BMC.

I like the deep-dive detail and end-user metrics data. The synthetic monitor is the best one. The best point of the new one is that there's no need for configuration. You can inject the Java script and start to change major developments in the application. This is a good approach, and we received all the data using this.

It's good if you understand the systems and issues well.

The most valuable features of BMC TrueSight Operations Management are the blackouts and event management. 

• Wide support for monitoring
• Strong event management
• Service management capability
• Baselining (analytics)
• Easy to integrate other tools with it