DX Unified Infrastructure Management Previous Solutions

Arunpandiyan M - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I've also used Elantra, which is more automated than DX.

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BM
Tool Admin at BCD Travel

We were using about four or five different solutions and everybody had to have all these different tools up at the same time. We were looking for one where we could just have one solution. 

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JS
Engineer II, Network Operations Center at BCD Travel

Our previous tool, Microsoft SCOM, was not meeting expectations. The cost, the return on investment for it, was not there at all. With UIM, the ROI is way up there. With the other tool, the admin time versus the value you were getting was just not there.

I hear they've made improvements to SCOM now. But we went a different direction. And we're happy that we did.

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Buyer's Guide
DX Unified Infrastructure Management
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about DX Unified Infrastructure Management. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user572904 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

One of the primary triggers for investing in a new solution was the fact that our current system didn't meet the requirements and the needs as our company began to grow and take on new applications. Additionally, the election to sunset the previous product that we were utilizing made for a big push to look for something new.

Personally, when I’m selecting a vendor, I want somebody who feels like they've got something to lose. Obviously, if I go with your tool set, and you don't seem to really care about the upgrade or my pain points, and you don't feel like, "Hey. I've bought it and I walked away from it. You're stuck with it.", that makes the relationship difficult. CA is extremely committed. I think that would be one of the things: commitment to success. They're extremely committed to our success and I can't be more thankful.

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it_user156147 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Applications Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

We previously used BMC ProactiveNet. Nimsoft shines like the sun compared to ProactiveNet with night and day differences in stability, scalability, functionality, features, and quality of support. Nimsoft was also considerable less expensive to monitor the same component infrastructure.

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it_user41610 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager Network Operations Center at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We had and older version Microsoft SCOM and it did not monitor Linux servers at that time. We needed a solution that could handle that. We had solo wins for network and we needed a solution that was scalable and a solution that we could migrate to our global infrastructure. In a previous company, I worked with CA products before, (Spectrum, eHealth, and Live Health), so I trusted CA and knew CA was a good product so I came back to them again.

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it_user778680 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

We were using a different vendor, different product and it went end-of-life. I call it "TM-ART" some people call it TMART, it is from BMC. 

We had to find another product.

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AS
Monitoring And Reporting Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used eHealth, which was another CA product. We noticed that UIM was getting a lot more development than eHealth. UIM was kind of a future product. We spoke with our account representative, and we did a one-to-one swap for licenses.

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it_user348300 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We had many solutions and this one came down from management. "You're going to narrow your footprint," and the powers that be picked it for us. We had to go with that. It was already in. Other products were already in house, so this kind of lent itself to, "Well, here's another solution from CA, so deploy that."

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it_user370593 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, End 2 End Monitoring at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but we've reduced our outages by about 15%. We've reduced time to resolution by about 40%. Lower overhead as far as man hours.

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it_user353859 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Technical Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

We had VMware up and running fine. We had an internal cloud on VMware, it was great for five years. It was almost self-regulating. Then we decided to go this other route. You know what VMware had under the hood? You have to script and program on to OpenStack to make it do the RS capability. It was a lot of "holy cow!" going on.

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RG
Founder and CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We previously used Solarwinds NPM but it wasn't as scalable.

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it_user558396 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The other product was at the end of its life, so we had to find something.

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it_user558231 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Cyber Management Systems

CA UIM was really the first time we’ve had a dashboard type of technology in our infrastructure. So prior to that, it was all siloed for the most part.

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it_user490704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Tools Specialist (Contractor) at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have evaluated and used many monitoring tools, from open-source to enterprise-class solutions and everything in between. They all have good and bad points, but scalability and flexibility seem to be most discussed, followed by stability and security.

CA UIM comes out on top very often as it excels in all four of the above criteria, and is also easy to deploy and comparably simple to operate.

  • Scalability: Addressed elsewhere.
  • Flexibility: Is achieved via the use of UIM’s REST API available for custom integrations and the ability to build custom monitoring probes using supplied SDKs.
  • Stability: Difficult to prove in a POC; however, I can testify that when implemented correctly with appropriate self-monitoring, the tool does not tend to fail without outside influence.
  • Security: The solution infrastructure can be connected securely and effectively hardened. The solution is fully multitenant compliant, which means inventory, metrics and events can be isolated between groups of operators. This is particularly useful for MSPs who allow customers to log on and view infrastructure status or service levels.

Several products I have evaluated claim to be multitenant compliant, but are in fact only able to monitor multiple ‘customers’, but not segregate the event and metric data.

CA UIM can be used as a standalone monitoring solution in many small- and medium-size organisations. It tends to be integrated into other CA products for large and enterprise-size organisations, where greater/granular application transaction monitoring is required, more in-depth network monitoring necessary and full service views are essential.

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it_user797952 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were a previous user of CA NSM. From a supportability perspective, we did not want to continue using something that CA would not support. It was a logical step. It allowed us to go and migrate from NSM to UIM. So far, it has worked well. 

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CF
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

We had no previous solution. It was the early days of Windows NT 3.5.

We decided to go with CA in the late 1990's, and we have been with CA ever since.

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LG
Big Data Architect en Seguros SURA at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Previously we had multiples tools to monitor IT infrastructure and other apps e.g ManageEngine to monitor databases, Nagios to monitor telco devices (switches, and routers, etc.) We switched to CA UIM because we had a lot of issues when we tried to correlate events and get unified metrics from our monitoring tools databases, in the same way we had maintain multiple tools and open tickets with multiples vendors.

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it_user778560 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Neuroses IT

We are partners for CA but we also partner with other providers, like small French providers for the local market, not the worldwide market. we can use UIM for the best monitoring and use features from other products as well. CA lets partners work with other products. We are honest about the futures of the CA products. Most of the time, it is stronger than the other products.

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it_user161208 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at Delta Air Lines (PreMerger NWA)

We were using IBM Tivoli solutions that did not meet monitoring requirements for numerous reasons, like the lack of scalability and technology.

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it_user778515 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst

We have SolarWinds and we had some older Spectrum products that CA had, as well. But, the user interface was not as modernized as UIM.

The product we had was just nearing it's end of lifecycle for us, and we needed to move on to something else that the users would be more comfortable with using.

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it_user424428 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead Global Service Monitoring at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I have been using this from the beginning.

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it_user158706 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Yes I have used multiple products in the past. The switch to Nimsoft was due to a executive level decision for cost savings. If setup properly this solution is not as expensive as some of its competitors.

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it_user778539 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We moved from the HPE product suite two or three years ago. I was not a part of that, but the main complaint with HPE was the support was locking. That is really about it. 

We did migrate from a different solution, which had a similar functionality. I would not say that it necessarily added to it, but I received feedback from the admin who administers the tool itself that it is a lot easier to use and very user friendly for the teams.

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it_user689553 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We were using HPE Operations Manager and SCOM. We switched because it's less resource demanding and has more functionality out of the box. Especially when it comes to support for different monitoring techniques, so that fewer custom-made solutions (scripting, etc.) are required. There are probes available for most kinds of monitoring metrics, applications, and operating systems.

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it_user558591 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Some of our customers had previously used CA Spectrum, but we did a complete business case analysis and then talked to sales teams from the other vendors. CA was very on board with us and worked with us better than any of the others.

For us, technical support was most important in choosing a vendor; trying to determine what kind of support we were going to get and then evaluating the ability to do the monitoring as a one-stop shop.

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BB
Enterprise Systems Mgmt Admn at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We actually had UIM before it was UIM. It was Nimbus in 2004. Then it went to Nimsoft, then CA bought it and then rebranded it CA UIM. When it got brought into our company, in 2004, we used it for Synthetic transactions, to monitor the email and different products on the web, and the response times to that. And then we were using a different product for our network monitoring. 

We wanted to try to eliminate some of the excessive tools we had so we moved our network monitoring into CA UIM at that time.

When we first moved on to UIM, and brought the network monitoring in, at that time, the event correlation product wasn't built in - so one event happens and then it triggers three or four other things. And when we were doing that, the product we were getting rid of did do that. CA had said that that would be on the roadmap. It seems like the roadmap has changed now, and they're doing more of the event correlation with Spectrum, but we don't own Spectrum. So we have a little bit of a struggle there with the event correlation, and it seems like CA is not doing the event correlation with their SNMP Collector probe. They've moved more towards Spectrum.

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it_user380754 - PeerSpot reviewer
CA UIM administrator at a government with 501-1,000 employees

The customer was using Nagios, and still is for the network part.

The main issues were:

  • The lengthy development periods (because you need to script everything),
  • The difficulty of having any custom reporting/dashboarding capabilities
  • The total absence of decent event management functionality: This is something most cheaper monitoring tools anyway don't have
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it_user393561 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Since we already had the licenses for a longer period of time, we were going to move to Performance Center. These are all CA products. We were going to move to Performance Center, we built it under CA's guidance.

In the beginning of 2014, they said, "Move to UIM." That was kind of a step backwards at the time but it ended up being the right direction to go, but we spent a lot of time trying to get the other product to go. We had tried to implement it, and certain things that you would think any monitoring solution would have were not available in that one. Performance Center was meant to be the next generation product, but then they redirected things to Nimsoft/UIM. I think that was a year-end decision at the beginning of 2014 that CA made.

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it_user778512 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This was our first implementation of this type of solution. We had done an internal proof of concept or proof of value. That is where we came up with using the tool. 

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it_user390807 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Director Technology Services Operations at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

We were having system outages, or server outages, or connectivity outages with the network and we weren't able to see it. The tools we had in place weren't robust enough and weren't flexible enough for us to design thresholds and different levels of monitoring. We started researching tools and we decided on UIM.

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it_user187290 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal System Administrator at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

We tried several Open Source tools like Nagios and Zenoss, but as the environment grew we found that those tools wouldn’t scale the way we wanted. There was also a lack of Synthetic Transaction monitoring tools that would require large internal development effort. We chose Nimsoft because it covered Windows and Linux and most of the applications we wanted to monitor out of the box. Another large factor for us was the ability to customize the product, since we were used to using Open Source tools.

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CF
Manager at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

We were using CA Nimsoft Monitor, and we knew we had to invest in UIM because NISM was a few years past sunset. We realized that we needed to embrace the latest technology being offered by CA.

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it_user158709 - PeerSpot reviewer
ICT Infrastructure Architect Expert with 1,001-5,000 employees

Many (10+). We switched to centralize on one tool.

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JE
Presales Consultant at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

I’ve used other monitoring solutions before. I chose CA UIM because it’s pretty good at what it does, makes your life a lot easier with fast deployment options, and CA is always improving it a lot.

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it_user450105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tool Developer/Lead at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We had numerous solutions. We had SolarWinds, we had WhatsUp Gold, we had a lot of different things like that. With CA UIM, we were able to roll all those into a single monitoring platform. It's not nine different products that are configured to work together, it's one cohesive central standard product.

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it_user377604 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Management Engineer II at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

No other solution was used.

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it_user348384 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Infrastructure Operations at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I was in a position where I was managing the NOC, and I was getting multiple complaints from our customers that they weren’t being notified of issues in their environments. So I started a reveal of the product in place and found some major deficiencies. At that point I approached our CEO and told him of the issues we were having and that we were losing customers, and we put together a plan to find a new product.

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it_user293970 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I have used and implemented the old product, CA Infrastructure Management, but CA UIM is the new strategic product in this line.

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RS
Solution Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

SolarWinds and ManageEngine are both good tools with good technology in this sphere but for our purposes they are unlikely to be able to scale and provide the information we need in our environment. It might work for other companies that have a different environment from ours. It's difficult to compare these solutions head to head because it all depends on an environment's requirements.

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it_user379707 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We had been using BMC Patrol and BPPM for infrastructure monitoring. However, we switched to CA UIM as it promised to be equally competent. And we have not found ourselves complaining since then.

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it_user373206 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Monitoring Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We started out with HP, then added Nagios, looked at EMC, and finally selected CA UIM.

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it_user304509 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Systems Management Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We're a startup, and this was the first system we put in. With the price point and the support of multi-tenancy, those were the decisive factors.

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it_user297120 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Tools Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We were using a previous CA solution but it was EOL’d and UIM is the new strategic CA IM product, so we switched.

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it_user233349 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant with 1,001-5,000 employees

We previously used CA Unicenter NSM, but we switched to UIM because NSM was an end of life product and CA no longer supported some common platforms (like RH64bit agents).

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it_user164013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Manager with 51-200 employees

We’ve only used UIM but looked at other tools.

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it_user390117 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

When I first started, we used Groundwork, an open-source tool.

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it_user159174 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Yes, we have used SMARTS and TIVOLI. We switched due to the CA full suit of solution which include netqos, APM and CEM. Nimsoft is part of the suite to allow use to complete the integration with CA SOI.

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it_user169710 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrador de Sistemas

We did not previously use a different solution.

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it_user480759 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Systems Analyst II at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

We previously used SCOM which is similar in many regards. This was the first product we evaluated and chose it mainly because they offered to customize it to fit our needs. Other vendors were not as responsive to our requests, although I feel they may have been a better fit overall.

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it_user348225 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Specialist at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I’ve used other products in much smaller implementations, but I like the way you can preconfigure things; you can drop the packages and probes on the servers you’re using. It gets done.

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it_user233928 - PeerSpot reviewer
CSI Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

No, but I have evaluated other solutions and deemed them unsuitable to switch to. Some solutions do, though, have novel ideas which could be more appealing to organisations with different needs.

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it_user189927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Ent. Monitoring Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We previously used Solarwinds Orion (NPM), and IBM Netcool. The main issues with them were scalability, features, and cost.

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it_user275361 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Operations with 501-1,000 employees

We used to use a Nagios-based solution that was cheaper, but the problem was that we didn’t have the proper support, especially for application management such as SAP, Oracle, Citrix, Amazon, etc. With CA UIM we were able to start monitoring those applications out of the box.

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it_user159834 - PeerSpot reviewer
System engineer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

I haven't used such enterprise-grade tools before Nimsoft. Only specific ones, like Wireshark & PRTG.

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it_user558153 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of IT Production Services at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were using OmniVision. We switched because CA Unified Infrastructure Management integrated multiple features.

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it_user154629 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Yes, the main reason for change were high support costs and a difficult management tool.

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it_user357405 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We were migrating and had several products that were outdated and had poor support. Our overall objective was to have one solution. CA UIM was that solution.

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it_user189933 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Services Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

No previous solution. CA Nimsoft meets all of mine and my customers needs.

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KN
Implementation/Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We did not have a previous solution. I have tried other solutions, such as Microsoft SSCM and SolarWinds. I've played around with them, but I have not really used them.

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it_user603243 - PeerSpot reviewer
Telemetry Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

We did not use a previous solution but we are architecting an alternative presently.

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it_user157599 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Computing Tools at a tech company with 51-200 employees

Personally yes, but in this case it is the only solution capable of meeting the business needs - massive scalability, highly distributed architecture.

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it_user154095 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

My customers were happy with CA eHealth. However, CA announced it would stop selling eHealth to new customers, so we did not have any other option but to sell CA UIM.

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it_user351507 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer Principal at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

We got the data center first and UIM came with it. We did some research and decided to go with this one because it can handle multiple vendors.

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it_user295758 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managed Services Operational Engineer- Automation with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used Nagios in our early years, and we switched because of the power.

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it_user229734 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Technical Testing Consultant at adhoc International

We already used v7, but we upgraded to the latest version because of the new enhancement described in the product release notes.

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it_user155184 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Executive at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

No, we did not use another solution.

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it_user159393 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder / Owner at a security firm with 51-200 employees
it_user772545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Full Stack Monitoring Consultant at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
it_user507414 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Developer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

I have never used another solution.

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it_user159171 - PeerSpot reviewer
NOC Engineer at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees
it_user797928 - PeerSpot reviewer
IS Team Lead at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

We used eHealth, which was owned by CA. It was getting close to end of life, and it was also stuck on SNMP version 2. Moving to UIM allowed us to remove ourselves from the REST registry, and start doing agent deployment.

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it_user779169 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations Coordinator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

We used Spectrum. We switched because UIM has new features or other features  which are much better than Spectrum.

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it_user386634 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Admin at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

We previously used Tivoli and CA NSM, which are outdated and are no longer supported. Hence, the organization decided to use UIM.

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it_user357438 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We could combine many tools, so this was extremely useful and saves us a lot of time. That's why we switched.

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it_user475434 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Development at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

We used an open source solution for some time, but decided to get a fully supported solution to improve service availability.

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Buyer's Guide
DX Unified Infrastructure Management
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about DX Unified Infrastructure Management. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.