Densify is not a stable tool. Every time the support gets investigated, it takes much time to get refreshed.

Densify's on-premise history gives it a solid skillset to build upon in the cloud. Unfortunately the tools and mechanisms which really came to maturity in the cloud, and were not mainstream on-premise, are still not implemented. These are features, such as auto-scaling, application load balancing, containers, etc.

In terms of integration, the tool has great data. However, it's not always meaningful because the true business attributes of how most Fortune 500 companies operate are not maintaining in one tool, they're in a school of many tools. I would say more are seen with integration to other tool sets and to add business contacts would probably be my one recommendation.

My comments were in regards to ITSM or EA integration. As an example, if I know a VM is running hot or has too many resources I do not necessarily know if this is a production or nonproduction, supports a critical revenue generating application vs a sunset application that has little business value, etc.

Integrating ITSM/EA applications with Densify data is extremely powerful and provides true business context.

So far there are a few areas. It seems that the mechanism for integration is, it goes so far but I think there could be some standard integration to normal remedy service now etc. I think that should be out of the box.

The reporting; we've seen that some of the functionality from an earlier version has been dropped in the current version that we have (v.9.3) and they're looking to put that back because one of the main functions that we see is the ongoing reporting to other systems.

Also I've just been looking at the new reporting interface that they have in version 10 and, as I've seen with a number of other companies, they are very self-focused shall we say, instead of delivering the data to maybe one or two or three standard BI platforms. I know they allow you to do that but you've got to do it. It would be good to have a working example of where they already work with whatever platforms exist, QuickView or whatever platforms, but we'll be working on that anyway. They'll be able to give those examples in about a year's time.

Areas for improvement are:

• A closer integration to the service management processes.
• Being able to correlate the systems which are at risk with systems that report performance incidents.
• Maybe a tighter integration with my CMDB processes, so all resources are appropriately tagged -- based on the CMDB representation.

Service management level integration is probably the biggest area for improvement.

• The reports which we extract from Densify could be more user friendly, such as by eliminating the unnecessary fields.
• Normalization of CPU utilization is required. At present, the data is available based on entitlement level.
• Adding performance metrics, like run queue, would be helpful to assess complex situations by relating with CPU utilization metric.
• CPU and Memory Util reporting more than 100% due to turbo boost technology and memory overhead respectively.

Initially we talked about some custom reporting, wherein our customer expected certain reports on a few areas, like how the storage is allocated, how the network performance is doing, and how the network utilization is happening for a virtual machine. So we wanted that reporting functionality and we have given that feedback to the team.

We are currently using a version that is a few behind (v8.3.4 as opposed to v10), so the only improvement I could suggest would be addressed in the newest version. However, in older versions, customized reporting was lacking. v10 includes a new reporting engine utilizing JasperReports, so this is likely no longer a consideration.

Some parts of the interface are rather complex and require a bit of time to navigate, but this has never stopped us as a Densify advisor is readily available to help with our "how to" queries.