I'd recommend the solution to others. It is expensive, however. New users need to consider their budget before going ahead.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I'm using the latest version of DX Unified Infrastructure Management.

Within the company of nine thousand people, about four hundred people use DX Unified Infrastructure Management, and department-wise, there's a total of sixty user accounts.

My rating for DX Unified Infrastructure Management, in general, is eight out of ten. If the price could be lower and functionality could be higher, I'd give it a ten.

I would recommend this solution to another company, as I am happy with it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: reputation and 24/7 support.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to us are 

• relationships
• response. 

Those two are the biggest things. We want them to be there when we're doing a major deployment. When things break down, that 3:00am call, they're there. That is the biggest thing for us: to have a close relationship with our vendor. 

And of course, knowledge that the vendor has of the actual product. That they have that technical talent within their team, that they can give that first-tier, third-tier, or whatever, support.

I would say you will probably see a lot of positive returns right out of the gate in the quality of monitoring that you are seeing; the type of monitoring data that you're getting from whatever it is that you're monitoring. I would encourage you to take a look at it.

There's always going to be room for improvement. Why I rate it this high is the ease of implementation, ease of use. I brought in several guys that never had any development experience. In 1-2 days of training, they were able to get some stuff knocked out for us; help us with the implementation process and the transitioning of it. Ease of use is huge. You don't have to be super-techy in order to utilize the product. Of course, to utilize it to its full functionality, sure, but day-one, out-of-the-box stuff is just phenomenal.

Make a conditional contract such that Nimsoft develops a fully functional maintenance mode UI that allows not only servers be placed into maintenance, but also different monitoring profiles and components like URL, Ping, individual VMware guests, SQL instances, etc.

Also consider using something else to monitor VMware.

Among the most important criteria when selecting a vendor, based on previous work experience, a stable environment is definitely number one. Because, an unstable environment means I wake up a lot of times at 3:00am, a lot of long weekends, a lot of hours. A stable application makes my job much easier. 

I rate it a 10 out of 10, based on everything that we discussed. I really enjoy the product.

When selecting a vendor what's most important to us is:

• Does it do what we need? 
• Does it do what we want? 
• Do we have to do a lot of out-of-the-box modifications?

I give it a 10 out of 10 because it's doing everything we expected and looked for. Like I said, we haven't gotten into infrastructure, so I can't really rate it that way yet. But what I've seen in the pre-conference classes, it's going to work just as well. So, I would probably give it a 10 across the board.

Definitely PoC UIM. It is worth it. 

I enjoy the product. It has done everything that we expected it to do.

When selecting a vendor, the most important aspect is that their goals are aligned with our goals. I look for a relationship that is symbiotic. I want them to understand that when we do well, they do well.

I would do a proof of concept and go through all the use cases to make sure it's going to fit your needs. You should also work with the user interface first. Ask yourself whether it is going to be too cumbersome for you, given the type of environment that you have.

Knowing now what I didn't know then, having really good and responsive technical support is very important. It is not something you really think about when you are looking for a better tool, but you have to live with the decision for years. It's hard to evaluate, I know, when you're first deploying or first looking at new tools, but being able to evaluate that would be good. The scalability and the ability to cover the range of our different requirements is also important.

What really brings it down is the whole user interface, and deploying robots in our environment – it could have gone better. They could have a better solution. They don’t handle custom monitoring well, where you need to customize something – whether it’s an action or needing to correlate alarms easily to take an action. We really had to jump through hoops to fit our environment in that way.

I would suggest you look at what customizations you have. I would do POCs with several different tools as it’s not a one-size-fits-all, especially when it comes to scale. Most tools can do stuff out-of-the-box basically OK. It’s when you’ve got your custom situations that you need to develop, that’s where you run into a lot of time and effort depending on the tool and how well it handles that.

I wouldn't recommend DX UIM to other users because of its issues with reporting and stability - SolarWinds would be a better choice. I would give DX UIM a rating of seven out of ten.

The fact that they're still doing a lot of development in the networking space, they're still trying to mature that side of the product to get where it needs to be. That's really the reason, beyond that it's a great product. We really like using the tools, we like all of the things that we've gotten out of the tool set, the ability to visualize, the ability to help our troubleshooting, the in depth analysis for our infrastructure teams and things like that. It's been really great.

Do your research and really compare them side by side, but give CA a chance to put their product against any because it's really one of the best in.

Define your success criteria very well. Make it pointed to your needs, to your industry, specifically your company. Test against that. Don't let the app teams get involved. They are going to give you 14 or 15 different variations of the same damn thing you're going to be looking at anyway. You've got to look at each one of the systems in the enterprise.

We've got six, seven, 800 applications. Each has an app team. Now, we've got an enterprise environment and IAS environment. Enterprise is running another 500 applications that are coming in through them, for the mobile applications spot. If I tried to get, it's like building an elephant by committee. We have to define 80 percent of what we want to do and monitor in the cloud. The other 20 percent has got to be free to customize. What I'm trying to do is build to the 80. Allow me to do as much automation as I can to that 80, and then leave the customization to the 20.

Plan and commit people and processes. Build a service, don't just implement a tool.

Give UIM a try. Build out a PoC environment. Play with it. Utilize all the probes you can that you think would meet your company's needs. Take advantage of it.

When choosing a vendor, we look at technical support.

Last words of advice. It's a great tool. One way I painted myself into a corner was when I first started using it I thought that it only can do this this one certain way. With UIM, the one thing I've learned is there's hundreds of ways of doing it and they're all right. It's just a matter of which way gets you there the fastest I guess.

Definitely insure to manage expectations you do a proof of concept and then executive buy-in. If you can get executive buy-in, you're good to go at that point.

We are using the latest version of the solution. We recently updated it. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten since the dashboards aren't that good. Otherwise, it is an amazing tool.

I very much prefer DX UIM to DX Performance Management.

Create an initial design document to help plan your implementation and identify potential issues beforehand. This document will inevitably evolve throughout the implementation and will provide a reference and a guide.

If they were in the process currently of comparing other products out there and trying to boil down that decision, one thing that I did is I made a chart. I basically took all of the monitoring things out there like CQ, Disk, Memory, Log Files, basically broke down everything, URLs, simple URL monitoring, more advanced scripting of website monitoring, I took all that and I built this template. Then, I went through and I basically said, does UIM cover this? Yes, yes, yes or basically I took CA , and I said what CA products does it take to cover all the points I need? UIM covered 95% of that. When I went to IBM and HP, as an example, I did the same thing and it took anywhere from eight to twelve products to do the same thing.

The way that I sold this up the command chain was I then said well it's a steep learning curve for these types of tools. If you have to learn eight or twelve tools versus one tool, not only is your job going to be easier, but you can sell it up the chain for less man hours to get efficient. That was one of the tips that I'd give to customers who are looking at the product is the learning curve is much less due to the fact that you're learning one tool to cover X amount of things you've got to do compared to eight or twelve.

I would give it a nine out of 10 at this point. There are a couple of things we are still working on. If we get those implemented correctly, then I could give it a higher rating.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: integration and support. It has alway been well-integrated and the support is good.

Monitor governance and solution sizing are key topics to start solution implementation.

This is very good product for monitoring as it has lots of functionalities and probes.

Today’s enterprise software can’t just be about the product. It has to be about the kind of ecosystem that that goes into it and companies need. If they don’t make a choice to invest in that ecosystem, they miss out on some of the best resources in terms of staff and technical development. I’m looking for a company that’s going to be straight forward. If they can make money because they have a good product people will pay for it. If they have to trick their customers into buying the product by selling them one thing and then forcing them to buy another because they don’t want to lose the investment they already made, that’s not somebody I want to partner with long term. I have personally worked with IBM’s product, HP’s product and CA’s product. They all have their strengths and their weaknesses. I wasn’t actually a part of this decision to make the investment in CA but CA has stood up against all of those vendors.

Say, they as were strong when you got down into it, they have some areas they are stronger other areas, they aren’t as strong. We’re a university so we’re not really in the making money business. Our decision was really about just ensuring that our students and our faculty and our staff had the best experience they can when they interact with technology and that means it’s up. That means that it’s working, that it’s fast when it should be fast, it’s stable and that really drove our decision. It’s that universities are very unique environments. The original campus, in the network sense, was a college campus. A lot of the technology that’s used in enterprise was developed on college campuses. There’s a lot of driving factors in there that come on the operational side to try and keep it stable. We realized that in order to be effective, we need to be able to see everything.

There can’t be a fog and it says, “We know how the servers are running or We know how the servers in storage are running." We don’t know what’s happening with the network or we know what’s happening with the network but we don’t know what’s happening with the VOIP or the phone systems. All of this technology is dependent on each other when things are down. Ends up resulting in a lot of finger pointing. When you have a centralized integrated approach and everybody can see everybody else’s stuff, you cut through all of that. If you have tuned the products and you can pinpoint exactly to the problem, then everyone can be working together on a resolution as opposed to spending all their time finger pointing, “I think it’s your network. No, it’s your storage array. No. It’s your server.” That all goes away.

I think the more complicated space is the ones where you have a mature monitoring solution but it’s not a central integrated monitoring solution and you have to figure out how to trade, things you’re going to have to give up for that silo in order to move it into an integrated approach. That’s always harder that just taking something that’s had no monitoring and bringing it up from scratch. I would put them in the top of the eight, solid nine category. I think they still have some work to do integrating some of their acquisitions. Like I said, the mobile and support space I think. My team has been very effective. These are a lot of people that I don’t interact with on a daily basis.

I think most of the time when people are looking at these other low cost solutions, they are not thinking about what they’re really going to spend. They’re not thinking about whether it’s sustainable, the solution that they’re putting in and they’re really going to see their return on investment. We had very specific needs in higher education that drove us towards CA. I don’t know if those needs would have been similar for instance when I was working in a marketing space. We’re watching a lot of websites and a lot of that kind of traffic. You need to look and see which product meets your particular space the best.

As i have worked on this product for quite some time I personally think this product is the best in terms of overall infrastructure monitoring.

When investing in a vendor, what's important to me are 

• software quality
• responsiveness
• communication.

I rate it an eight out of 10 and that's only because I think it can be better. I think as a competitive products in the market, UIM is really solid. A few changes could make it better.

Make sure there are staff to administrate it, after it gets deployed. And ensure that after CA delivers, that you have the ability to follow through with the rest of the implementation.

With version 9 of CA UIM arriving soon, we think we will rate it even better, at nine out of 10. With the current version of the product it's a seven. CA UIM has a long history, but as a result, it's difficult for CA to follow market standards. The new version will arrive on the market with beautiful capabilities and very nice interfaces. The new version will enable CA to catch up to market standards. It's a great choice.

Be sure to correctly plan what you need, it's very important. In a lot of cases, the customer asks for a monitoring product with some needs. When we arrive for the workshop, we discover they have other needs. It's important for the customers to not only ask partners to make a proposal, but they should go to the market, got to the forums and community, and see what exists on the market. Ask partners detailed questions. Not, "I need system monitoring," but why. What more do you need? That's important.

Secondly, don't forget that proprietary products like CA have a price. This price is justified by the capabilities. Don't compare open source products with a proprietary product. It's not the same. We look very expensive because they compare us with Aegis or Centurion, but it's not the same product. It's not the same team. It's not the same methodology of work or technical support.

If I had to choose all over again, I'd probably look more into the mobile function of it.

In terms of selecting a vendor, it is just like any business. Either companies monitor in-house with a custom built solution and they need a better solution and support ability, or you have a product that wasn't performing and you want to get another one. Since our company was very small over 10 years has grown very fast to be one of the largest corporate travel company in the world, my guess is they didn't have anything and they needed something. Or maybe they did it all in- house previous to the solution, and what they had was probably very immature.

When selecting a vendor, look at the relationship, look for dependability and get references. Make sure the solution works. Look for a vendor who will be a good business partner. Make sure they offer a proof of concept and make sure that you dig everything out of the vendor that you can. Not from a purchase point of view, but from a knowledge perspective and best practices. That's what's missing in IT. It’s just not a lot of people adhering to best practices and things like that. You get workers that just aren't skilled in doing this, so they rely a lot on other people and recommendations. They rely especially on the people that built the software. I would rely on them. That's what I've done my whole career.

I would suggest that you verify the growth, basically the scalability that you're planning, to utilize its solution. Make sure that's within the grasp of the solution when you're purchasing UIM.

You should nail down your requirements and understand that input from outside teams is important because your monitoring the whole environment. Also, ask CA for help as they’ve done this before.

We would advise any organization implementing this product, to ensure that there are good training materials available for their users, as it is a complicated solution and requires some specific knowledge prior to use.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Our criteria when looking to switch to a different product include the user's ability, their willingness, to use it. And another main consideration, you can get data in but can you get data out in the formats you need? If you can only get data in, but you can't get data out, it's of no use.

I give it an eight out of 10 because, as I said, I think it needs a little bit more improvement around the UX, but it's getting there. And they're making a concerted effort to make that happen.

I would tell a colleague who is researching this type of solution to really look at your feature functionality. What do you need? Does it meed your needs?

There are things that are nice in just covering the basics for us, but then we have pain points on some of the more advanced stuff.

It is very reliable and easy to implement.

I’ve actually pointed people to UIM because it can be simple. It can be as simple or complicated as you want. The simplicity helps a lot of places get up and running. The ability to drop a module on a server and click a couple things helps and is a lot easier. Pretty straightforward to set up and can be basic if you want. It allows you to get far more complicated as well.

The documentation is great and so are the forums. The included documentation and wiki gives you more than enough data to get through the day to day monitoring. The forums and support are there if you have something more complex.

We recommend this as a good starter solution for organizations, however, we would advise that additional functionality will significantly increase the cost of this product.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I started just a few months ago, but the company has been using it for about two years now. I have been surprised by the foothold CA has on the marketplace and how many products they actually manage.

I would definitely recommend the concept if it is something you are looking for.Just make sure that it integrates with the rest of the tools in your environment.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Functionality of the product
• Ease of use.

What I like about CA compared to other vendors is they are not pushy. They are actually more supportive if we have any issues they will get the appropriate rep to assist. Our rep does not feel like he is a sales rep, even though he is. To have that good relationship with the people that you are responsible for is a big deal, because I have dealt with other vendors where they are kind of the sleazy, salesman type.

Be aware of your exact needs so you can ensure the product will meet your needs.

Make sure you have a good grasp on what you need to get out of the product, of course. What does this product do for you? Once you have a good understanding of that, it's really communicating with either the architect or whoever is going to implement it to make sure that it reflects the goals, the requirements, the SLA, and so on. Then you can do the configuration and implementation.

My advice is to be patient, work with CA, and don't be afraid to ask questions or seek help.

Cloud vendors have expanded their services and features and functions within their own platforms. Having to rely on a third-party to keep pace with that development cycle has proven rather disappointing. That's why we're looking for a tool that has the capability to enable us to extend the tool on our own, if we choose to.

I don't think I would recommend this product. My issues stem from the turnover between companies that we've experienced in the last 10 years. The continued development of the tool has not been great. I think they've become lost in their tracks.

I would rate this solution a six out of 10. 

When our company is looking to invest in a vendor, our criterion is that we will try to stay with a vendor that we have a relationship with already. 

I rate it an eight out of 10 because the ability to configure the probes is much easier than with other products. Before we went with the UIM product, I had to evaluate other products and the configuration of those was much more difficult than with UIM.

I would advise, because they have the new SaaS product - and I have a feeling we're going to be looking at that at our company also - doing a demo of the SaaS product and see if that meets their needs.

Try to look beyond the price tag. You really do get a lot in return, especially when you have a highly heterogeneous environment.

Rating: 7/10. It's got the potential to grow higher. It's not like this is as good as it's ever going to get. We're very pleased with the product in general.

Advice for others: If I was looking in to the product I'd probably start by asking CA some questions, try to use it to pigeonhole our setup onto somebody else may work totally wrongly for them. Start small and build up to it to get their own familiarity with the product going.

Plan well. Because of what the tool does, some companies do not really have a good service catalog, and without a good service catalog, taking the leap into the UIM space is going to be an interesting challenge. That has been one of our challenges, we did not have a good service catalog.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• The partnership with the team
• The quality of the products
• The reputation of the vendor.

When selecting a vendor we are first and foremost looking for a partner. We're not interested in a vendor/client relationship. We're not interested in just being a dollar sign at the end of the quarter. We want somebody who will work to understand our business and understand what's unique about us. I'm sure that's a common thread with many customers but it's really important for us to have a partner relationship. The second thing is we want serviceability. We want to be able to call tech support, or talk to a systems engineer, and have them engage with us and work with us through a problem, not just throw us canned solutions and assume we're going to apply those and walk away.

I'd rate it a 9/10. First of all, I don't know that I ever reach a 10 with any vendor, but a 9 because the solution works as advertised, the service is there. The responsiveness of the tech support is very, very pleasing. They come back to you when they schedule, they follow up on their commitments. We've had some challenges expanding our footprint in other data centers. Like I said earlier, it's not perfectly easy, it is complex but once you get it dialed in we're up and running and everything's smooth. Their service teams have been there with us all the way, so that's really important for us.

When it comes to advice to others, I think you should focus on having an understanding of what you want to measure and monitor in your environment. It's more than just saying, "Yeah, we're going to monitor all the servers." What thresholds? What do you expect your CPU utilization to be? What do you expect your memory utilization to be? What's important for you from a customer service responsiveness? Do you have a systems engineer who's willing to put the time in to understand your business before providing you a solution? Those things are really key for us.

I would give it an eight out of 10. Business class, I would give it a 10. Enterprise, eight. And there are just a few more things to make it more enterprise-class friendly.

I think organically we tried putting it in for various products and services. Over time, when we realized that we can harness more out of it, we made a decision to put more energy for our enterprise customers into tools that really give them more value. Rather than trying to invest in too many tools, we decided to actually work on fewer tools; we'll get more out of them.

Without being biased, I feel that the most important criteria when selecting a vendor is about the people and whilst there's always a tradition in an organization when you're working with a vendor, it's really important that you have engagement from all levels of your business, from product marketing, engineering, architecture, as well as from a commercial relationship.

If you have a transactional relationship, you will only get suboptimal results. What we've learned is to broaden the discussion with different areas of our partner-vendor and work with them at different levels to bring the best out. That collaboration is really important. That's, I think, changed a lot over the last few years and we're now starting to get the value out of the relationship.

I’d never give anybody a perfect rating. If you asked me about two years ago, my rating would have been lower. As I’ve mentioned, the collaboration has definitely improved things.

Have a good integrator

I was able to quickly learn it and use it, deploy it, modify it to our specific needs, and it's been very reliable since.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are the history of the company, how long it's been in business, what offerings in terms of support it offers, and really other customer feedback based on their personal experiences.

The product is one of the best in the market. I can say that because of 10+ years of experience with monitoring solutions for infrastructure. Even more, it's better when you start talking about the enterprise level because of its great scalability. But this product is simple enough to be used by small-to-medium and medium-to-big companies. They offer also a free version called SNAP that anyone can try it out.

The deployment and everything went really well. The biggest feature we've seen is the ability to track availability. Availability reports, how's the product performing, not just up down like ping monitoring. We can get in there, we can pull metrics, wherever we need them, it's just very easy to use.

It is probably an 8/10, just because there's always room for improvement. A solid eight because it's always been able to do anything we've asked of it. We've done custom integrations, written custom probes, and it's always there, anything we need to do, it's fully capable.

Recommendation to peers: do your homework. Really get in there, really look, set up a sample. Again, I can not say enough the cohesiveness of the product. It's not multiple different piece meal products that have to be configured to work together, it's all one product, under the hood, and it does what it says it does.

As a simple solution for monitoring it's pretty handy, simple to use, very customizable, and integrates with Salesforce.

It’s been very stable, it’s flexible, and it really fits our business needs and business model. Integration with some other CA products has been a little challenging, but I can’t blame it on this toolset alone.

You would probably want to have, at least in the beginning, an understanding of what you’re looking for. Before you start evaluating any products, have at least a short list of what you want to get out of a product. When we didn’t have that setup at times, when you’re dealing with different vendors, they tend to steer you rather than you directing them. Identifying key items is extremely important. Make sure that you have staffing, because like any solution, it’s not a one or two person job.

If you have a strong IT department, or some special request for monitoring, that is hard to shared with others, you can try to implement it yourself. Otherwise, it is better to have services (from CA or other companies). You just have to remember that it is harder to take on an implementation on the fly and correct what is already done, than have one done from scratch.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

From what I have seen, version 9 looks great.

It provides a wide variety of monitoring options to the user. In addition to that, the reporting has good features like trend reports, customized dashboards, etc. It still has a way forward to strengthen the network as well as application monitoring and newer versions might have that in scope.

The product promises an overall good experience to users. Users will find it easy to access, without being highly technical or thoroughly well versed with the product.

Decide upfront about monitoring thresholds and use templates.

My advice would be to thoroughly identify your business objectives. With managed service providers, understand the product and have adequate resources, knowledge, and skills in order to make a smart decision for the company.

If you have a highly heterogeneous environment, CA UIM has the best chance of supporting all of your platforms (including probes for more exotic ones). The ease of scaling out your initial setup, the distributed architecture (Nimsoft has its roots in the service provider world) as well as the high availability are all differentiators.

Just look into the prereqs before installing so you’ve got the HW for building your environment. Other than that it is straight forward and by the book.

UIM is a very scalable product. It includes agents for a lot of technologies and new technologies that help the IT team to detect problems proactively with visibility of the IT environment and the business using dashboards and reports. It provides a unique vision when using UIM and Spectrum together, including a unique alarm console.

Look for three main things -- scalability, because you want a platform that will grow; ease of management, because you may have thousands of devices to manage; and single-point data presentation, because you could have hundreds of hosts with all their data.

CA UIM meets all of these at a less expensive price than the other large vendors.

Make sure you can get good quality support.

The advice I can give you is to first make an assessment of the needs that your company has. Once they have identified the products that offer solutions to their problems, then don't only consider the price but consider also the costs of licensing, support agreements, product functionalities, product positioning etc.

Consider reviewing evaluations made by other technology vendors and if possible ask for a demo to your local IT providers. They will be happy to show you the products and their different advantages.

UIM is showing its age, and need a major overhaul to keep up with competitors. I would recommend using other solutions.

We deploy to customer sites so I spend a lot of time dealing with firewall administrators, so if you’re going to be using it in this type of environment where you’re sending alerts back to your central office, you’d want to make sure the ports are open. Make sure you configure antivirus exclusions as well.

Get an expert to guide you through it. Don’t expect miracles, you get out what you put in, no solution is the holy grail. You should become a developer to really see the benefits of the product and get involved with the community to share your thoughts and ideas, CA listens to their customers feedback.

Ensure that you have a competent and experienced person doing the initial architecture.

I would recommend this solution to others. We currently have engagement with two banks for this solution. We are trying to pitch this solution to them.

I would rate DX Infrastructure Manager a nine out of ten. I have not really compared it with other solutions to see what are the differences. Based on my usage, it is serving, and it is okay. Customers are not complaining.

First of all design do a analysis of what kind of process you can automate in your company, that way will be easier for you to capture value from a solution like this. It's important to pay attention to the infrastructure requirements.

If you need an all-in-one solution that's easy to maintain, to scale and that you can rely on - Nimsoft Monitor is a good solution.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• level of support
• reliability of the tool
• functionality of the tool and 
• cost, obviously. 

Know what kind of products you are going to be using UIM to monitor and manage, and ensure that the compatibility is there. Because if there is not out-of-the-box compatibility, it can take a significant amount of time and effort to make things work.

Go ahead and implement it. Keep it simple in a phased manner. Set expectations correctly. (This is not a synthetic or real user monitoring tool.)

When selecting a vendor I would say the most important criteria are a history in infrastructure domain and credibility.

I would advise to start from a blank slate and not to try to make it from another solution.

You can get some good information from UIM. Just make sure to ask a lot of questions along the way and make sure that you have a good understanding of your business before you actually move into implementation.

Go ahead and choose this product.

Discuss whether it is feasible to do so through this tool, because the administration is complex, I recommend that due to the integrations with network monitoring, servers, SAN, VMware, etc., it's worth buying.

It comes down to identifying what you need out of the system. Make sure it's good out of the box and try to align your software selection and the priorities of your business.

You need initial support and know how to set it up correctly. You might also need a consultant's help initially.

Search for an expert to get the deployment right.

CA is a very nice solution. Before you make a final decision though, make sure all the stakeholders understand the solution and how it works. If they don't understand how it works they might not be able to appreciate it. It's a powerful solution, but give them some visibility into it, its capabilities and what they can do with it, before implementing it.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. It's not a ten because of the reporting aspect. Apart from that, the solution is okay. It's the reporting that users complain about.

Please investigate other solutions so you can make an informed choice. CA adds technical debt to your organization.

I think you should set it up the way that CA says you should set it up.

If you have a highly disparate estate across old and new technologies, Nimsoft is the only realistic in-house answer, prior to considering the customisation of open source alternatives.

Just follow the prerequisites, and a step-by-step installation guide is available on wiki.ca.com.

Don’t try to over-deploy. Start small and grow into it. Take your most important platform or application. Don’t just try to install everything.

I don’t love UIM, but it is the best selection for a multi-tenant infrastructure where SLA’s are a must. The original deployment was very successful, but this is not plug & play. At least one full time administrator is needed. With acquired experience, the product can do almost everything a monitoring product should do, but it is not all “out of the box”

Allocate a lot of time to learn the product and be prepared to get your hands dirty with the configuration files and also LUA scripting.

Go for it, as it’s quite stable and many organizations are moving towards it from their old product.

I give it an eight out of 10, for dependability, reduced cycles, and functionality.

I would recommend the solution.

It’s easy to implement. A good solution for medium environments.

You shouldn't implement it in Windows, and do it in a different database, preferably an Oracle one.

Check or ask for a compatibility matrix to ensure that your environment (server OS, virtual environments, etc.) is supported.