DX Unified Infrastructure Management Room for Improvement

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

There are quite a few manual processes.

We've had issues with pulling reports. Sometimes we have trouble or get errors. The reporting process should be easier. 

If you have a hub, you should be able to have an unlimited number of servers. For example, if you have 500 servers, and the limit is ten, you have to pull 50 reports. We'd like to just pull one report for all servers. This also increases the time to pull reports. If we have to pull more reports, it takes that much longer than just pulling one. 

The product can be expensive. 

Right now, they are updating and consolidating the dashboard. I'm expecting an update that will resolve a few glitches in the server.

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Mark Tukh - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Pre-sales Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

There should be wider coverage of storage infrastructure. In addition, the product used to have a mobile interface, but it is not supported anymore. It would be good to add it back.

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RK
IT Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I'm very happy with DX Unified Infrastructure Management, but what could be improved is its user interface because currently, it has many wide spaces. All the information you need is in DX Unified Infrastructure Management, and it's a reliable tool, and though that's more important than the gaps in the user interface being smaller or wider, those gaps still need some improvement. I know the team is working on it. My company had some backend problems with DX Unified Infrastructure Management in the past that have now been solved.

The setup for the tool also needs improvement because it's complex.

Another room for improvement in DX Unified Infrastructure Management is its technical support because it's sometimes not as knowledgeable or responsive.

What I'm suggesting to be added to the tool is an open-standard ELK Elastic-based database where you can put in all data, so that you can use the data in other systems as well.

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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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
BM
Tool Admin at BCD Travel

I would like a credential management portion, since a lot of probes require different credentials. Some require the same one, but you have do it across a bunch of different servers and once you have like 2400 servers like us, you do not know where these probes are anymore and you do not know where you put in credentials. If they had some credential management interface, that would be the best.

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JS
Engineer II, Network Operations Center at BCD Travel

We've talked to our vendor about the specific parts of UIM, specific probes, that we'd like to see improvements in. This would give us greater functionality. An example is logmon. We'd like to see some more functionality there. Maybe something that can capture an XML tag, data, things like that.

Overall we'd like to see a better console for the alarm view. Right now it's great, but there's some functionality that was lost from the previous migration. They are trying to integrate some of the functionality from the previous versions, which was lost when they migrated to a new format for showing that.
Since that's the most visible part of our tool, to our users, that would have immediate benefits, I would say.

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it_user572904 - PeerSpot reviewer
Team Lead at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

One of the biggest areas to improve would be the training aspect. There's a little bit of training out there available right now. I know it's a newer CA product. I think the training is a little rudimentary at this point. I think there needs to be some more advanced-level training available.

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

The VMware monitoring had quite a bit of room to improve. In very large environments, the VMware probe could not keep up with data collection and would often times fall behind – thus scaling was an issue. In addition, the ability to filter in or out which VMs you wanted to monitor or not to monitor was severely limited. The suggested configuration is to monitor everything using the rule templates that applied to every live VM managed by the VC. While this was simple to setup, we ended up alerting on VMs that were not in use.

Secondly, the lack of a robust out-of-box maintenance mode functionality might be a detractor to some new users. I had to build my own maintenance mode functionality using the enrichment probe in addition to some CGI scripts and SQL triggers to allow me to place monitoring profiles into maintenance. The default setting only allow users to place entire servers into maintenance. This was a problem for URL, DB, ping, and VMware monitors.

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

A would like to see a little deeper application monitoring and maybe some of the capabilities of CA Spectrum.

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

The biggest feature that I've been hoping they would enhance on is inventory management: things like adding/removing nodes. 

Also, a little bit more functionality in the Admin Console.

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

Without deep diving into the infrastructure side, I really can't say because I only work with the Synthetics, end-to-end side of it. Right now there are just minor, little glitches, things that I see, but it's things I'm working with support on.

With the Synthetics it's more or less what a user sees in an application. There are some things that UIM can do and some things that UIM can't do. What it can do is great, and it's done a lot, and I've done a lot with the product that supports what we do. That's why I say it's a 10 across the board. 

The little things are, for example, maybe Windows.frames can't be seen within UIM, or within the side I'm working with. They say, "Oh, we're going to get that fixed in the next feature." Great, so we're in the process of upgrading right now. We're on 8.4.7 and we're getting reading to go to 8.5.1, which is the most current release.

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

I would really like to see HTML5. I spoke with a couple of developers about it. I'd also like to see additional monitoring so we can push rules a little bit easier.

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it_user348300 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
  • They need to work on the user interface. I know they are, but to me, that's one of the big things that is holding them back. It's not with the times. It's not real intuitive. You really need to work with it to figure out where things are.
  • We need to be able to group servers and deploy different packages to them.
  • You should be able to better organize the grouping and deployment. That's kind of where they struggle. They need to work on that area. I know they are, but that's our pain point. The organization is lacking.
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it_user348300 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The UI to me is huge. I really think they ought to step back and redesign it. Look at other tools out there and see how well the UI is working for those. I don’t think they can fix it with the technology they’re using.

The GUI for the infrastructure, to me, is antiquated. We have products that we’re moving away from that have a better GUI and they’re 15 years old. That’s one of my biggest disappointments – I don’t find myself being as productive because the GUI is so sluggish and not user-friendly. Needs a lot of work.

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Harshal Jawa - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Consultant at vvolve management consultants

DX UIM's reporting and customization need to be improved. There are also issues with its stability, and it requires a lot of effort to execute and implement something.

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

Continuing to mature the SNP collector and the network side of the tools they're still not as strong as they need to be. If you're moving from a different product like Spectrum, or something like that, it's a little bit stronger in the networking area, continuing the development of that area.

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

The UIM product is playing catch-up. They are not there yet to do a lot of the next-level things that we need them to do. The auto on-boarding, the customer self-service pieces of it. We are hoping to meet with them in about two weeks to start looking at ways we can get that done. Also, High Availability, the failover capability. For their product, we were going to go with a hardware platform for HA. Two separate blades with a bootable SAN piece. They got a software-driven HA position. I'll take a look at it and see what it has to do. I think there may be a lot more moving parts there than what I want. We will see.

Also, since we went to OpenStack, we have to integrate storage and networking to a certain extent in there. Each of the probes that we use has to be specifically built in the system. Right now, CA is pretty much at ground level with it. I think the next release in Q2 well probably be much more enhanced towards that end.

There are the two more things I want. First, customer self-service where they can go in and make whatever changes they want to make, absent giving them admin access to my consoles, so long as it affects only their applications. You want to make modifications on threshold limits for severities for these things to go out to the service outside, I'm okay with that. How do we get that done? How do I get from RA to the desk station? How do I get there? I don't know.

Second, I'd like an HA variant that isn't going to scare me, and help me do all the on-boarding. I'd rather deal with the blades. I've got two blades out there with a bootable SAN system. Each blade fails, bam, this one comes up. All the VM's come right over. Pretty simple to me. That's what I'd like.

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

I would like to see enhancements to core probes for bulk uploads. Some probes have the capability to monitor multiple targets. You either must enter them one by one or use scripting to bulk load the targets. I would like to see that functionality built into the probes.

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

Right now, I don't have any new features in mind. We’ll see once we get in and start playing with it a lot more in depth. We do have another team that's looking at implementing it, so that may be something down the road on which we can give more information.

The product out of the box is great. We were very impressed with it. We have only used it for what we need so far; the SLA piece for monitoring our apps.

We heard at a recent CA World conference that APM integrates with UIM. Spectrum also integrates with UIM, depending on the release and can actually cross-correlate alerts. When we have APM and Spectrum and we get them on the right versions, we'll be able to link all three together. That would be an improvement.

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it_user558141 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I do a lot of coding outside and inside of UIM. The biggest, most annoying problem, if you will, is the ISE that's embedded in UIM. It is very limited in its scope and what it's capable of compared to even some of the more primitive ISEs that are on the market. Personally, I'd like to see more time spent on the ISE, whether that's going to be in their new product, which is Unified Management Portal.

I've heard from up the food chain that they're going to be changing it and it's going to be more integrated with UMP. But I'd still like to see more improvement on the ISE, especially from my perspective because I primarily work in automation. The ISE portion is very big in my space.

In PowerShell, for instance, their ISE is, in my opinion, pretty good for what it does. You can tab through all the options versus in UIM's ISE, in order to do that there's actually a pane on right hand side that you have to click through. Even then, what the actions that are listed there do is not described well enough.

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it_user558231 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at Cyber Management Systems

I would like to see integration into more data sources. For example, integrating facilities information such as temperature and other environmental variables, because heat can actually impact server routers. For example, environmental wouldn’t necessary align with an OSI layer, but it impacts all of those particular layers. So it'll be just like security would be another layer.

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RF
Team Lead-IT service Management at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Some probes or agents are not multi-tenant. We have been asking Broadcom to improve them to be multi-tenant. That said, it is just some agents, not all. For example, most of the agents are multi-tenant. However, for example, the agents for cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and Google are not multi-tenant. This is difficult for us since we are a service provider.

The display layer, the portal for the customers, is not very easy to work with. We are also trying to ask them to change the way that the customers can see the information in the portal. The dashboards need to be improved. 

For example, we collect a lot of QoS data. However, out of the box, that data is not displayed in the portal. We need to manually create one dashboard for each QoS. It's not very helpful since we have a lot of customers - which means thousands and thousands of servers and applications. We need to do a lot of things manually. That is not very good.

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

Parts of the Unified Management Portal are not written in HTML5. I would like all components (Portlets) to be HTML5. This would increase the speed and responsiveness of the site, and possibly improve the appearance.

Improved network monitoring and topology mapping: Although this functionality does exist, it requires enhancement. CA UIM is very accomplished at monitoring the majority of IT infrastructure and is capable of collecting and alerting on the vast majority of metrics across network device vendors. However, the configuration of network device monitoring could be improved. The latest SNMP_Collector, and ICMP (ping) probes only allow for monitoring of discovered devices and are configurable via the web-based Admin Console. The previous equivalent probes were less dynamic but more flexible, being configured via both the Admin Console and the client-based Infrastructure Manager. A combination approach of dynamic and manual network device monitoring would obviously be more beneficial.

As for network topology mapping, this is achieved via disparate pairs of discovery_agent and topology_agent probes located in each network segment gathering device information via ICMP, SNMP, Telnet and SSH. This mechanism actually works really well, but it’s the way the data is collated, interpolated and represented in the topology views which requires attention. Having some predefined views to depict different network layers, the ability to show routing of traffic or bandwidth utilisation would be great. Also, it would be nice if more detailed device information was available via a mouse-over.

Note: I have not used the topology mapping in UIM 8.4, but I’m not aware of any significant improvements.

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it_user353439 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Enterprise Management Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We've had a lot of difficulty integrating with our ticketing software, which is currently Remedy. I was really surprised when we bought Remedy that we would have such a difficult time integrating, because they're one of the big four, and CA is one of the big four. I would think that that was just boiler plate stuff, but it wasn't. We had to have custom stuff, and it was built off of a really old probe. It's real backwater duct-tape-and-twine keeping that system together. Since then, CA has come out with a 2.0, but that doesn't work with our current version. We can't make it work.

I don't really want to go into all the details on that, but essentially we're having a real rough time retrieving a ticket number back instantly. With our current system, we open a ticket and eventually they send us a ticket number back and we connect it, but the new system doesn't really make it work. I haven't had enough time to dig into that. Primarily, in our Remedy side of the house, it's had a lot of turnover and, basically, we have no support on that side of the fence to make it work. The fact that CA doesn't have a plug-and-play that works real well on that is a little frustrating.

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

It is going to be about looking at the technologies we choose to implement over the next couple of years, and how we can get more native information from those solutions. Everyone is talking about cloud and having Office 365 availability. I understand that it was just released. We are looking forward to enhancements in that area. 

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

We have a customized auditing feature that we have set up to ensure configurations are deployed to each server as per our desired model. We have 104 models and 104 packages. All of that has been custom written. If the product had something like that built in, I think that would be a benefit. 

That is an audit that goes to each server each night and verifies that the setup is according to our desired model for that particular server type.

We have a few customized routines we have had built for our scale. It is beyond auditing. We had to come up with a few alarm hubs and concentrated hubs for different segments which are not a standard use case. I would tend to think, in enterprise solutions, our use case would be sort of typical. So, we had to do some work to make what was more of a business class solution work at the enterprise level. 

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

I would like to see improvements in the maintenance mode area. I would like to set only a probe from a robot or group in maintenance or place profiles from probes in maintenance. Making a GUI with criteria such as selection by robot/hub/probe etc.

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it_user378384 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect EMS Practice at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

There are several areas for improvement, among them are --

  • Reporting capability - We're unable to drill down to the specific data that we'd like. We're also not able to get some data, such as trends, that we want when trying to determine root causes of issues in our applications. This is particularly frustrating because we have so many applications that we use and depend on that we need to know with some certainty what the issues are affecting them.
  • End-to-end application monitoring probes function - We're quite large with over 500 probes, and there's no ability in UIM to monitor all of them through our many, many applications. We're relying too much on middleware applications to do this.
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it_user202704 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

When ever there is an IP address change to the server and even changing the IP inside the robot.*.cfg file it won't update on IM automatically, and we have manually validated the probes. This should be improved.

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AC
Consultant at Tata Consultancy Services

Reporting capability can be improved especially when it comes to availability. Additionally, automatic baselines can help reduce the count of alerts.

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HW
Technical Service Owner for Monitoring at BCBS of NC

CA has been very famous for the mainframe. I think that's actually the edge, by the way, for CA products, as there are many, many dotcom products that don't touch mainframes. I think that CA should still keep that. 

The area where CA is changing is, I'll give you an example. The fresh technology should have been out a long time ago. But it appears to be we're catching up on the UIM, because Microsoft basically says they are not going to support the fresh, starting next year. That means they are a little bit behind on the waves in the architecture, etc. I think that can be improved.

Another thinking is, if the developer can get to the level-1 engineer level, they will develop a better product. I suggest the developers at CA really work as a level-1 engineer, because then you have a different sort.

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it_user778851 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Monitoring Design Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Being able to report on the monitoring configurations and find out where you differentiate from standards. If I've deployed 500 probes to monitor Oracle, and I want to know that they're all monitored the same, I have no way to do that now.

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it_user778560 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Neuroses IT

This is a very complex question, because it depends on the customer's needs. Some customers need more network capabilities, but UIM is all about IT monitoring. It's an all-inclusive software. 

It's difficult to become the best in monitoring all of the parameters in technology. Some customers want extended capability in the network, or the system overall. But it's difficult to ask the vendor to integrate all of capabilities in one product. We prefer to capitalize on the synergy of products, and not to add features, and features. 

Three or four years in the future, there will be a product with a lot of capabilities, but if one of our customers wants a simple product, not expensive, we can't provide them a product with thousands of capabilities when he will only use ten.

We prefer to follow the market standards, and use a product with a simple and user-friendly interface. That's what we want.

The major problem we have when we sell CA UIM is that we need to sell additional products because it doesn't cover cover all the features. The problem comes down to price. That's the major problem for us. When you have to sell many products, the customer will say, "Oh, it's too expensive," and he won't purchase all the products. So, we think when you have to sell many, many products, they have to do better on pricing.

We would also like to see automatic network topology.

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it_user350334 - PeerSpot reviewer
Account Delivery Executive at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the things I would like to see an improvement on is the ability to do mass deployment. Also, I'd like a federated identity feature, where I can give our users a login and they can choose whatever thresholds they wish to have.

Even better, I would like to see a synthetic transaction report from the reporting feature that our business unites can use to record their transactions and provide it back to us. That would save us a lot of time.

Finally, I'd like some self-service functionality out-of-the-box, so that you can assign probes, or deploy with thresholds, or whatever you want to do. You just put it in a server and let it self-service.

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it_user558039 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Manager, Information Technology at a leisure / travel company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see more configuration around best practices and recommendations because the software that is being monitored and APIs are becoming more complex. It's just overwhelming what you can monitor. Having something out of the box that would allow you to at least monitor the most important things would be nice.

I would like to see a pack that just installs the things that need to be monitored. And this may not be where I know enough about it and it may not be configured correctly so I may not be getting everything I can get out of it. That's why I need my vendors to tell me how to get more out of the software that I bought. I know who my people are, and I don't think they understand how to configure it properly. My team doesn't know what to do with it, so I don’t think that is a problem of CA. But it is a business partner issue. I need to find out if it a problem on my side, theirs, or both.   It might not have been turned over, there may not have been best practices. It could be completely on my side where my people just don't do their homework. I have to stop right there because that could be the case.

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it_user353238 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Development Manager at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

One of the things I would like to see an improvement on is the ability to do mass deployment with this solution.

Also, it should allow for federation where I can give our users their login and they can choose whatever thresholds they wish to have.

Even better, I would like to see from synthetic transaction reports the ability for our business units to record their transactions and then provide it back to us. That would save us a lot of time.

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

Very specifically, we want HTML 5 web administration instead of Flash for UMP. HTML 5 web admin is essential for a lightweight web-client administration solution.

Additionally, an HTML 5 web-based alarm console would be a must-have feature as it would allow me to manage it from anywhere.

It still needs a lot of work. An HTML 5 web admin solution is needed badly. Also, the thick client administration tool is archaic, slow, and cumbersome.

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KN
Solution Architect at SA Consulting

We would like the navigation of this solution to be more user-friendly for our system administrators.

Also, the solution is quite complicated, so we would like there to be better documentation on the processes, in order to ensure we know exactly how it works.

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it_user778515 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst

More HTML5, more flexibility, and reducing the number of screens, fewer mouse clicks, fewer mouse movements. They should really take advantage of the features that the newer web technologies allow for. We're administrators, we're doing thousands of things every day, lots of clicks. Automation, automation, automation is what we want.

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it_user401061 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Monitoring Administrator at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Although this may not work based on our environment, but topology discovery and root cause analysis would be nice to have. Right now, we don't have the RCA and rootcon topology awareness. It may be in the new version, but based on our architecture, it may not work. It would be a big win, however, if we had it.

Another useful feature to have would be automatic configuration per standard by new robots that check in for any particular customer. This could help us decrease the configuration time.

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

Most of the time, we need to restart the monitoring server when deploying new features. If it is possible to enable new features without restarting the managed server, it would be awesome.

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

The automated discovery tools have come a long way in the past few years, but it would be nice if that same tool could also pull systems configuration information as well.

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AN
Enterprise systems management team lead

We have experienced challenges with finding a mechanism to deploy the agents, but it's only on the first deployment so it's not a big issue.

We would also like to see some enhancements in assignment and adaptation functionality for consoles.

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

The main complaint with the tool is we are attempting to migrate off of SCOM and the management packs that SCOM has for exchange (ED and SharePoint) it does not look like UIM and can't necessarily compete with those. Maybe, if that could be improved.

I would have to look up some actual use cases, but when we initially set up the 6-risk environment within UIM, it did not meet the needs for the application owners who actually manage the Citrix environment. They decided to actually go back to SCOM. That was the one main concern, and that is something that we will have to readdress with CA.  

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

It would be good to implement views showing the aggregated status graphically. For example, they could use colors reflecting the status, and the possibility to drill down to detailed information. The views should be configurable so the administrator can organize them the way he wants. Dynamic views should be supported. That means the members of the views changes based on conditions defined by the administrator.

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AR
Production Analyst at a non-tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We're just hoping to see the growth in different functional areas so that it's a little bit more dynamic. The other enterprise suites that they're trying to bundle up are great. I think that the core functions of the product itself are great. I think it might need a little more work at the extremities, trying to hook up with other software. Right now, they're doing a good job at trying to implement additional suites and software. What I would like to see is that the quality of what is currently in place just be increased.

There are some components of UIM that are dated, or they're being left behind and some newer ones are being put forward.

I can't see any new features, and if I did, I don’t know what I’d be doing around here. Can this feature do my job here? But no, realistically, we depend on these systems that when we see configured, we know exactly what we're going to get. It's been improving. Still, I think there's a lot of room for growth

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

Our experience has been that UIM does not do discovery well.  While discovery exists, it does not have a method for reporting out on new servers, and it cannot be used the way our new customers would like.  Discovery should be more than discovering the IP or hostname.  We would like to see a tool that can discover the device and go through an information gathering process.  What is the server, what does it do, or even what is it connected to?

As for event correlation, this is a bigger issue.  Right now, UIM does not give us any form of true correlation. Our customers do not want four alarms for every server outage. They want a single alarm that tells them if the server is down.  However, the current system will not allow us to tie a ping response alarm to an SNMP unavailable alarm. We have to do custom work to make this happen.  There is also no direct correlation to upstream devices. If we lose a database, how does it affect an application?

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it_user378189 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Multi-tenancy for ICMP profiles of servers is not there
  • Availability reports in percentage is not calculated by the tool out of the box
  • Rest of the things can be achieved by tweaking the script in Lua
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AM
Services Infrastructure Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product could be improved if the company kept up with service developments, in particular from the cloud vendors. As Azure, AWS and Google are rapidly adding features and functions to their own public cloud offerings, UIM has not necessarily kept pace with that development. In particular, it was the platform as a service capabilities. The infrastructure as a service capabilities were quite good, but the platform as a service was lacking significantly, along with a lot of the serverless capability as well. 

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

In the UMP, certain devices will show up multiple times and they don't correlate correctly. That's one of the issues. 

Sometimes the probe, on its first release, we will find some bugs with it and notify support and then they escalate it to the upper level and they get things corrected.

The dashboarding. They're going in the right direction, getting away from flash and using the HTML5 with the Cabbie dashboards. That has been very helpful with us in developing dashboards. But maybe some additional out-of-the-box dashboards with different standard tools that people are using. 

The one thing that our company has started to use is MarkLogic, and they don't have a specialized probe for that. We've reached out to them and put feedback on the community trying to get votes on that. But so far, it hasn't gotten a lot of votes.

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

I would like to see the retirement of the heavy client (infrastructure manager) in favor of the web-based admin console. It is close, but it is not there yet.

Support for the PostgreSQL database platform would be nice. At this time, you can only choose between Oracle and MySQL when running CA UIM on Linux.

As a DBA, I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL. (This is my personal preference. By no means do I find MySQL a bad product.)

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it_user393561 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mainly the policy-based management that they're working on. That's huge because changing configurations on a large scale is very tedious at this point, and keeping track of it is tedious. We'd be able to do other things rather than spending the time on the administration, and also there'd be less errors. We would have less times where we would find, "Oh, we've got the wrong threshold on this server because we thought it was over here, but something got overwritten when we moved this. That sort of thing won't happen as often.


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

If there was a way to better harvest information from other sources to configure the components, it would make it easier to do.

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

One of the things we'd like to see is a more streamline and baseline reporting mechanism. We use several CA products and we'd like to see all of the products dump information into a common format so that we can harvest it into multiple dashboards. Right now if you use multiple applications, you need 3 different experts on 3 different reporting structures. We'd like to see them come with a unified database and ability to harvest that data.

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

There really is no perfect monitoring tool, CA UIM is really the best of breed if you need monitoring for all Operating Systems and a large list of diverse applications. Some areas of improvement would include enhanced management for the UMP where the MSP is concerned. Additional configuration auditing and reporting.

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

I would like to see auditability. We've built our own audit functionality to ensure that every CI has the desired model configuration applied to it. And we run that on a daily basis. If that became part of the product, I think it might be a little bit less intensive in terms of resource, because we're doing it with scripts.

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it_user572919 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I would like to see further consolidation of the tools from a deployment point of view. Make it more modular; drag and drop; being able to have a commercial model that also lends itself well with what we're trying to achieve for our customers.

It's not only about features and gimmicks. It's about making sure the features and products align to our customers’ outcomes.

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

Dashboards +++ and correlation creation tool (instead of NAS)

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

I would probably like to see more out-of-the-box solutions that I don't have to individually go into, configure and set up myself.

With every new probe that is released, we have to come up with a good monitoring template to accurately identify the key metrics for that specific technology to monitor it correctly. We have to find SME’s for that technology, sit down with them, show them all the metrics that we can collect then ask what are the key important metrics that if this breaches a threshold, should we alert. This is very time consuming for all parties.

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

With the increased amount of data it has to collect, a different approach to data storage would be nice, perhaps something similar to a NoSQL instead of a relational method. But this is something to be studied, of course C.A will choose a method that is capable of delivering performance and integrity.

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

Maybe a little bit more on the reporting side. It does integrate with a product called iReport, but that's very cumbersome to use. It's a very full featured product, but something you'd have to work with every day to fullyleverage.

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

There are a few areas for improvement, but I would have to say some of the Java content is a little buggy and would definitely like to see continued upgrades and improvements in the GUI. I know some of the stuff is preferred to be set on the controllers, however accessing the console from GUI is a more efficient way as you can control your user accounts there and it makes it safer than giving someone access to the controllers. The problem is sometimes you have to access the controllers in order to do certain tasks.

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

Since we’re in the technology space, I’d really like to see quicker adoption or certification process for new product or platforms that come out. A faster time-to-certify in other words.

With the SNMP collector probe they have a catch-all general solution; if there’s no probe for a specific service or application, it’s for general use. There is a certification process by way of their list, but it does take some time. For us, streamlining that process would be key.

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it_user348354 - PeerSpot reviewer
Server Team Lead at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It seems clunky, not as user friendly as Spectrum, for example. When setting up monitoring you can have Nimsoft agents installed on some servers but not others, so maybe it’s a bit more complex than it needs to be. It’s not as straightforward or easy to implement as Spectrum was.

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

Although the products is easy to deploy, the implementation effort is still inconsistent. This is because you have a lot of different technologies and vendors.

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

I would like to have the option to monitor via mobile phone so it would be helpful if DX would develop a mobile application. I'd like to see a single dashboard and automation implemented as part of the solution.

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

If it had solid capabilities to ensure complete network infrastructure monitoring is performed that would be good. Everything in a single platform for the complete IT infrastructure will be a boon for every customer. In addition to that, telephony, and VoIP monitoring is also an aspect that can be looked at. Transaction monitoring will be yet another field of research and innovativeness.

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

The scalability of the web-based portal needs improvement. Users will need to quickly become proficient in scripting to take full advantage of its capabilities.

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

A lot of the admin is web-based. Having the web-admin portal be a bit more scalable and adding the feature of responsive decision-making process, it would be of benefit to us and I’m sure to others as well.

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

Administration interface, in particular the infrastructure manager. The event console could also use a make-over.

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it_user164013 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Manager with 51-200 employees

The SLA module could be improve to be more robust and configurable the same goes for the HUB tunneling.

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it_user492783 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Consultant at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see them improve integrations with other CA products to use the data on dashboards and more widgets on UIM dashboards.

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

It's too modular in the sense that there is not an awareness of things. If you set up an alarm for 10 different things but the actual host is down, then, in theory, you could get 10 alarms. Going forward, it would be nice if there was some kind of awareness of not just the host, but it knows what a service is and you can define it, it can suppress those kinds of alarms. Thay way, you only really get one alarm that is important instead of getting flooded with 10 or 15.

I would say, too, that I have seen some of their roadmap features and I think they are working towards that, but it is just a little more difficult because of the way they designed the software.

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it_user280929 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage and Backup Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

NSD and NMS support need to be improved. Usually, what I encountered was that if we had an issue, the suggestion was always to upgrade to the current version, but sometimes when they upgraded some features would stop working.

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

Its integration to CA's SOI (manager of manager), the out of the box connector release by CA is disappointing.

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it_user169710 - PeerSpot reviewer
Administrador de Sistemas
  • I think it can be improved by a greater provision of specialized technical support, as there are very few trained personnel there.
  • Improvement in the technical documentation of the system.
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it_user480759 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Systems Analyst II at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Although it is better than SCOM, it still needs major improvements to usability. If you need a rapid deployment solution, this is not the best tool for that job. You can create Super Packages which allow you to pre-configure Probes, but it still requires a lot of invested time to set up and still needs customized to each environment if they are not identical. UIM and its agent/probes rely on JRE7u45. Support is not offered for any newer versions at this time. I would like to see better rapid deployment options, interface updates, and less reliance on Java.

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it_user238455 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Infrastructure Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Only EMC Clarion, IBM, Hitachi and NetApp is possible
  • No exhaustive viewable dashboard on the health of storages
  • Capacity forecasting not available
  • Doesn’t support SMS alerting via GSM modem, but works with cloud SMS web application which in-turn requires lot of manual effort to configure
  • Enterprise alarm console view lacks event correlation even from the base level
  • No run book automation feature in place to enable
  • Reporting customization for needs is a complex mechanism
  • Less capability on individual device dash boards and service health dashboards
  • Huge customizations for creating each dashboard as there are no OOB dashboards available
  • Network Discovery is less than excellent on the devices categories, discovery modes (SNMP, WMI).
  • Doesn't have the intelligence to group devices automatically based on the device type
  • Network topology is not automatic as it requires lot of manual interventions to define
  • Web portal views for different categories of infrastructure components is not in OOB feature, needs a lot of manual intervention
  • Web portal is not available for OOB like the application HA
  • HTTPS enabling for web application doesn't work as expected due to certificate issues
  • Multi-tenancy feature lacks in segregation of devices in the database which has the same IP in multiple customer environment
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it_user348225 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Specialist at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

The UI seems sluggish at times. When you go to maneuver or browse through, it takes a while to update. When you set up new systems, it takes a while for them to show up. Patience is key. I’d be curious to see if there are any plans to have command-line management capabilities to deal with the sluggishness of the GUI.

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it_user233928 - PeerSpot reviewer
CSI Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
  • Documentation
  • Product releases
  • Testing
  • Transparency regarding bugs and closed support cases
  • Honesty from the vendor on what is and what isn’t important from their portfolio of products
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it_user189927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Ent. Monitoring Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
KN
Techincal Support at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The only challenge that I have with this solution is the reporting part. The users are not really comfortable with the kind of reports they are getting. Sometimes, they want to see reports in their own format. Customizing those reports with Jasper is not very easy. It could be because of the knowledge gap. If you have the knowledge of how Jasper can be configured to suit customer requirements in terms of reporting, it is good.

There was a time a customer complained about one issue related to Netflow analysis. Broadcom has a separate model for that, but the customer wanted everything bundled together. It could also have IP management so that I am able to see or analyze IPs so that the IPs that are already in use don't get assigned.

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

They need to improve in their mobile interface to enable access to the dashboards through that channel. Their application requires a lot of servers to run, so that architecture is also something that requires attention.

A module for keyboard and mouse actions would be very interesting, for actions that cannot be performed differently. Also, it would be interesting for them to enable SAP integration in the future.

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

Web GUI (WASP) should be further developed as in some cases it has issues and instabilities. Some functions are being duplicated in Web and console, I wish they were in one place to avoid overwriting the configuration.

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it_user779157 - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Usually it's reliability issues. Some of the components don't always function as intended, or don't function as you would think they should. 

To give a specific example, within this product there are individual probes, and each of these probes doesn't always necessarily output the same kind of information into our database. So when we try to collect QoS data, from one probe we might get a ton of information, lots of good stuff that we can use in our database, but then from another probe we might not get so much, or we might not be able to pull the things that we want to.

I'd also like to see more probes and more templates. More probes in the sense that we were coming across devices that we're expected to monitor and manage for which, out of the box, there isn't a nice clean solution. There are probes that are dedicated for certain devices and certain device types, which is great. But then there are times we come across nuanced products for which we have to develop our own solution. There are probes that exist in there that allow us to make a customized solution, but it takes a lot more time.

The other element is that there are no real templates, out of the box. Let's go with an example where we do have the probe, which is great, and we do have a really nuanced customer with a small set of devices that maybe not a lot of other customers use. There might not be a template in place, so effectively we have the tool in front of us but we still need to develop a solution. So it would be really nice to see a little bit more of something like a central repository of templates that we could use. That would help us expedite our onboarding process.

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it_user500109 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Improvements could be made to the reporting and analytics features. The OOB report templates and analytics can be improved.

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

It needs more report capabilities; things that make it easier to find them. It needs a central, global, point of view for inventory. Currently we have to get it piece by piece.

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it_user353400 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Professional at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It takes a bit of getting used to with all the different acronyms and terminology. It's also not the easiest tool to use.

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it_user334737 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - GSMC Instumentation & Analytics at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
  • Alarm Management
  • Alarm Correlation
  • Jaspersoft reports
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it_user154629 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Implementations, operations and technology departments are benefiting most from this tool.

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it_user357423 - PeerSpot reviewer
Tools Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

It needs even correlation. We are looking to consolidate into UIM over time, but one of the biggest discrepancies is that UIM does not have even correlation amongst its features.

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

It needs to be easier to implement because right now it requires consultants to help with that.

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

Integration with other tools.

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

One issue I'm having with CA now is the complexity of the solution. They have APM now, Application Performance Manager, as part of it. I think they are still trying to understand how the application works. In terms of deployment, it's not straightforward. We are having issues with that. APM is not really user-friendly, in terms of the dashboard. People want to see a dashboard on the screen, to understand in real-time what is happening.

Also, there is something a customer requested from us. They wanted to know if we could manipulate the script to do the following. If an alarm is sent by the product they want to see it scrolling on the NOC monitor, instead of them having to click it.

There is also room for improvement in the reporting. It is not really good enough, according to our customers. So what we now usually do is use Power BI to get them the kinds of reports they want.

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

This product has one foot in the past and another foot in the future. As a result, the approaches to managing components are not unified; leading to added complexity to management.

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it_user558624 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting IT at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

The reporting part could be improved. We’re using other tools for that. Maybe we’ll continue to do that, but that is one thing we are missing; and the SLA, and what you can do there.

As I cannot compare it with others, it's a bit difficult to say.

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

Customer support. Not up to the usual standard I am used to with CA. There is a huge amount of value support could add if they would give me more access to the right people, which is a relationship I am used to having with CA SMEs.

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it_user797967 - PeerSpot reviewer
Distinguished Engineer with 10,001+ employees

We want to see more investment in the UI and the dashboard (from what we have seen here at CA World, that is the case). We want to see this because usability and ease of use of the product is becoming more important for our customers. 

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

CA UIM needs some improvement with performance reporting (if we compare it to CA eHealth).

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

Right now it’s doing well and I can’t think of much in the way of improvements, but some newer data monitoring multi-values would be nice.

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it_user350661 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Application Support Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

They should further test their probe development. If we add a probe to pick out certain metrics from a particular platform, it’s not easy and there are some issues. The mainstream stuff, the application is usually pretty good at those. It has trouble, though, with the one-off metric probes.

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

UIM supports AS400, but it is somewhat limited.

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it_user229734 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Technical Testing Consultant at adhoc International

Product stability and performance, especially in Linux environments needs to be improved.

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it_user155184 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Executive at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
it_user159393 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder / Owner at a security firm with 51-200 employees

User interface / speed of deploying monitoring based on templates.

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it_user772545 - PeerSpot reviewer
Full Stack Monitoring Consultant at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
  • Stability
  • Alarm segregation
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it_user507414 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Developer at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

Customer support is good, but sometimes needs bit of urgency from a CA engineer to look at the issue.

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it_user159171 - PeerSpot reviewer
NOC Engineer at a tech consulting company with 501-1,000 employees

Infrastructure manager and the user interface.

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it_user797928 - PeerSpot reviewer
IS Team Lead at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Continue to advance the filter capabilities, and more input fields.

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

Some parts of the services view. The UIM has no features through goods and services yet. 

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

Event correlation: Compared to other tools, it has less out-of-the-box correlation. I agree that any type of customization can be done by LUA scripting. However, an advanced correlation option should also be included out of the box.

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

It needs to be more stable and have improved reporting. This would make it better out-of-the-box.

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it_user159873 - PeerSpot reviewer
Developer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Communication between hubs collector needs major improvments

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it_user789015 - PeerSpot reviewer
‎Digital Design Manager with 1-10 employees

I think this software has a lot of functionalities. It is a little complex to use versus other softwares.

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

Network monitoring beyond SNMP.

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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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.