CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. ManageEngine Site24x7

It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.

Incentivized

I have tried other tools (PRTG etc) in the past, and switched from US monitor to [Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring], for all the built-in features and ability to implement by using with or without the agents deployed (ip discovery LAN). This is one tool that encompasses the entire organization and allows that single pane of glass feel (NOC screen view) for an accurate virtual snapshot of your entire organization, either cloud and/or LAN.

Incentivized

• ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
• Change orders.
• Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.

Incentivized

• Alerts: Site24x7 can be configured to send alerts in all sorts of ways, from email, to text messages, to even direct automated phone calls.
• Internal monitoring: An agent installed on one or more machines can monitor internal connectivity to other network devices. This means if connectivity to a server goes down, we often know about it before users alert us.
• External monitoring: Site24x7 also watched our websites and sends alerts if they're unreachable. It uses multiple locations to do so, which means if there's a partial network outage in some part of the country, we know who is affected.

Incentivized

• The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind.
• It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly.
• It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed.

Incentivized

• I wish the advanced monitors were not so expensive.
• It is a cloud solution, so it is necessary to open up outbound ports in all security zones.
• If you lose outbound internet service, all your internal servers will throw alarms and life gets extremely noisy.

Incentivized

We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.

Incentivized

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

Incentivized

I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to ServiceNow. The user interface on ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With ServiceNow, the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.

Incentivized

Site24x7 [All-in-One Monitoring] has some similarities to ThousandEyes. Especially in the troubleshooting aspect where both offer Web performance waterfall charts to analyze the issue better. Both have cloud-based servers globally that allow to determine performance on the Internet. Site24x7 has more features available so we selected it instead.

Incentivized

• It helped make us an ITIL shop.
• It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues.
• Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk.

Incentivized

• Positivity wise, we're spending a third of what we were on our website monitoring, this has allowed us to focus funding elsewhere (namely SolarWinds).
• We have enhanced our core monitoring by now also being able to provide better coverage, whereas we were handicapped with our previous supplier due to the scaling costs of multi-step transactions.
• The general feeling from our IT staff is that the platform is not great, which obviously reduces confidence in the ability for the platform to provide accurate monitoring data for our websites.

Incentivized