CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. N-able N-sight RMM

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

SolarWinds patch management has had issues over the years. Sometimes requiring manual intervention to get resolved. The UI [with N-able RMM (formerly Solarwinds RMM)] makes it easy to see status of systems and identify any alerts easily. Remotely monitoring the status of servers/computers. Managing the systems, patching, systems maintenance and remote support.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Thanks to RMM I never feel like I'm unaware as to what's going on in my network. I can be in the office or half a country away and feel completely aware of what's going on.
• We've had numerous situations over the years where a part of our network is having issues (latency or errors) that the RMM alerts have saved us from a major outage. You can't ask for better proactive alerting.
• The advanced alerting allows us to stay ahead of issues instead of reacting to them. This gives us confidence in our network and our end users better support.

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

• There are so many features and options that it can be overwhelming in the beginning.
• Wish there was a way to add custom fields to reports.
• The GUI is crowded or links aren't clearly described on certain pages. I find myself forgetting how to get to certain views.
• The software can start to lag after a while even if the hardware is specced out correctly. I would definitely recommend over-speccing the device.
• API is just OK, wish they would put more effort into this.

Incentivized

The interface is easy to navigate. Setting up policies is straight forward. The antivirus and web filter are simple and exceptions are easy to make. Upgrading the agent is made simple and creating scripts is made fool proof. (Well, almost)

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

The ease of use, full functionality, reliability and excellent support.[N-able RMM (formerly Solarwinds RMM)] gives users a full suite of tools with a single installable file. Unlike standard tools, you don't have to install several different executables to be able to have fully protected end points.

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

We only tested an older version of LabTech. By comparison, the newer version of LabTech is much more competitive to Solarwinds RMM than it used to be. ConnectWise Automate has far better integration options for our PSA than Solarwinds RMM, down to very granular changes for automated ticket templates.

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

• The SolarWinds name carries a good bit of clout in the industry. This has definitely helped secure a few deals.
• The addition of Cloud Backups had a positive impact because we were able to easily add it as a bolt-on for existing clients. We have now added this offering to almost 20% of our managed servers.
• We are in the process of moving into a "co-managed" business plan. SolarWinds RMM has facilitated this by allowing us to help in-house IT teams with offloading server management and maintenance while they are able to focus on big-picture objectives.

Incentivized