TrustRadius Insights for Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Management are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
CA UIM, also known as Broadcom Unified Infrastructure Management, has been utilized by customers across various industries such as banking, entertainment, government, healthcare, and Managed Service Providers. It showcases its versatility and effectiveness in performance monitoring and statistics. Managed service clients of Sirius Computer Solutions have successfully used CA UIM to monitor their assets and extend into client premises for event and performance monitoring. Additionally, consultants have leveraged the tool to monitor their own infrastructure, build/test test cases, create standard operating procedures, and customize configurations for their customers. This demonstrates the flexibility and adaptability of CA UIM in meeting the diverse needs of different users. Furthermore, CA UIM has become a central monitoring tool for IT teams, including critical business units, allowing them to efficiently monitor their application environments and promptly address any incidents that may arise. The tool offers customizable dashboards that combine database and application information, granting users the freedom to tailor the monitoring experience to their specific requirements while reducing the setup workload for the business team. Moreover, CA UIM enables proactive management of various infrastructure components such as network, server, storage, databases, and applications through advanced analytics and troubleshooting reports. The simplified installation process and intuitive visual wizard make it easy for different departments to collaborate effectively with this powerful monitoring solution. In summary, CA UIM has proven itself as an invaluable asset across industries and user groups. With its wide range of capabilities in performance monitoring and statistics, it empowers Managed Service Providers, consultants, IT teams, and businesses alike to optimize their infrastructure monitoring processes efficiently.
Broadcom Unified Infrastructure Management, which was originally called Nimsoft, is an infrastructure monitoring tool that has been on the market for quite a long time. I have been using this tool to monitor mostly all types of infrastructure components such as servers, applications, databases, network devices like routers, switches, firewalls, storage appliances like EMC boxes, etc. This tool gives you centralized control to monitor the entire infrastructure components via a single dedicated window.
Pros
Agent based monitoring
Database monitoring
Server monitoring
Cons
Agentless monitoring
Web console
Custom dashboards
3rd party integrations
Likelihood to Recommend
Broadcom Unified Infrastructure Management can work extremely well in an environment where customers prefer an agent-based monitoring solution. However, it works pretty well for the entire infrastructure, but if a customer is looking for in-depth network monitoring, then it might not be able to provide complete coverage for all the types of network devices.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Professional Services (10,001+ employees)
CA UIM is being used for proactively managing our Infrastructure including network, server, storage, databases, and applications. UIM provides advanced analytics and proactive trending reports to quickly troubleshoot root causes. Supports a simplified installation and deployment process with a step-by-step visual wizard which makes it easy to work with different departments. You can build your own dashboards which can provide management and the NOC a single pane view of all critical services and the entire infrastructure.
Pros
Ease of management
Unified platform
Depth of infrastructure management. Has numerous probes which can help you monitor every aspect of your environment.
Cons
Better Integration with Incident Management Tool, For instance CA ServiceDesk Manager (CA SDM)
Log Aggregation and reporting on the Log Aggregation
More Options with event management, better event correlation.
Likelihood to Recommend
Deep monitoring of physical network, cloud, and application environments. Application Monitoring. SNMP Monitoring and polling custom Mibs (very impressive). Custom Monitoring using scripts. Supports Heterogeneous Environment. The probes give you the flexibility to monitor almost everything and not wait on the vendors for certification unlike the older CA products (CA eHealth). Better Event Management. Does not provide you the correlation options, which other, products like Splunk (SIEM), have to offer. Still, it has enough options.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
As a consultant, I use CA UIM in my lab to not only monitor my own infrastructure, but to build/test tests cases, standard operating procedures, and custom configurations for customers that I support. I also build service catalogs and governance kits to help customers know what they are monitoring and what will generate alerts within their implementation of the tool.
Customers I support come from a range of industries: Banking, Entertainment, Government, Healthcare, and MSPs.
Pros
Server performance can be done exceptionally well with UIM. It monitors various OS flavors: POSIX (Aix, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, zLinux), and Windows.
With just a handful of probe s(CDM, NTevl, NTservices, NTperf, processes, logmon) your dashboards can be populated within minutes after installation of the product and discovering servers. One particular feature I like is MCS which allows you to perform template based monitoring which allows for implementing standards and including exceptions.
The SNMP collector monitors anything that is SNMP capable. With the ability to build a template out of templates here as well, you can standardize monitoring by device, vendor, or model regardless of device type: routers, switches, storage, load balancers, etc.
The UMP is the presentation layer. Without OOTB dashboards, you see quickly how your environment is performing. And with true multi-tenancy, you can separate data by customer.
Cons
True HTML views without dependency on Shockwave. Shockwave tends to crash which causes the user to have to reload the screen. Doesn't happen often but can be annoying.
Discovery via AD - I saw a competitors product with this feature and thought it was a great addition; would be a value add in my opinion.
Nimble is gaining a lot of market share; it will be good to see probe support for the device.
Likelihood to Recommend
Anywhere customer-facing dependencies exist (Cloud Services, Web Urls, Synthetic Transactions, Databases, Servers, Network Devices, and Storage) and performance metrics can be obtained to enforce SLAs.
Nimsoft is currently the main monitoring tool for the company which I work for. It's being used by entire IT team, and some critical business units, that need to monitor their application's environment. We had a critical problem that was to show the incidents at the moment that they were happening, to a faster fix. Most of them were not just IT problems, but also business problems. And Nimsoft helped us to address them.
The tools also allowed us to give the freedom to these teams to create their dashboards, mixing database and other application information, with their application. This freed us from most of the dashboard setup, that was something that the business team had the knowledge (sometimes they create little monsters, but that's another history). Also, it solved the typical email warning message, to lots of people. We started to create warning groups, based on the big set of rules that Nimsoft have, when needed and to the right people, even preventing to warn people when the message was an error that could be expected in some scenarios (a deploy of an application that was already being addressed, for example) or yet to warn also the managers in some situations.
Pros
Baseline Monitoring
Multi-Tenant
Speedup deploy
Web Interface
Business Dashboards
Device History
Cons
The use of flash in Dashboards
Integration with more alert options (Slack, for example), out of the box
Fast deploy also in the mainstream Linux Distros.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well Suited: - Multiple units (you may split Nimsoft per Groups, companies, etc.) - When your Business Teams NEED Dashboards (they'll love it after they learn how to use, for example, if they discover that the may even run SQL queries together with monitor the webpage of the application, and display business data)
Less appropriate: - If you are beginning to monitor your environment (because you need to know your environment at least a little bit to check if the entire set of monitoring Nimsoft plugins will really help you or you will only use it to ping your application) - If you don't have at least one (i do recommend 2 or 3 after some short time) people dedicated to deploy and fine-tune the monitoring. The tool is really good, but if you don't have anyone working on it, you will notice that you're spending money in an elephant to kill an ant or worst, that you passed the entire year, and still have the same problems of the last year, cause no one put the hands enough time in the tool. I saw this happening during the first year when I was the only one working with the tool and still supporting the entire team.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)
I heavily leverage CA Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM) for performance monitoring and statistics.
Pros
Web interface has both great form and function. I've noticed the capabilities of what you can do via the web interface is getting closer and closer to that of IM's thick client.
Deployment of probes and configuration packages is literally drag and drop. Quite easy to use and scale.
Cons
I'd like to see improvements in inventory management. Currently node management isn't as efficient as I'd like.
I also see a big opportunity to offer greater customization in the Detail Tab. I'd like the ability to pick and chose which metrics are displayed by default in the Detail Tab snapshot.
Likelihood to Recommend
I've been really happy with the amount of performance data and reporting options that I've been able to get out of UIM. Performance hardware statistics take no more than a few mouse clicks. Also, as mentioned in the pros section, deployment and configuration is very intuitive and easy.
Sirius Computer Solutions utilizes CA UIM for our managed services clients. Our MSP clients utilize Sirius for various support level services and we base this on the core infrastructure of UIM to monitor their assets. By offering a solutionary framework such as UIM, we are able to extend into the client premises and monitor for both events and performance.
Pros
Industry leading element correlation and metric discovery
Proven message bus platform allowing outstanding performance
Segregated dashboard views and client workspaces built on top of powerful LifeRay portal technology
Advanced probes for AWS Cloud and Nutanix
Advanced correlative views for hybrid infrastructures containing localized and cloud infrastructures
Cons
Looking forward to the removal of Flash based elements
Out of the box views still a bit dated and require updates to QOS to turn on all the views
Inability to manually rename a CI from the portal
Likelihood to Recommend
This is a great solution for companies of all sizes and can really be utilized for much more than you think. This product is not a standard monitoring solution, it is truly a framework, allowing you to architect and design to fit your needs. We find that as long as the technology has a way to be monitored, or communicated with, we can figure out a way to use CA Unified Infrastructure Management (UIM).
