Backup Radar vs. CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)

We have more than 2500 individual backup jobs across our customer base. With Backup Radar, I now have a detailed, accurate insight into all jobs. I do not have to wonder or doubt if the backup job did not run, it logs a "no result in 24 hours" ticket for me and if it failed, I get a failure ticket logged. It cannot be more simple. This is done across multiple different backup software. The reporting, be it on demand, or scheduled, is absolutely brilliant and super valuable

Incentivized

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

• Backup Monitoring (no successful backups in 24 hours)
• Automated Ticketing (Backup Radar logs the tickets in our PSA system)
• Automated Reporting (Daily, Weekly, and Monthly reporting)

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• None offhand that I can think of

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

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

Never used anything else similar to this

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

• Positive, the ROI is no match compared to the integrity and business reputation value we get by using Backup Radar, as we do not "resell" Backup Radar to our customers, it is our internal monitoring and reporting tool for the customers we look after.

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