Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Manager, formerly from CA Technologies, is a unified tool for systems monitoring and analytics. It offers multiple deployment options for IT teams and MSPs .
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HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM)
Score 9.0 out of 10
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HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) is a solution for managing hardware across a variety of HP servers, in addition to storage and networking product. Some key features include: Inventory Management and Reporting, Health Management, and Firmware and System Software Updates Management.
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.
This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products
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.
All tools have their own gaps , some seem to do more than others, some just work better. With UIM we have found a sweet spot with features, price point, pros, cons, etc
Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.
Business Units love It - Good for them, but worse for the IT Team until we share the responsibility of the dashboards.
If no one put their hands on it, it will take some time to give results. I'm talking about environments with 400 devices, for example, in something about 6 months to one year, if no one is dedicated, and depending on the consulting company. Some, even certified by CA, was not good. If possible, try to use CA services directly.
IT Teams, after they start to notice that the tool really work, will want to monitor everything. Depending on the company, this will be more or less easy to measure, as ROI. And I'm telling this because usually IT teams don't know how to sell them to C-Levels, and the tool, because of the price, is always a motivation to questions like: "What is this tool? Do you really need it? Is there another way to monitor this?"
Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.