Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM) from CA Technologies reached end of life (EOL) in 2015.
N/A
N-able N-central
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
MSPs
and IT professionals use N-able™ N-central® to monitor and manage devices and complex
networks remotely. N-central provides
visibility and efficiency as the user's needs scale. N-central can help users:
1. Proactively monitor everything on a customer network—not just servers
and workstations—and troubleshoot.
2. Stay on top of threats with features like MFA, antivirus, integrated endpoint
detection and response, data backup, disk encryption, email protection,…
N/A
Pricing
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
N-able N-central
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)
N-able N-central
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
N-able N-central
Features
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
N-able N-central
Monitoring Tasks
Comparison of Monitoring Tasks features of Product A and Product B
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
6.0
1 Ratings
25% below category average
N-able N-central
7.4
6 Ratings
1% above category average
Automated alerts and notifications
6.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Remote monitoring
00 Ratings
9.66 Ratings
Network device monitoring
00 Ratings
8.36 Ratings
Management Tasks
Comparison of Management Tasks features of Product A and Product B
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
6.0
1 Ratings
20% below category average
N-able N-central
9.0
7 Ratings
23% above category average
Patch Management
5.01 Ratings
9.07 Ratings
Service configuration management
8.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Software and hardware inventory
5.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Reporting
Comparison of Reporting features of Product A and Product B
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
5.5
1 Ratings
34% below category average
N-able N-central
-
Ratings
Performance data reports
5.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Customizable reporting
7.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Data visualization
5.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Risk analysis
5.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
2.0
1 Ratings
108% below category average
N-able N-central
-
Ratings
Antivirus and malware management
2.01 Ratings
00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)
N-able N-central
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
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.
N-Able is perfect for an MSP environment. It gives all the standard functionality an IT professional needs out of the box and can be configured to show almost anything required. For example, we have configured a dashboard to show when our backups need attention for each customer. This is achieved by running a small script on repeat via N-Central everyday/evening, and the result gives us information on the dashboard to help us identify exactly what is working and what needs looking into.
Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.
Customer support just points to online guides and I feel they aren't helpful.
During the trial they turn on a lot of features. In my experience, if you play around with the features, they charge you for them. Keep this in mind if you move forward with N-Able - they will charge for "trialed" services.
In my experience, some services that you're being charged for can't be disabled or monitored by you or your team. You only see them on the monthly invoice.
In my opinion, the "Scripting Automation" doesn't provide value. You're either going to be writing your own batch or Powershell to make scripting work.
In my opinion, monitoring software deployments is painful.
The default monitoring template can't be duplicated, edited, or referenced. You'll find that the default monitors in an unusual way and will throw needless recurring alerts into your ticketing system. To avoid this, you need to create a template from scratch which takes many hours to set up.
In my opinion, they're more concerned about a quick buck than customer service. "Buyer beware" company.
Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.
The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.
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.
Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.
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.
Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.
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.
