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CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. Observium

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)

    Score3.1 out of 10
    N/AUnicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM) from CA Technologies reached end of life (EOL) in 2015.N/A

    Observium

    Score6.1 out of 10
    N/AN/AN/A
    Pricing
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Observium
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Observium
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Observium
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    Cisco Meraki Dashboard
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    Enterprises
    Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
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    Nmap
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    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Observium
    Likelihood to Recommend
    3.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    Support Rating
    2.0
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)Observium
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Observium
    • If you are on a budget, this is one heck of a tool for the price (including the ~$200/year for the Pro subscription).
    • If you are OK with maintaining and updating open source tools, this is a great tool.
    • If you are afraid of the Linux command line or live in a Windows-centric world, this might not be the tool for you.
    • If you can't stand things occasionally not working, this is probably not a good fit.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
    • Change orders.
    • Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Observium
    • Automatic device discovery.
    • Scalability
    • Real-time monitoring.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • 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
    Read full review
    Observium
    • Documentation
    • Community support
    • Easy to set up but hard to customise fully
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Read full review
    Observium
    It's open source. Your mileage may vary. Sometimes the provided documentation is beyond frustrating, other times it's right on the mark.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    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
    Read full review
    Observium
    I haven't used other products that are similar to Observium. Observium is an open tool, with a robust feature set. There are elements of comparable monitoring across other tools, but nothing I've seen that is a complete parallel in terms of feature set and visualizations. If I were asked, I wouldn't have another tool to recommend over Observium.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • 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
    Read full review
    Observium
    • It is good for DC admin.
    • Only positive impact.
    • Highly recommended.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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