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

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

Panda Systems Management is well suited for small to medium sized organizations looking for a tool to centralize asset management not only physical but also assist with rapid deployment of patches, applications, etc. It proves also to be very beneficial as permits (to and extent) to do troubleshooting without interfering or interrupting end users.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Remote access. It's as good as any other on the market. It also allows for RDP connections which is a nice feature.
• Inventory management. We get some great insight from the reports we can run.
• Quick Jobs. If there's an app or service you use, there may be a quick job to install and update it remotely.

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

• Licensing. With the possibility of monthly splitting
• Integration with firewalls even outside the corporate network

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

We rate and recommend Panda Systems Management not only because it is a very effective and very cost effective solution that pays itself for us (ROI) extremely fast, but also due to all reason described previously and possibly a few more I'm sure we missed here. I do have to says tech support for this solution sometimes leave a bit to be desired.

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

Panda is a bit of a greatest hits between some of these other things. I feel like GoToAssist has a stronger remote support option, but Panda is more convenient. Kaseya has a ton of features, but from an ease of use standpoint, Panda seems stronger. Spiceworks has a fine inventory system but it lacks features. I added Azure as well since we are a 365 shop and Azure supplies a lot of the same visibility that Panda does. However it is a completely different animal, and it's way easier to hop into Panda and get what you need than get waaay more data than necessary from Azure/Azure AD/ATP.

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

• It has facilitated us in the management of controls on the various clients, reducing the cost of human resources
• Thanks to the alerts, in case of intrusion, it is possible to intervene promptly

Incentivized