CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. ManageEngine Site24x7

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

Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring is well-suited for organizations with diverse IT infrastructures, including networks, servers, applications, and cloud services. For very small-scale environments with minimal IT infrastructure, a comprehensive all-in-one monitoring solution like Site24x7 might be more than what is necessary

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

Incentivized

• Very clean website UI. Tests are well categorized and navigation is very simple.
• The accompanying mobile app is very useful when on the go as it can also notify you of any issues.
• The cost of the platform is very cheap and the cost also scales at a low amount.
• No on-premise footprint. All cloud-based.

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

• Ability to edit an existing maintenance schedule, vs creating a new one each time
• Grouping of emails to SMS and non SMS alerts to save on false alerts
• Setup of Realtime user monitor was not as functional as expected with regard to adding 3rd party scripts.

Incentivized

The user-friendly interface and intuitive design of Site24x7 may be attractive to organizations looking for a monitoring tool that is easy to set up and navigate.

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

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

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

Site24x7 [All-in-One Monitoring] has some similarities to ThousandEyes. Especially in the troubleshooting aspect where both offer Web performance waterfall charts to analyze the issue better. Both have cloud-based servers globally that allow to determine performance on the Internet. Site24x7 has more features available so we selected it instead.

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

• Reduced downtime: We've reduced downtime because the alerts from Site24x7 get us working on a problem immediately.
• Less required manpower: We do not need additional staff overnight or an outside contractor to monitor the network since we get alerts ourselves.
• False alerts: We do occasionally get false alerts, which causes time spent after hours tracing a problem that does not exist.

Incentivized