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

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

Uptrends has more than 100 checkpoints all around the world. Which helps to track product performance and uptime in 1, 5, 10, or more minutes check interval. Alerts with error info got during checks help to determine issue type and transfer it to the relevant department. A synthetic check needs some improvements to cover standard web application needs, but recording those scripts is very easy with google extension.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Monitors downtime.
• Waterfall of resources when loading pages.

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

• Custom alert text option on mail
• The synthetic tool needs some improvement when the last used device has not to support for recording scenarios in iframe located elements.

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

Support average response time is 24 hours, which is quite a significant time when having some issues and needs help. They have notification issues as well. I mean, when a customer needs to be notified, for example canceling anything related acc maybe they sent notification and service suspend immediately, no pre notifications to act and be ready not to be blind.

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

The price range is good if compared with the following tools. Alerts are informative, easy to connect with chat ops software, like slack, which is widely used by teams in my company. Performance measurement, which can be tracked day by day and can be delivered to stakeholders, all this made me decide to choose this tool.

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

• Ability to monitor uptime.
• Cost savings over competitors.

Incentivized