October 29, 2019

CA Unicenter - The World's Okayest Ticketing and Asset Management System

Verified User

Director in Information Technology

Government Administration Company, 10,001+ employees

Score 3 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use CA Unicenter across our entire organization. It's used for IT ticketing, asset management, incident management, change orders, problem management, customer service analytics, and more. We also use it for ticketing with other non-IT teams such as Facilities. All of our sub-agencies are on this one ticketing and asset system.

Pros and Cons

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

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued) Feature Ratings

Monitoring Tasks (1)

60%

6.0

Automated alerts and notifications: 60%
6.0

Management Tasks (3)

60%

6.0

Patch Management: 50%
5.0
Service configuration management: 80%
8.0
Software and hardware inventory: 50%
5.0

Reporting (4)

55%

5.5

Performance data reports: 50%
5.0
Customizable reporting: 70%
7.0
Data visualization: 50%
5.0
Risk analysis: 50%
5.0

Security (1)

20%

2.0

Antivirus and malware management: 20%
2.0

Return on Investment

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.

Alternatives Considered

ServiceNow

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.

Support Rating

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.

Other Software Used

ServiceNow, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, BMC Helix ITSM (Remedy)

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)

ScienceLogic SL1

LogicMonitor

Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Management

HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM)

HP BTODiscontinued

Microsoft Intune

Tanium

Tivoli Monitoring (legacy)

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

Amazon CloudWatch

Oracle Enterprise Manager

ManageEngine Site24x7

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)

AlertBot Website Monitoring

Backup Radar

Freshping (discontinued)