Nimsoft - Your Business Team will love it after they discover that they may create their own Dashboards :)
May 03, 2018
Nimsoft - Your Business Team will love it after they discover that they may create their own Dashboards :)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with CA Nimsoft Monitor
Nimsoft is currently the main monitoring tool for the company which I work for. It's being used by entire IT team, and some critical business units, that need to monitor their application's environment. We had a critical problem that was to show the incidents at the moment that they were happening, to a faster fix. Most of them were not just IT problems, but also business problems. And Nimsoft helped us to address them.
The tools also allowed us to give the freedom to these teams to create their dashboards, mixing database and other application information, with their application. This freed us from most of the dashboard setup, that was something that the business team had the knowledge (sometimes they create little monsters, but that's another history). Also, it solved the typical email warning message, to lots of people. We started to create warning groups, based on the big set of rules that Nimsoft have, when needed and to the right people, even preventing to warn people when the message was an error that could be expected in some scenarios (a deploy of an application that was already being addressed, for example) or yet to warn also the managers in some situations.
The tools also allowed us to give the freedom to these teams to create their dashboards, mixing database and other application information, with their application. This freed us from most of the dashboard setup, that was something that the business team had the knowledge (sometimes they create little monsters, but that's another history). Also, it solved the typical email warning message, to lots of people. We started to create warning groups, based on the big set of rules that Nimsoft have, when needed and to the right people, even preventing to warn people when the message was an error that could be expected in some scenarios (a deploy of an application that was already being addressed, for example) or yet to warn also the managers in some situations.
- Baseline Monitoring
- Multi-Tenant
- Speedup deploy
- Web Interface
- Business Dashboards
- Device History
- The use of flash in Dashboards
- Integration with more alert options (Slack, for example), out of the box
- Fast deploy also in the mainstream Linux Distros.
- Business Units love It - Good for them, but worse for the IT Team until we share the responsibility of the dashboards.
- If no one put their hands on it, it will take some time to give results. I'm talking about environments with 400 devices, for example, in something about 6 months to one year, if no one is dedicated, and depending on the consulting company. Some, even certified by CA, was not good. If possible, try to use CA services directly.
- IT Teams, after they start to notice that the tool really work, will want to monitor everything. Depending on the company, this will be more or less easy to measure, as ROI. And I'm telling this because usually IT teams don't know how to sell them to C-Levels, and the tool, because of the price, is always a motivation to questions like: "What is this tool? Do you really need it? Is there another way to monitor this?"
Basically, these other tools were easy to setup, I think sometimes even more that Nimsoft in some scenarios. But after you need to expand the size of the environment, or in big environments, for me, Nimsoft is the tool that allows you to grow with them. All of the other tools start to present problems in the database. When you need to think in bigger machines or start to "code inside the tool" to solve some performance problems, and other problems that appear. Nimsoft comes with a big set of documentation, and the support really works, as fast as you need, even as higher as you pay.