CA Unicenter - The World's Okayest Ticketing and Asset Management System
October 29, 2019

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

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)

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

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

Cons

  • 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.
  • 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.
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.
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.

Do you think CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued)'s feature set?

Yes

Did CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) again?

No

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

6.0
Automated alerts and notifications
6
6.0
Patch Management
5
Service configuration management
8
Software and hardware inventory
5
5.5
Performance data reports
5
Customizable reporting
7
Data visualization
5
Risk analysis
5
2.0
Antivirus and malware management
2

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