CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. SysAid

It is a suitable tool for a large organization with extensive user needs. It is not for a small shop as it may be over-engineered for smaller organizations that don't have teams that can manage a solution of this size. It does have some significant hardware and configuration needs, but that should not deter customers from deploying it in-house. I've seen it deployed in the cloud as well as in-house; the downside to deploying it as a hosted solution is you're forever at the mercy of the vendor for customizations, and they cost an arm and a leg. The simplest things take a long time and cost much more money than necessary, so you can't truly get a custom solution and end up with mostly vanilla services (unless you have very deep pockets.)

Incentivized

SysAid is Great for IT Support. Tickets can be easily entered using the portal that has a more modern look and feel. We have also used SysAid for our Customer Service Team. Tickets can come in through email or direct access through the cloud. They no longer get lost in the shuffle. Reports can be produced for the managers to better undersand where issues are.

Incentivized

• This application is very easy to use. It is the best when it comes to training since the application is easy to understand and employees are able to easily catch up on work process.
• It is a great reporting tool because users can look up work they've done over a period of time.
• The auto populate feature is very helpful since at the service desk users do have several tickets to create for a single requester.

Incentivized

• Ease of use for end users creating tickets from their own Self-Service Portal (which is tied into Windows Active Directory so no login is needed).
• Ease of use and management of tickets by the IT staff.
• Flexibility. We currently have IT teams associated with a single program, a single department, and all other IT items. SysAid allows us to easily manage this, add to it, change it, etc.
• Support - SysAid support has remained consistently great throughout the years that we have had the product. That is a fairly rare thing for hosted solutions these days.
• Expandability. We have a lot more that we can still do with the product and are working on expanding what it can do as we move forward in time. There is a lot to this product overall.

Incentivized

• Linking into other ITSM Tools for automatic event/alert generation could be a good feature to use. Not sure if this has been addressed in later versions of the product.
• Effective integration into communication tools such as pagers, text messages would be a great plus. Again this may have been addressed in later versions.

• [I would like it if the] Due Date [could] recalculate if a ticket has been stopped (awaiting user).
• [The] dashboard could have more options when creating a new graphic.
• [The] end user portal [could offer] the ability to customize more info, like font and adding more images.

While the concepts of Service Desk and EITM were solid. The user interface, tool capabilities, and integrations fell behind the rest of the industry. Too often it seemed like CA bought and rebranded products without fully integrated them with their other products. It was a coat of paint, without the parts under the hood being updated. The overhead for administration was too high and the reporting capabilities were absolutely amongst the worst I've seen.

Incentivized

Because through SYSAID is how the operation of all IT is carried out and in this way the performance indicators of the services, systems, operation, trends, workloads, project control and their deviations are known; as well as the requests for changes and requirements that are requested by both users and that is where the system improvement projects are triggered, such as change controls, which by the way are audit topics.

Incentivized

It is a very simple tool to use, the training required to implement it is minimal and it is also very simple for end users. There is a quick guide to configure and it was the only thing we used to configure the tool. The response of the users was good to the implementation because they did not feel that it was a big change that complicated the request of tasks by the IT department.

Another of the benefits of sysaid is that it is highly available when working in on-premise environments.The only times the system is down is when a restart of the services is required to add a new feature. Apart from that, we have not had any problems.In the case of the cloud, the only condition I have seen where sysaid is not available is because the internet link is down or damaged.

Incentivized

In the case of system performance, I have seen that no matter the number of assets and users, Sysaid responds in the same way and at the same speed. The reports that are scheduled do not have any details because they arrive directly to your email. In the same way, when it is integrated with other systems, for example through the API or by email, we have not seen any failure due to the integration. It works very well with or without integrations.

Incentivized

I have had nothing but positive experiences working with the SysAid support team. There are multiple pathways to request and receive support, which are all connected with each other. I get an efficient and effective response most of the time and when there is not immediately a good answer, they create a support request to follow up for resolution.

Incentivized

My team was greatly assisted and trained well. Despite the time zone difference the trainer made every effort to be available during times that were suitable for us and the assistance and help offered was extremely appreciated by my team. A wonderful experience by the team.

Incentivized

The training I received was very good, they gave me tasks to carry out and then they checked what I had done.It was gratifying that the instructor noticed that I had made very fast progress because I had done the implementation myself and it was very fast. At least I remember that after 5 days I had already finished almost 90% of all the implementation tasks.

Incentivized

In the initial stage we implement separate SysAid servers for head and branch offices. When we managed to link up our offices via point to point VPN, we manage to console them into one server. All the assets and devices on branch office were divert back to the server in head office

Incentivized

We are too integrated with CA Service Desk Manager to disassociate anytime soon. We found the more we used the product the more we needed to customize it in order to better integrate with our business processes. There are other alternatives that have many built-in features that had we have foreseen our future requirements... would have chosen ServiceNow or Remedy as our "go-to" ticketing product.

Incentivized

The value of SysAid just seemed to be much better than Kaseya. The review was relatively short with Kaseya, but I immediately liked what SysAid offered. The overall capability compared to the costs associated with SysAid made it a great choice.

Incentivized

Le doy esta calificación porque los módulos que contiene se pueden usar para casi cualquier departamento, tanto gestión de tickets como inventarios de equipos, hemos utilizado una versión gratuita en Ingeniería para gestionar sus tiempos en las tareas asignadas, es lo único que utilizan pero podrían usar fácilmente el módulo de inventario para su herramienta y el módulo de proyectos también

• Because of the difficulty in creating various functions and workflows, it has had a negative impact over time to where the 'knee-jerk' reaction to any new options requested or desired is to customize it which has resulted in mimicking out of box functions through the customizations.
• Examples of the use of certain areas and options is lacking. This has resulted in the misuse of various fields. For example: Multi-tenancy we do not have turned on and was never pursued because we we're told it "wouldn't work for us". This has resulted in previous administrators creating many new roles (which in turn has created just as many access types and data partitions) which has created a large amount of overhead. It's now difficult to turn on multi-tenancy until this overhead can be reconstructed/removed and the bringing personnel up to speed on the changes.
• On the initial install (which I wasn't with the company at that time) CA had provided us with custom scripts to execute certain functions (without considering if Service Desk could actually do that function out of box) and applied it. After a few upgrades to the product, these scripts are still being used and have caused underlying issues since their application. CA has denied support on these scripts because they are customizations even though we are looking to remove them.

Incentivized

• Our resolution time has increased a lot compared to not using a ticketing system.
• We have reduced communication load significantly for our helpdesk admins.
• The knowledgebase is rough, but still allows us to preserve and share our collective experience and expertise.

Incentivized