Monitoring Analyst & Exploitation in Information Technology at Verisure (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using TS Operation Management mainly to centralize all our system alarms and report them to a dedicated 24/7 service. We needed a complete and powerful tool that would allow us to manage all kinds of different systems, OS, networks, databases, etc. TSOM provides all the necessary tools in one environment, on-premise and in the cloud.

Pros

Centralize all monitoring agents in one tool.
Big catalog of monitoring types (KMs).
Powerful event manager.

Cons

Custom correlated alarms policies can be hard to handle.
You need some training to use properly the UI.
TSPS dash lights are poor for dashboards.

Most Important Features

"all in one" tool.
Compatibilites with BMC Remedy and Entuity.
Automation features ( to fix an alarm for example).

Return on Investment

Overall quality of service.
Management of critical incidences and on duty issues are better.
Automation that prevent guards calls.

Alternatives Considered

Centreon

Other Software Used

Entuity, Zabbix, Prometheus

Andrew Kawczynski View profile

Systems Administrator - ROC Technology in Information Technology at Johnson Controls (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My company as a whole is fairly large. I however am the systems administrator of a smaller portion of the company, called the Remote Operations Center. I have been using TrueSight Pulse for the past 2 years to monitor my server health on the servers that support some critical systems. It is a great tool to have, as I always have access to the interface to see the graphs and usage that my servers resources are using. I like the email alert feature as well as it allows me to get notified if any resources are high.

Pros

I always have access to the interface to see the graphs and usage that my servers resources are using.
I like the email alert feature as it allows me to get notified if any resources, CPU, disk, memory, etc are reaching threshold levels.
I like the ability to add different meters and being able to adjust the notifications within the UI.

Cons

The interface is functional and adaptable but I kind of wish it looked like its predecessor Patrol Monitor.
It is somewhat hard to understand the integrations into the UI.
Hoping for more metric choices.

Return on Investment

Positive in alert notifications.
Positive in keeping environment up time.
Positive in being able to monitor various metrics and meters.

Sean O'Brien View profile

Senior Manager of Enterprise Solutions for Monitoring in Information Technology at Ensono (501-1000 employees employees)

Pros

The ability to have a single URL and a consistent user interface for all types of systems keeps training costs down. When we train someone to leverage MS SQL monitoring they just learned everything they need to monitor Windows or Linux.
Event management is powerful in TrueSight. We had a solution from another vendor running for one customer to monitor their F5 load balancers and the resulting ticket noise was averaging over 11,000 tickets per month. Within two weeks of moving that to BMC we got the monthly average down to 400 tickets per month.
A single agent to manage it all. We have tools from another vendor and to manage an e-commerce server it was common to have to have 3 or 4 separate agents installed to collect everything we needed for monitoring. With TrueSight it all comes from the newly enhanced, streaming, Patrol Agent. Just add Knowledge Modules to the agent (which are remotely deployed and managed) and you can monitor just about anything from a single agent.

Cons

BMC has elected to not build in network monitoring which has always been a problem for us. They do have an excellent partner in Entuity for that but purchasing from a partner means separate contract talks.
They are merging in many old products into an every growing TrueSight tool but some tools have seen features dropped on the initial move and then we have to wait for future releases for the features to be added back in.

Return on Investment

The cost of the tool has been a challenge to build into our cost models and still remain competitive. To do this we have to both eliminate other tools that have duplicate features and push automation to improve the labor ratio of the IT support teams.
Having a does-it-all monitoring tool has allowed us to bid on new contracts without having to shop and learn for new tools.
BMC's constant updates of new technologies allows us to offer services to customers quickly after new technology from big data to cloud to new updates to classic system hits the streets.

Alternatives Considered

CA Spectrum, ScienceLogic, SolarWinds Network Device Monitor, HP Network Node Manager, Foglight and IBM Tivoli Monitoring

Benjamin McKrill View profile

Enterprise Management Automation Administrator in Information Technology at Parkview Health (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Providing quick and accurate alerts
Provides users with tools to investigate events
Provides a quick easy solution for searching log files

Cons

Hardware monitoring built in as a standard feature of TrueSight Operations Management rather than a separately bought product

Return on Investment

We have not figured ROI at this time.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Pulse for performance and availability monitoring across all of our servers that demand real-time monitoring. Pulse is used primarily by our NOC to review current load as well as historical loads.

Pros

Real-time high-resolution metric monitoring. Data can be collected and viewed at 1-second resolution.
Visualization of line charts
Cloud hosted

Cons

Pulse lacks the ability to have multi-level filters for viewing data. You can only build a dashboard containing particular metrics then you can change what instances are displayed on those charts. It would be nice to be able to have dropdowns to select categories of instances within other categories. It would also be nice to have instances of metrics (i.e. % processor time for processor 1, 2, 3, 4, etc rather than the current single % processor time). The only way to do this right now is to create 1 metric per instance (i.e. % processor time.1, % processor time.2, % processor time.3, etc).
Alarms can only be built at a single severity level. Alarm configuration is pretty limited.
User permissions are lacking. There are 'user' and 'admin' permission levels, but that is it. There is no way to define permissions based upon particular actions (like creating dashboards, or creating metrics). You're just either an 'admin' or you're not an 'admin'.

Return on Investment

It has had a great impact because it provides our NOC a central location where they can go to view historical data without having to RDP into servers.
It has allowed us to have a cloud hosted location where we can POST custom alerts into that can then be pulled into our private hosted alerting solutions.

Alternatives Considered

Datadog

TrueSight Operations Management (discontinued)

What is TrueSight Operations Management (discontinued)?

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Reviews

Complete, all-in-one and powerful monitoring solution.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Most Important Features

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Other Software Used

TrueSight Metrics Meets Meters Magnificently

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

TrueSight for a True Win

Pros

Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered