Event parsing and editing to create more understandable alerts and to act on alerts is one of Unicenter's strengths, but this requires you to understand what events mean and know how to parse them. Strong Boolean scripting logic makes it possible to suppress and deduplicate events, but unlike that of HP's product, it's strictly roll-your-own--there's no out-of-the-box functionality. CA's recommendation is to hire professional services to jump-start this for you.
CA's infamous 3D interface, which displays the network and devices with flying-through-space navigation, is still part of the product, but the myriad Win32 consoles--which in the past equaled a confusing number of navigation entry points--have thankfully been supplanted by a new Java "Explorer." The Explorer interface launches almost all of the Win32 and 3D interface functions.
Billboards, one Unicenter Explorer function, offer a new navigational shortcut that displays a synopsis of a device's or subnet's status. The Billboards lived within various important segments, subnets and routers.
Another interesting Unicenter Explorer utility is the "Historian" with its "Controller" view. The Controller is a slick navigational toolbar that stores bookmarks and provides access to CA's dynamic grouping of important network devices, aka BPVs (Business Process Views). The tool's main claim to fame is that it enables you to move back and forth through event histories. We selected devices, dialed in a date and pressed "play," watching the Explorer pane for events. It allowed us to look at the BPV devices one at a time and replay through previous days looking for errors. While we could see some value in looking for time between events on a device, it would have been more helpful to have an entire BPV selected, and have those events played back. We could not display the Controller when accessing the console through Windows Terminal Services.
CA's performance monitoring is very complete but also very complex--we spent way more time than we should have setting it up. CA says the next release will address our concerns by making administration of performance collections easier.
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