Agent Stability
This has improved since the days of 7.0, but we almost constantly battle with agent stability issues. It comes in waves. The HTTPS bug in 7.5 absolutely destroyed us. At any given time a quarter of our machines were unmanagable. We were beat up daily by our help desk and it took weeks to figure out what was going on. I know this was fixed in SP1, but we haven't been able to move to that yet. We had to revert to HTTP to stabilize our environment.
But it's not just this one bug. For years this has been an issue, and it seems like it's almost always caused by problems with plug-ins. We've had the App Metering, OOB, Inventory, Monitor, and Deployment plugins, all at different times in the past, crashing the SMA. Some were due to bugs, some were due to plugins being upgraded before the SMA, and some are still ongoing. The Deployment plugin still crashes the SMA on some of our physical Cisco servers. I haven't opened a case for this. I removed the plug-in and I'm waiting to upgrade. We're currently on ITMS 7.5 HF5.
Obviously when the agent is not functioning everything goes to hell. Computers don't get patched, software doesn't get delivered, monitor data stops coming in, etc. I could set up an agentless policy to monitor the SMA service on every single device and restart them when they stop, or alert us, but I shouldn't have to do that. Thankfully RAAD exists, as we uses that regularly to hunt down and remediate misbehaving agents. The fault reports help, too.
Everything is relatively stable now - I'm just waiting for that next inevitable round of agent issues. At a previous TAB meeting we talked about a future version of ITMS doing away with the plug-in model. I seriously hope that's still in the works.
Remote Control
We gave up on pcAnywhere, and I know other customers that have as well. If you're wondering, we went to ScreenConnect. pcAnywhere is a product of the 90s that has pretty much only seen added support for newer operating systems. One of the better features, the pcAnywhere Access Server, got killed off after the source code was stolen. pcAnywhere is not a CEM-enabled solution and Symantec has acknowledged that this should be rectified. And now the retail pcA product is EOL. pcA Solution is a dead man walking.
If Symantec wants to include a remote control tool in their management suite, like other vendors do, it'll probably have to be an acquisition. I once heard through the grapevine that Symantec had written a new remote control tool from the ground up that was fully Internet-enabled, and that they decided to kill it. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's a little sad if true.
Beef up Monitor Solution
While it's super simple to set up Monitor Solution there are some glaring omissions and odd issues.
We still can't monitor multiple instances of SQL Server without setting up metrics per instance. There's no way I'm taking the time to do that. We started monitoring SQL Server with another tool.
Uptime reports have been useless to us. ICMP availablity shows Up, Down, and a chunk shows up as Unknown. I placed a support call for this. I was given some reason as to why the data may show up as Unknown and was advised to post an Idea on Connect for changing this behavior. Really? I want it to show a system as Up or as Down. That should be the goal. Why should I post that as an idea?
Since upgrading to 7.5 I very frequently get bogus alarms. For example, CPU usage alarms will come in showing that a system is over 1000% utilized. Again, I opened a case and we worked this for a while. I was told I need to schedule a Reset Monitored Resources task to run on a regular basis. I was told this was a best practice. I'd never had to do this before going to 7.5, and I've never run into an issue anything like this with any other monitoring tool that we use. I ended up turning off email alerts to my team because they were too often being triggered for no reason.
I just want the product to work well. I want to be able to rely on it.
I could rattle off more, but these are some areas where we'd like to see improvement.