OpenText Operations Bridge Reviews

We primarily use the solution for event monitoring and evaluation.

The most valuable features of the solution are its grouping scripts and event focus.

The solution needs to improve its general performance of the interface. Especially when there are lots of events, it takes forever to load, especially the closed events. 

In a future release, we would like an improved upgrade process. When you upgrade it now, it first uninstalls everything and then reinstalls all the packages, which means any customization that you've done in the directories on the surface disappears.

The solution is reasonably stable. The performance is not always up to scratch, but it seems to be pretty reliable in most cases.

The solution is scalable. The UI seems to be a bit slow sometimes, but otherwise, it's fine. We have between 50-100 users.

The past year has not been very good in terms of technical support. There were long waits before replying. I think up to one year ago it was all right, but now it takes a very long to find solutions to a problem. Very often we find the solution ourselves before the support engineers do.

We previously used Operations Manager. We switched for the added features, better scalability, overall experience, and better resolution to end of life issues. 

The initial setup is simple.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would advise others to look into the correlation techniques and adaptability through grouping scripts. The out of the box functionality is great, but there's so much more that you can do with it including dashboards, etc.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The ability to automate a lot of the repetitive tasks so that many human tasks are taken over by Bots. That is the most valuable feature in HPE Operations Bridge.

In today's world, we are under constant pressure to reduce IT resources. The more we can automate, the better it is.

It decreases our time to fix problems and it takes less time to find the root cause. A lot of the process is done with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is built into the system. It helps us nail down the root cause faster. It has also reduced our costs.

I would like to see more Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality. Because of the large amount of tasks, it makes more sense if you have an AI plug-in. We still depend on people to operate a lot of the events.

We also need a better road map and a more affordable price.

This solution is part of our long-term initiative for operations to go into a more automated mode. We started this journey back in 2008. By 2018, it will have been a 10-year journey and we have almost completed it.

Stability is good. Although we do have problems, the problem is more in our data center provider than in the software itself.

We are running an environment for over 100,000 users, so it's very scalable. It's good.

We have used them through HPE partners. They are fairly knowledgeable. Because we are a tiny resource, we rely on them a lot.

We looked at CA and a couple of small players.

When selecting a vendor, look at the roadmap. Look at how the product is going to evolve over time. Very often, we make the mistake of only looking at the current features and not what's out there and what is going to be there in three to five years or more from now.

Plan long-term and not short-term. This is not a short journey. It's definitely at least a five to ten-year journey to change the operations mode.

HPE has a reputation as a modern leader in this domain. They have a proven track record.

We use this solution primarily to monitor servers, to do some log file monitoring, events correlation, and events duplication as well as dashboarding.

We have a bunch of critical servers and applications. We are able to monitor using this product to create a dashboard and have automatic alerts to notify the responsible team.

The event correlation is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

The UI could be better. The ease of use, deployment, upgrades, and licensing could be better. The license, not only the model, rather, the way you manage your users and things like that need to be worked on.

The initial setup is a little bit complex. 

Technical support could be better.

The solution can be more stable.

It's not easy to scale. 

The solution needs network monitoring, and support for more cloud providers.

Anomaly collection could be better. They need better reporting. 

I've been dealing with the solution for ten years. 

While it is a lot better in the current version, it is not as reliable. You need people constantly checking everything, to keep it running. It's a complex product so some components, internally, can cause some unexpected behaviors.

While it can scale, more or less, it's not a straightforward process. 

We have between 50 and 100 people using the solution right now. There are level one, two, and three operators and a few system admins. 

We do not have plans to increase usage. 

We aren't very satisfied with technical support.

Neutral

I did not previously use a different solution. I use something similar in parallel, however, it's not a replacement. 

The initial setup is a bit more complex than straightforward. I'd rate it a three out of five in terms of ease of setup.

I was not here for the latest deployment. However, based on my experience, usually, it takes at least one month to more to plan, prepare, deploy, and configure.

We have five people who can handle deployment and maintenance. 

The deployment was handled in-house with some professional services helping as well. 

While we don't precisely calculate the ROI, we have seen it.

It's quite an expensive solution. I rate it five out of five in terms of the high cost.

I did not previously evaluate other solutions. 

We're using a mix of versions 2020.11 and 2022.05.

I'd advise new users to be prepared to face issues and have problems with the support.

I would rate the product seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for monitoring Linux and application workloads. 

The integration capabilities are very helpful. 

It is stable and reliable. 

I'm not aware of areas that need improvement. 

I've used the solution for quite a while. I've used it for ten years at least. It's been about a decade. 

The product is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'm not sure how many people are using the solution in our company at the moment. 

I've never used technical support. I've never needed any assistance. 

I was not part of the original installment. 

I haven't validated all of the monitoring tools on the market. 

We're a customer and end-user. 

I'm likely using the latest version of the solution. 

The solution is a good monitoring tool. People should try it. 

I'd rate the product eight out of ten overall. 

With our HPOM installation, we monitor the European (and part of the global) infrastructure of our financial services, consisting of around 800 servers in various regions.

It has greatly reduced the number and duration of outages as support teams are notified immediately when something goes wrong or even before something breaks. The integration with the ticketing tool makes sure that there is a record for every issue.

The various types of monitors are very useful. We use them all:

• Threshold monitors
• Log file monitors
• Open message templates
• SNMP trap monitors
• Process monitors
• Database and infrastructure SPIs.

Additionally, the Performance Manager provides great insight into our systems' performance.

Installing and upgrading the HPOM and Operations Agent software is not always easy and the process can be quite fragile. Once it is running, it is very quick and stable, but an upgrade can quite easily break something or terminate unexpectedly.

For additional features, we are looking forward (and implementing) OMi 10.6x.

• To monitor the complete IT infrastructure. 
• To consolidate various products into one and various screen NOC were using to monitor the environments into one single screen, so they can act quickly on the issues and resolve the issue faster. 
• Correlate the events from servers, network switches, routers, and present single or few events with the help of correlation techniques stream-based event correlation and topology based event correlations to reduce number of events, so NOC can find root cause more quickly and help with the ROI. 
• Migration from Operations Manager of Linux to Operation Bridge products. 

Single pane of glass. NOC has to view only a single screen to monitor the entire infrastructure. All events can be seen on single screen and they integrate well with other products. 

Well integrated OMi with Network Node Manager (NNM), Operations Bridge Reporter (OBR), Operations Manager for Linux (OML), and Operations Connector and Universal Discovery to correlate events using SBEC event correlation. Event correlation helps to consolidate and reduce event counts, so operators can act quickly and resolve the issue in a timely manner. 

It has the capability to display overall health of the infrastructure and is very useful for executive reports on the health of the infrastructure.

It helps to integrate and consolidate various products, such as Operation Manager, Operations Bridge, OMi, Operations Bridge Reporter, Operations Connector, Network Node Manager, Universal Discovery, ServiceNow, and NOC, which use one single screen to monitor the entire infrastructure. SBEC (Stream-Based Event Correlation) event correlation has helped consolidate events into one event helping to reduce events visible to operators letting them act and find root causes more quickly. It has helped to handle message storm situations. Earlier NOC were using different screens to monitor different environments. Now, they have to look at single screen as other products are well-integrated with OMi. 

Topology base event correlation. Topology-based event correlation does not work well with NNM events. NNM does not understand well and collect information needed to correlate the events. Separate active and history tables from one single table and improve performance. It should be improved to view more than 100K events from closed browsers without impacting performance. QA of the products should be thorough before it is released and documentation lacks the information needed to implement the products, upgrade the products from one version to next version, and there is integration with other products. If events goes beyond 100,000, performance is degraded and sometimes the browser freezes.

No.

No.

Technical support is good, but it could be improved. 

No, we are migrating from OML to OMi. 

Initial setup was straightforward and integration was easy. 

In-house. 

Not applicable.

It is competitive. 

No.

The product is great, but it could be improved. 

The ability to integrate directly with the RIPM on top of DSM. We're looking to use the event feed into OMI, the metrics feed, and using things like SHA. There might be opportunities later to try for a faster root cause analysis.

At the moment, we're still building the system, so I can't say.

When installing against IIS, you need to expect a fully locked-down IIS, rather than expecting a fully out-of-the-box. It is sold to enterprise customers and I can't believe any enterprise customers would be happy to leave IIS out-of-the-box. I would think that everybody would have locked it down. You add what you want to include in a white list, rather than blacklist out what you want to exclude. So, the IIS configuration definitely needs to be improved.

The installation instructions need to be improved, as well.

We had a designated person with FlexCare. He was fair enough with the installation in general. I think we worked out what the problems were with the filters ourselves, because we've seen that on other HPE products. We were kind of expecting it.

We are combining it with other monitoring tools. They did a huge proof of concept to determine what the right fit was. I wasn’t involved in that. It was all vendor engagement, and so on. It wasn't just HPE, we had other vendors as well, such as IBM and Compuware.

The installation instructions are a mess to the point where the advice given to us by other HPE people has been to not follow the instructions, but to follow the VMEs instead.

The installation for an enterprise IIS solution, rather than just an out-of-the-box one, doesn't work very well. We ended up needing to troubleshoot the installation to get it to work. Installing the IIS filters was a big headache. We installed them, but we couldn’t do anything until we went in and adjusted them. When I left, there was still a problem creating users. We couldn't do any of that, so I don't know if they fixed that yet.

For people doing this for the first time, if you have support from HPE, use it. Milk it. Use your FlexCare points and grab somebody. You might sail straight through. If it works, and you do not have any problems with that, then maybe you're fine.

It is mostly used for event management. We use it to consolidate events from different data collectors.

The correlation feature is the most used feature. It allows you to correlate events from different sources and have more meaningful events.

The deployment of agents on new CI should be improved. There should be some kind of automation to directly deploy them from the console.

It can maybe have some more AI functions because most of the other tools are going in that direction.

I have been using this solution for around two years.

It is stable. It has got high availability.

I haven't done that yet, but its scalability must be good. It must be easy to add new servers.

In terms of usage, mostly the operations teams work on these events. We have a team of around ten members.

Their support is good. The community is also helpful.

It was pretty straightforward.

It was actually management's call, so I didn't get a chance to look at other tools.

I would rate Operations Bridge an eight out of ten. It is a very good solution for event management and agent-based monitoring.