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 solution is mainly used for server monitoring as well as consolidation integration with the various data sources. We use this for where we want to consolidate event performance rates and capture all those tools that were a single unit.

The even consolidation is great and the extract mechanisms give you very good correlation features.

The stability is good.

I've found the solution to be very scalable. 

The setup process can get a little bit complex. 

There is new development happening, however, it's important that certain legacy applications should be supported in the future.

I've used the solution for eight to ten years at this point. 

It's highly stable. It's worked well for me for eight to ten years and I haven't had any issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable and the performance is good. 

The solution scales quite well. It's not a problem at all. If a company needs to expand it out, it can do so.

The initial setup is not exactly straightforward. It's complex as it's not just one product. It has to integrate with many other products. A standalone product can be simple, however, when you have an integrated environment, definitely the complexity is increased. How you design it and whether it is standalone dictates the process. Every setup is unique and different according to each individual company.

The cloud version does have a subscription cost.

While the solution is on-premises, we also have a cloud deployment that has just started. It's available via subscription and companies can use both models. 

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite happy with its capabilities and have been quite pleased with that solution overall.

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.

It's really the basis for everything we do for event management, for enterprise management. It's a single pane of glass and it has the ability that when you select a particular event that you can see all information required in a single pane versus having to launch four or five applications.

You don't waste time launching multiple applications. You can actually have information right there in front of you. Again, it quickens the mean time to recover.

It's not mature enough. Like I said, we're being forced to go from OM to OMi even though OM overall, or OMi, as part of Ops Bridge, has many, many more features. Ops Bridge is a suite of tools. Most of the suite of tools in there are less than two years old. There are a lot of growing pains. They're forcing people to go from OM to OMi where OMi, even though on some parts it has many more features, the functionality that is really utilized by a lot of the industry is only about 70% of what OM could do, imported into OMi. Then the developers tend to be in an Ivory Tower development area instead of a real world area, so there's people that say, well why would OM people do that? I used to be a consultant prior to working here. I can tell you 150 companies that do it this way because these are all your Fortune 100 companies.

Their documentation points have spaces that don't exist. They will change their command lines without anybody telling you what it is. Like I said, it's a new product. I've been working with HP on this stuff and everything for over 30 years and I haven't opened up 50 tickets in those 30 years. I have already opened close to 60 just on Ops Bridge and had already seven enhancement requests. I should never have to do that. HP used to do very top quality testing before they would release a product.

We've been using OM for years, and it is at the end of life, so we had to migrate or we've been forced to migrate. Ops Bridge still has a lot of tweaks that has to occur, but we're working with HP to try to help resolve most of those issues.

Well, the whole installation was a nightmare. They have the evolution guide and the evolution guide is very incomplete. Like I said, that's the biggest thing. It says, well go do this, but it doesn't tell you how to go find the documentation on how to do that or it doesn't exist at all. It's amazing, one of the biggest answers that you get from the supports folks of that is that, boy I wish the developers would document it. Thanks for letting us know how it works. That's not a mature product. They also don't have training from an administrator perspective, only from an operator perspective. How can you release a product and there's no training for administrators?

The potential of what the product can do is amazing once you figure out how to do it. The latest release, I guess it's 10/11, of those 57 tickets I've opened up, I would say probably 50 of them have already been corrected in that version. It's becoming a much more stable version.

Hold off on it a little while. Wait for the next major release and hopefully all of the issues that have created a nightmare for me will be resolved. Even though they said it was out for over a year, it was not a product ready for release.

As a total offering, Ops Bridge is a strong offering in the market. It adds value; it's competitive in its entirety, from network scanning to enrichment, up into event information. The implementation is challenging with customers, so we see added value, but there are diminished returns due to the complexity of the implementation and also the maintainability in general. There are some challenges, but overall there is added value.

For its fundamental proposition and as far as the way it works, it works well. It's a strong product; it has a wide capability - especially if you integrate it with more application performance-related solutions - and if you have infrastructure scanning, those two work together well. The data model and the data flow is pretty good, so overall it's a product that definitely adds value in a complex organization; complex in terms of infrastructure and application infrastructure. It's definitely a good product.

The application is stable; it's about when environmental changes impact what you do and how you look at it. Increasing the reach of the application adds additional work.

When you look at it - for instance, in event detection – that’s when you want to understand how an application relates to the infrastructure, and how that works. There's some modelling involved; you need an understanding of how that application relates to the infrastructure. There's automation for that, but not everything can be captured. There's overlap between what different applications see in an infrastructure and how they report that back. To merge that information correctly, to make sure that you have the entire stack - the technology stack and application stack - properly configured, that requires attention, that requires configuration.

We worked with customers who want to manage critical applications. They have to map out the applications into the different infrastructure components; if it's mainframe related, for instance, which is still a big part of the picture, especially in the financial sector. They need to map the individual jobs and the alerting to an application, so that's a lot of manual work.

Depending on where you land, if you get stuck in generic level-two support, then it’s quite uninspiring – that’s probably the best description. There's a high return of returning tickets back to the pending customer; getting tickets closed without adding value to the solution. Every step has one question. A ticket goes to a pending customer, you send a response immediately, and 24 hours later you receive the next update, which says something like, "Thanks, now we need this piece of information." The ticket then goes back to the pending customer, so you can easily lose a week just trying to get to a point where they're looking at your issue. Even if you set up a WebEx in which they look at what you're doing and understand the issue, we still go through the same process; there's additional information we request.

It's really tedious to get through that. When you switch to level-three or more of the ACE-type support, that goes away. In a discussion with HP, they typically say something like, "You should upgrade your support levels."; buy better support instead of actually maybe fixing their L1, L2 support. If you have the product and support is part of the license you buy, then I would expect to have a certain level of quality in that support, without having to upgrade to some kind of premium plan. It's not about having a dedicated comm tech, or someone who understands your environment, or all these additional things. It's actually about getting a proper response to a well-formulated question.

For greenfield implementation, which still happens, fundamentally I think Ops Bridge provides a deeper level of understanding of what's going on in the infrastructure. If it's a complex environment, it's difficult to find toolsets that will address it correctly. If you look at the entire offering of Ops Bridge, it's one component in the suite that is relevant for monitoring your environment; detection of what's going in that environment.

If you look at Live and more holistically, all those components that include a BSM, OMi, and other products that I forget, that by itself offers multiple layers in the different technical areas of infrastructure. They work well together for some data modelling challenges, I guess, but overall it works well together and it provides a many-layered insight into what's going on in the infrastructure. You have different levels of how you can see what's going and analyze what you should be doing to address that.

In a complex environment, I don't think there are many good alternatives that offer it more or less end to end. You'd be cobbling different vendors, maybe with the exception of BMC, which probably could do it. The overall offering is consistent and as wide a technology as you can find, so there's strong benefits because you can do it all with a HP stack with augmentation of some of the specific domains with other vendors, which you have to do anyway.

I don't know if there’s any alternative. I think the main driver there would be how comfortable they are with the existing product suite. I think IBM is probably the strongest alternative in the field. I think they're behind, from a technology perspective. The only thing that they seem to be stronger with is related to the visualization.

At the Ops Bridge level – basically, at the highest level - how do I view my environment? What do I see going on? And, can I use that information in an aggregated way to prevent or limit the impact of occurrences of events in my environment? That's what Ops Bridge, or the OMi component, doesn't have to that level. You can't go from all the way to the top to all the way at the bottom to drill down, you have to use different environments for that. IBM does have that.

If that's important to have on there, then that's one of the things the people that manage the infrastructure need to be able to do. Especially if it's over multiple sites - a strong geographically dispersed environment - then they would be an alternative, but for all other situations, there isn't much else out there.

As with anything, it's not just a tool and switching it on. They need to realize that it's a journey with a lot of challenges. Especially organizationally, it's not only about putting something in to existing systems; it’s also the desire to be compliant in organizational departments; it's invisibility of infrastructure because of security reasons or appliances that don't allow access. There's a lot of challenges organizationally that, even though you have the best software, you're still going to have to put a lot of effort in.

Overall advice is that if you do this, you need to commit and to be ready to put in a lot of effort in getting your organization to basically comply and help out. I think these products are really strong in terms of UI, but there's room for improvement in some of the usability and some of the integration components could be stronger.

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. 

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.