OpenText Operations Bridge Reviews

I think what I'm really looking for is being able to get a faster root cause analysis for events and incidents that happen, including correlation of events across networks, servers, and applications across our infrastructure. We have a real hybrid landscape where we are on premises, as well as in the public cloud, across AWS, and in the Azure cloud. We want to make sure that we have our operations running brilliantly with fantastic up-times. We think that getting our resiliency right is possible, because we get faster root causes and event correlations that can actually come from the solution itself.

When we first transformed from being on premises to going significantly into the cloud, we had to go ahead and change a lot of our enterprise architecture and landscape. We needed to be networking very differently and to be leveraging virtual machines on the cloud very differently and in a cost-optimal way. This clearly meant that our internal IT had to operate very differently from what they were used to in the past. We needed to get them to change themselves and work differently so they could provide these kinds of services. IT needed to be able to give me the kind of resiliency, simplification, standardization, agility and the promise of the cloud with optimal cost. This was something which was important, and that's what it did to transform our IT.

I would like to see a lot more ease-of-use, as well as easier deployment of the product itself. Considering that the people who end up using these tools are much more cloud native for everything else, they would want to see something which is cloud native and as brilliant as some of the other products which are out there. That's something that I believe can be much better. I think HPE has this on their roadmap to actually get there.

Our level of implementation is not so deep as yet to be able to go ahead and say whether it's stable or unstable, but whatever I have seen it has been fairly stable.

We are a very large organization with 170,000 employees. This product completely scales to meet our needs. We have 4,000-plus network devices, about 2,000-plus on-premises servers and about 1,000 cloud-based virtual machines, all of which are managed through the HPE solution.

I think we need to get a lot more depth to be able to see how much technical support we'd actually require. So far it's been okay, but I would think that when we get much deeper entrenched into HPE Operations Bridge and use it significantly, that's when we'll really need technical support and that's when we'll figure out how good or not so good it might actually be.

Initial setup and deployment has been fairly complex. There are specialized skills and expertise required to run deployments. Once deployed, I think the solution is fairly robust for us to go ahead and use.

I was not involved in the actual buy decision when that was made some time ago, but I do know that there are competitors out there. But I think some of them would be more collaborators rather than competitors.

As an example, at a recent conference, Scott Guthrie from Microsoft talked about the OMS suite of products, and that’s amazing because we are on Azure. I know that OMS has a set of capabilities that the HPE suite doesn't. On the other hand, the HPE suite has some capabilities that are not there on OMS.

We really like the synergies between both of these products, HPE Operations Bridge and Microsoft OMS, going forward. That got me thinking that maybe I should get OMS as well so that we can do some of the things that I want to be able to go ahead and do on Azure. We're heavy on Azure anyway and we would then be able to get the best of both of product lines.

Remember that Operations Bridge can do a lot, but it's fairly complex to get started with. It means getting people to adopt the product significantly for them to be able to maximize that kind of investment. Once it is in there, it's extremely robust. The kind of value it can provide to the business would be significant. It should be maximized by all businesses, so go ahead and invest in the suite itself for the enterprise.

I think HPE has a fairly good roadmap. They're taking advantage of the kind of movements that are happening in the cloud. Going hybrid IT means being able to bring the best of legacy services that you've always had, with the strength of the solution that you've always had, over to the newer technologies which are really disrupting.

The most valuable feature is its ability to integrate with everything.

It identifies parse issues pretty quickly. Instead of logging multiple tickets, we actually deduplicate those and just create one ticket, which makes our operations a lot easier to manage during the incident.

When the systems talk to each other, it becomes sort of a drop and go. And I'm talking purely in our instance, because, from what I see, it seems like none of the other countries have that issue. But it goes back to not having enough skills within the African region, with HPE and with all their suppliers. Once they sort that out, we won't have to get all the people from other countries to come and do it. It should make it a lot easier to manage.

Our issues are largely support related due to where we are and the knowledge base that we have here. This issue relates both HPE in general and to the technical products.

We have worked with other vendors, but the difference is that the knowledge or the course and certifications are made available in our country, whereas with HPE you have to actually go to a different country. So our challenges are more pronounced with HPE because people are less certified.

The functionality of OMi itself is actually cool, but if you can't use it, or if you can't get your teams to set it up properly, then I have to rate it lower. If we could implement it fully, I would rate it probably to be about a nine or a 10.

The product itself is a nine or a 10, but because of the limitations within South Africa, it's more of a seven.

It's pretty stable. The only real issue we've had is knowledge of the solution in Africa. I have discussed this with the team at a recent conference as well. Knowledge and skills are not really something that is sold in South Africa.

There are no issues with scaling. We are looking at adding new sites, which it pretty much copes with easily.

We use VMware, Fortinet, and Cisco. We are staying with HPE because we use HPE for all our server and storage. Cisco for the networks, Fortinet firewalls does load balancing now as well; we've actually moved that to them. We don't want to be a single vendor shop. That's why we stick with HPE for this solution.

The OVPA plugins for the various OS levels.

I'm not using it now, but when I was, it was the capability of auto fixing issues that could be customized per device, OS, or application. That seemed to make people the most excited.

It can be cumbersome to get up and running. And it's very expensive.

I used it for, probably, a total of 12 years.

Just some compatibilities with certain OS levels that I remember.

No issues, it was very stable.

No issues, in fact that's one of the features that I like about the tool.

Great.

It used to be great, but now it's off shore and is much more difficult.

No, but I've used Nagios after the fact at other places because it's cheaper, but it has much less flexible.

It wasn't complex, but, the DB behind it was the toughest part.

I implemented at the last place, alongside Pepperweed at Intrado. They were excellent.

No other options were looked at.

Be patient, and take things step by step to get it going. Once that takes place, it's pretty self-sufficient.

My primary use is the consolidation of monitoring tools and dashboards.

The most valuable feature is that everything can be consolidated into one dashboard.

The service takes a very long time to start and it requires a lot of resources. A huge amount of memory is required.

The setup process should be simplified and faster to complete.

I have been using Micro Focus Operations Manager for 15 years.

I have experienced no issues with stability.

I have not needed to scale this solution. We have fewer than 100 users and we do not plan on increasing our usage right now.

I have not needed to contact technical support within the past year.

My team has been in contact with the local Micro Focus partner and my understanding is that the local partner's skills could use some improvement.

We are using another similar tool in the company, but it is not in my department.

It took approximately one week to complete the installation and setup. I would say that the setup process is painful.

I implemented and deployed this solution myself.

I don't remember exactly how much it costs but I know that it's affordable.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It allows us to build dashboards for individual parts of the business. Our team members appreciate that they can just get a view of their part of the world without having to worry about anyone else's. This seems to be the most valuable feature for us right now.

We have a central screen that alerts us to problems from all parts of the business. This enables our operations team to have visibility of all issues and deal with them or call out as required.

I know that in the next version, X1005, they're moving to more graphical overviews, which should help our senior managers. We're looking forward to that upgrade.

I think it's been seven years since we first used it.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable though we've had issues in the past. I'm not sure whether they were hardware related or OS or the product, but it seems to be quite stable in the past few years.

I haven't bumped into any issues, so it's scaling well.

I would evaluate them as weak, unfortunately. They're barely bearable in the quality of the guys that support us. There are not always specialists in their support system. They seem to be learning as much as we are. So support is weak, I'd say.

The initial setup was straightforward. I had no problems with it.

Plan your implementation. Learn what's really important to your business that's not even from an IT perspective. That's only natural production or sale side or whatever it is and use that to map it onto your implementation. That's what I would say.

The most valuable feature of Operations Bridge is the centralization of all the alerts, events, and topology-based statistics that you can see in a centralized view for different customers internally. It could be your support groups, your management, or your governance. That's what we feel like it's giving us. It is the ability to look at it holistically, even though it's pure statistics from events and notifications. Your key performance indicators can be validated very easily and centrally.

From our monitoring perspective or from a visibility perspective, HPE UCMDB is a must have. It's an amazing piece of software. Regardless what other systems you have in your environment, you should have UCMDB in place because it performs a very good classification and discovery of your CIs. This tends to build up that service model that can be utilized between any piece of software. This is a great value we are getting out of UCMDB.

Operations Bridge, as is the OMI 10, is a great piece of software. It has a lot of potential that needs more exploration and we'll be doing that. We will be engaging my competent team, because we are working with HPE very closely, even for the developmental aspects. We are providing our inputs and we are bringing that change which is required for the tool. I must say that OMI 10 has great potential. This is where our core focus is, to improve on that potential aspect.

Reporting has to be tackled a bit more. Conceptually, it is there and conceptually it is amazing, but somehow the module itself is suffering. This is one of the issues with stability. The reporting module from HPE is not a very stable module, which is OBR to be very specific.

I'm going to have a round of meetings with the product development and the management to talk about that and to have more design plans and roadmap on this.

Not all the modules are very stable, but definitely we know from our practices and operations which ones are stable. Regarding the ones that are not stable, we are constantly having engagements with HPE support, as well as HPE development, to make it more stable. There are a few unstable modules, but most of them are very stable and long running. As our environment is changing, the requirements are changing and we are adapting based on our plans.

Initially, we started with the normal support. We had a lot of hiccups. Then we had a lot of discussion with the product teams, as well as the HPE account managers. Then we went for the FlexCare support, and that actually changed the way support works with us. We were able to receive Level-2 support directly instead of going to the log procedures and wasting time over the initial assessment of the cases. Then we were able to get guys directly involved in our support issues or the cases and incidents, which actually helped us a lot.

For us, the most valuable features are the ability to identify IT issues in your estates and to be able to rectify them hopefully before they cause outages to services.

It keeps our IT systems functioning, which for our company is absolutely essential.

I can’t think of anything that particularly needs to improve. I think their functionality is there now, so I don't think we need more functionality. I think we just need to get that more stable and get it quicker and maybe a bit more intuitive and easy to use. I think the functionality has just gone through the roof from what the previous products would do. So with all of these stands up and looking around, your level of automation in that has gone right up. I don't have a problem with functionality at all. It's almost too much to use all the functionality. They need to go in and start low, get what you need working and then build up.

If you're using the full functionality, it can be a bit naive to think, “I'm going to just deliver this all singing, all dancing gold plated Rolls Royce in the solution; all in one go." For a large organization it's quite a task, so we're starting off with minimal migration and not just put another in. We are migrating from old versions of HP Operations Manager. So we have that path of migrating our legacy systems and our old monitoring policies onto the new.

We were using an older version of Operations Bridge and have migrated to the new version. Originally, when it was first based on Java, it wasn't as stable as the newer version, which we like. So, it's getting better. But we appreciate that it was a completely new product with a total rewrite and re-architecture. So you expect that sort of thing, and you expect a few patches and stabilization issues. Nothing that we didn't expect, but on the whole good.

We're reasonably large, so we started large-scale, and we've stayed large-scale. So we haven't had to scale up and we just came in at the level we needed to come in at.

Technical support has occasionally helped fix problems. They're good.

Operations Bridge was on our road map; HPE Operations Manager and Operations Bridge. It’s the enterprise tool of choice, and that's what we're sticking with. Our guys know it, and we're used to it. We've invested in time and all our monitoring is around Ops Bridge. It's a big jump to migrate to Operations Bridge from Operations Manager, let alone migrate to a different product.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. The documentation is good, so we didn't have a problem with that. There are lots of different ways you can set it up and lots of different architectures. So choosing the one that was right for us was challenging. The documentation was valuable in that it enabled us to choose what we needed to choose.

I would advise them to look at their infrastructure and think very carefully about what they need. Only buy what they need, and start small and build up. I've seen so many projects and programs fail because they tried to deliver too much too quickly. And even with the might of HPE and HPE's contractors and the whole of HPE, we still have problems with a huge implementation of trying to bite off too much too soon. So I would advise to find out what you need, try and build on it. Get that foundation and level of understanding and eye out the problems as you go. Rather than trying to put everything in all at once and then have a stack of problems.

I don't know about anybody else, but for me, as a technical consultant I want to make sure that the products enter my strength, that it scales up properly. It's all well and good having a part, and then when you try and scale it up it all falls to bits. The support structures need to be there, and when there's a fault the labs get on it and the patches are written and issued quickly. All those sort of boring, technical reasons for me. I'm the one that deals with the errors and issues. So for me, it's less about the finances, if somebody else pays for it.

Operations Bridge is a solution that will bring together a lot of various operation data sources from the network server's applications and help the customer to focus in one area, one place, so they can escalate and route the issue to the proper resource for particular incidents. I've applied that type of software for various customers.

It optimizes their operations efficiency, and makes people more focused on the issue at hand instead of trying to figure out what's going on. It gives them an up-to-date status. If there's an issue in the IT system - whether it's a server, network, application, or resource issue – the product emphasizes it and gives you tools to troubleshoot and resolve it.

I think they are moving toward the whole platform format. They need to move away from Java, Flash, and plug-ins to streamline the integration with third-party products. This will make it easier for customers to use and deploy; using wizards and those type of things. I believe these are in the lifecycle and will be in v12.

It's been a pretty stable product. In its earlier years, it had typical lifecycle and maturity issues, but now it's at version 10 or 11 and seems to be running fairly well.

It's been very scalable; as a platform, it handles various data sources, both from HP products and third-party products.

The support team has had its struggles; it is getting better. I think the split of HP into two companies has helped, but that on-going process has created some issues. However, they seem to be working through it and getting better. I think it could be improved with regard to response time, and getting the proper resources.

I'm a senior consultant, so I've extensive experience with the products, so my issues probably should be escalated to a higher-level person from first-level support, rather than have them going through the routine scripts, because I've already done that. No reason to repeat it.

For various customers, I deployed it and helped them run it. It has its complexities because IT has its complexities. When you're monitoring IT, you're going to inherit those complexities, but HPE did make pretty good strides to pull in the data sources and make out-of-the-box integrations, both for their products and for third-party products. Making it the most seamless product possible.

We do work with other solutions. I would say HP is probably one of our largest partners but we do work with other software vendors. We do some integrations with IBM's NetCool, and with legacy products. HPE make their products modular, even at the data cluster level. We can integrate into another Ops Bridge, but we have also done some other conversions of customers’ ideas and IBM's, and converted them over to HP's products. Sometimes it's a toss-up. Sometimes it is politics in the customer's technology.

You have to have an IT operations background, be familiar with the processes of IT operations, have that type of mind-set. A lot of technologies are based on previous HPE technologies, so some history with HP's legacy products helps. Even though this is a new product, that's always helpful.

I think it's ability to bring in obviously the HP products into one place, gives you a meaningful lens, meaningful correlations, and the ability to process and to take on third-party data, event streams, and metrics. Bringing it all together and it being not as complex as building your own integrations from scratch - they give you a nice, good jump start to bring the third-party data in - is where I give it strengths.

I recommend it and obviously I do make a living deploying it, but I also like to see whether it has value at a customer's site. Can I solve some of their problems, some of their use cases? Because even if they deploy it initially, if they can't use it and get value out of it, it won't last very long. You have to make it fit in their environment and solve some of their use cases and scenarios, and then they'll continue to use it and grow with it.