OpenText Operations Bridge Reviews

It helped us move from a company that looks at its network from a resource perspective to a service perspective.

It helps me on a day-to-day basis. We used to have our services monitored by two isolated islands. One island was from the IT perspective, with servers and operating systems. The other island looked at the service from a resource perspective, with routers, switches, and an aggregation layer.

HPE helped us aggregate, and we now have all these layers in one layer. We're now looking at the service from the core of it, not from a resource perspective or from an IT, servers-based perspective.

I see room for improvement in the licensing scheme area. It's getting more complex day by day. Every day there is a new rule, so it's hard for me to plan every year and determine what I need to buy. I have to find out what I need to merge together because the license scheme changes constantly.

My company is very large. Most of the implementations in our area involve 250 or 300 nodes. We have tens of thousands of nodes serving over 2 million users. We are a large enterprise in the telecom area.

It's pretty stable right now. Every batch increases it more and more.

Scalability is great. We are an example of HPE worldwide. We are one the few sites that has 45,000 devices managed by HPE. Scalability is very huge.

The HPE setup is very straightforward. However, once you go into scalability and grow larger, that requires expertise and needs some hard work.

Through a partner

I looked at IBM, CA, and BMC. I chose HPE because it gave me all that I needed in one suite. With others, I have to integrate multiple solutions and vendors to get what I need. With HPE, I have one vendor and one source where I can get almost 96% of what I need.

What's most valuable for us is the ability to see all events that occur on our network.

It gives us the ability to monitor the entire infrastructure proactively and reactively. We can build incident event management and problem management processes in case of a problem so that an event is registered. We can then change the event to an incident and resolve it in the least amount of time as possible. If we can't resolve it, it enters our problem process where we can determine the source, possible fixes, and prevent the same problem from occurring in the future.

There are a couple of areas of improvement:

• Performance needs to increase; and
• Better correlation from the box rules.

We've used it for four years.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

Stability is pretty OK. We previously had issues with a large amount of correlation rules, but OM has mostly eliminated these problems. We've thrown 1000 different correlation rules at it and it's working just fine.

Scalability is not relevant because it's a standard solution that's built for a particular purpose, which it accomplishes.

3-4/5

We performed the initial setup, which I'd rate as 3/5.

We did evaluate other options, but the suite of HP solutions -- Operations Manager, SiteMinder, Essentials, Service Manager -- is better than anything else out there.

Plan and then integrate. Planning requires a good assessment of your needs. Be prepared also make some in-production investments because you'll likely need to make changes on-the-go as you determine how to correct mistakes.

Organizations using multiple tools for monitoring their infrastructure, namely storage, UPS, etc. rely on multiple consoles to view the events from respective elements to manage consoles. This causes delay in isolating the fault. OMi helps in the consolidation of events on a single dashboard from several sources via the available APIs.

The biggest strength of the Operations Bridge is the consolidation of events from various sources. For one customer, we were able to consolidate events from more than 25 sources, most via Traps using a BSM Connector. Once the Head of IT Operations saw the value, then the expectation was that all the other siloed departments would work together to send the events to a central console.

Event consolidation

Cross domain event correlation

Run Time Service Model (RTSM)

Flexible dashboard with the availability of widgets

Agent and agentless monitoring

The most important feature is availability of the software on Docker, hence reducing implementation & upgrade timeline

Remove the dependency of Java technology. This is a feature used for admin purposes to update the modeling.

For high stability, I would recommend a HA setup with the recommended configurations.

Single server setup should only be considered for small environment.

Micro Focus Operation Bridge is highly scalable. It can support multiple server architecture for HA, DC-DR setup, and is also available as a container for the Docker, which can be ported on private or public cloud.

The customer service response is good.

I have helped organizations to switch from other tools to OMi. The main reason was event consolidation and seamless integration with the Service Manager for incident management and SLA reporting.

The setup is straightforward. Depending of the architecture/integration, it can take from one to 10 days.

Highly recommend to go for CDF (Containerized Deployment Foundation)

I have implemented this product with the help of a team.

ROI will depend on the modules available.

E.g., if Orchestration is integrated with events, the fault can be fixed with the given sets of SOPs. This can give up to 90% ROI in a short period of time.

Pricing is very flexible and depends on the modules selected as per the requirement. You can select from the available modules Micro Focus Operation Bridge (SiteScope, Operations Agent, Reporter, Operations Analytic, Cloud Optimizer, Orchestration, CMDB, and several Management Packs for various technologies like Oracle, DB2, Citrix, etc.).

Not applicable.

Implementation of Micro Focus Operations Bridge will need a long-term perspective while solving today's problem. 

The most valuable feature is the integration with other HPE products because it enables us to feed all the information into same area; whereas before it was in different sites.

It is very adaptable and relatively easy to install.

I can't think of any areas for improvement at the moment, but we haven't had it for long enough for me to say. We're still in the process of assessing it. It's been pretty impressive so far.

The stability has been very good so far. We've only had it a short time.

It is very good on scalability.

The technical support is normally very good, but occasionally patchy.

We were coming to the end of life with the hardware and software we were running, which are also HPE products. We've moved into this new area, so it was a combination of the hardware and software.

The initial setup had some challenges; but since it was completed, it has been very stable.

The initial installation document didn't have some of the prerequisites we needed to install the software; but we looked at the installation document again recently and they added all that information. So, in our particular case, it was good.

We're with HPE anyway, but the other vendors would have been Microsoft or IBM. But, really, it's generally going to be HPE because we're already using them.

I would recommend this product to colleagues given our current assessment, but we haven’t fully utilized it yet.

The most important criteria to us when we choose a vendor are stability and support.

It's very scalable and it does seem capable of accepting the volume. You can just keep expanding it as your organization grows.

It integrates with a lot of other products. You can integrate it with ticketing systems and all sorts of software. There are links to software that allows it to be monitored. It's a monitoring system, so it makes sure that everything is up and running. You can have dashboards and just make sure everything is up, working, and functioning correctly.

There is a new release which is much more GUI based. We haven't moved to the new product, which is OMi. So that probably does more of what I want, and has more to do with event management and is event based.

We're using Operations Manager (OM). I want to see better event planning. I would like event correlations. This is the thing I've always been interested in, but with the existing tool, it's been very, very difficult to do. I think this has been addressed in OMi, but I've yet to see that. When I really move to it, then I might increase my rating to closer to a nine. The event correlation is not there and it is a complex tool.

Even though it claims to do event correlation, in reality, you could just write a program from scratch to do this. That is fine, but it's not part of the product. For the new one, I believe it's supposed to do that. OMi is supposed to be much better for event correlation. So I'm looking forward to getting down to really using that.

This has been in our company for 20 years.

It's very stable. There are always some issues, but they tend to occur when changing the product. When it's up and running, it tends to stay that way. It's a very stable product and its origins are about 20 years old. It’s been around for a long time and it has a good basis.

It's capable of being expanded to extreme levels.

I use it. We've got dedicated technical support and that's very good. Because the product was not so well known year ago, it used to be a lot more difficult. We would get put through to people who didn't understand the problems at all and it took quite a long time before you could speak to somebody who did understand. Now we've got dedicated people and it's much easier. Everything happens really fast now.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've been involved in migration to a later product. The migration was very complex. It is a very complex product. It probably took me a year before I really felt I understood the product at all. It wasn't something that you can learn in two or three weeks.

It's just a vast complex product and it has also evolved. That's the downside of the product evolving, because there's lots of things that come from its origins and there are some things which have been added, and you can tell the difference. You can tell that it's not brand new because it keeps changing names. It used to be called OpenView and all those commands are OV this and OV that, so I it wasn't updated on that part of it.

Because they've been here for 20 years, it's very difficult to move away. At one time, I was trying to influence a change, but it proved to be impossible. Now that I've got more used to the Operations Manager, I'm happier with it. We'll see whether or not the next generation is really good, or as good as it says on the box.

No one would actually use Operations Manager now, so go straight to OMi. I also recommend to study, study, and study to learn the product.

First case of installation of the tool with the business branch of a French telecom provider.
We installed the tool with SiteScope, Network Node Manager and Network automation.
I don't remember the exact environment but we had more than 2000 network nodes and a number of servers.

Installation of a preprod and prod environment. Not much customization. Some rules for enriching and installing the different connectors. Some business view was created too

Great experience but I moved to network automation for a new project.

the implementation of Operation Manager made it possible to centralize the events of several supervision tools such as sitescope, Network node manager or Nagios.

This is one of the big advantages of the product, the connectors developed by microfocus.

All the enrichment part allowed to reduce the processing time of support tickets. All the information was already present in the alarm.

We could have gone further with the connectors to the ticketing tools.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

the most important aspects in Operation Managers are:

* The total environment provided by microfocus. All the tools can be implemented together with a certain ease.

*A lot of documentation provided by Microfocus and a fairly large community. The forum is provided in response from members.

* Enrichment is also a strong point but also found among competitors

level 1 technical support is incompetent. I'm almost afraid to open tickets because I know I'll be asked the same thing 8 times.

The price is very expensive for a tool that doesn't evolve very quickly compared to competitors.

I've been working with the solution for five years.

We haven't faced any stability issues. There hasn't been any crashes or glitches.

We haven't faced any issues with scaling the solution.

lot of bug with queue

We've been in contact with technical support, and we find it to be unreliable. They always ask the same questions and they don't fix the problems. We're very unhappy with the level of support they provide.

We're currently looking at switching to Canopsis, which is an open-source product. It has all the modules we need and it's absolutely free. It's very similar to Operations Bridge, for the most part.

I didn't participate in the original setup, so I'm unsure as to if it was straightforward or not.

The solution itself is quite expensive. We did have to pay extra for technical support when we purchased the solution, however. It was included in the price.

We don't have a relationship with the solution; we're just a customer.

It's a good solution overall. On the market, there aren't many other solutions, other than maybe BMC or a few more. It's expensive, but it's very good.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the event correlation and how we handle the events. There are a lot of possibilities and it's a new experience for us. I used to work with IBM. It's another way of working and thinking and it's a revelation for us.

It helps us the most with correlations of events and events handling; how we do that in SM9, it is a new way of working for us. I'm very pleased with it.

There are a lot of locked files and I don't know always to search for the good locked file that can show us more information. There are a lot of locked files, about a thousand. You cannot always find the correct information to solve an issue.

We have worked now almost two years with OpsBridge and it is a very stable system. We hardly experience difficulties or down times. It is the most stable system I ever used.

We have almost 50,000 employees. I know that a lot of customers work with OpsBridge. They find it easy to use, and how we implement it makes it very nice for the customers. I know that the customers are satisfied.

We have a deal with HPE and we have all the tools of HPE. I think they make good tools. There is always room for improvement, but basically they always have good tools.

I have only compared HPE products that I work with and I have my experience with HPE. I have not evaluated other solutions.

The most valuable features are that the main console, which our customers really like, the sexy UI, its complete passivity, and ability to work with non-HP vendors. But the main advantage is the reporting capability.

My customers are happy and satisfied with the monitoring capabilities that give them a more precise picture of company performance. The company can can improve and make changes according to the data that monitoring provides them.

It can run a little slow if not configured correctly or if a customer doesn't use it properly.

The product is very flexible and can be adjusted to our needs. It has good scalability as you can use Ops Bridge for 5000 samples and then increase it to 10,000 with no problems.

Israel lacks tech support for this product. I could only get sufficient support from California. I don't think there's a large enough market in Israel.

I am from an integration company and I'm not obligated to any vendor and I recommend HP.