OpenText Operations Bridge Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are using this solution for incident management, and event automation.

In Micro Focus OBM, everything was controlled at the node level and now everything can be controlled at the console level. 

It's a very good product overall.

The pricing could be improved.

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

We are using the latest version.

It's very stable.

It's a scalable solution. 

We have approximately 45,000 users in our organization. 

We are only working with two products, one is Micro Focus Operations Manager, and the other is Orchestration, that we are trying.

It's very easy to install.

We have a team of 15 members to deploy, maintain, and support this solution.

The cost is very high.

We plan to continue using this solution. We are already working on a new project using Micro Focus and I recommend it for other users.

I would rate Micro Focus Operations Manager a nine out of ten.