OpenText Real User Monitoring Reviews

We are a solution provider and the Micro Focus Real User Monitor is one of the products that we implement for our customers. They use it primarily for monitoring users and application performance.

The most valuable feature is application performance monitoring.

The implementation is quite easy.

We would like to see support for non-Windows environments. Right now, we have to use it on a Windows server, but some of our customers don't like this.

I would like to see improvements made in terms of agent-based support. As it is now, we can install an agent on the application server, but it is not recommended for systems that are in production. In our experience, it is a really good option that we can implement for customers that do not want to reconfigure or change their network.

I have been working with the Micro Focus Real User Monitor for approximately 10 years.

This product is quite stable.

This is scalable in some ways but not others. If you want to run multiple RUM Engines then you have to install multiple servers, and they cannot run in a single instance. For example, one RUM server can be used but it has to be standalone, with no backup server or load balancing support.

Our customers are varied in terms of size and industry. Many of them are very large enterprises, with more than 10,000 employees.

The Micro Focus technical support is quite good. They also have a critical response team, which can provide an immediate response if needed. I have had the opportunity to work with them on some complex cases and they are very powerful, useful, and friendly with the customer. It saves a lot of time.

The initial setup is quite simple. I find it quite friendly for both installation and configuration. Our customers also find it easy to understand.

The length of time required for deployment depends on how many modules the customer wants to monitor, as well as how many the RUM server can discover.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this product is to read the manual carefully and work with support during the implementation phase. This will help to avoid issues in the future.

Overall, this is a good solution. One final complaint I have is that the roadmap from the vendor is not clear, which makes it less attractive to some customers.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The Real User Monitor, with its transaction and synthetic transaction monitoring, is the typical classic in APM cases when the customer would like to do transaction monitoring. Micro Focus scores better where the underlying infrastructure management is also covered by Micro Focus tools.

Otherwise, there are many other products that score well on a standalone basis. Micro Focus has kind of lost their place in the APM market place, which they used to enjoy with their market reacquisition product.

If we're talking about an end-to-end solution, it has to come from one vendor, which provides the underlying infrastructure as well. In that case, Micro Focus or BMC would score better than one-point solutions, like AppDynamics, New Relic, or Dynatrace, because they are pure APM solutions.

When it comes to end-to-end apps management, integrated solutions score better. Otherwise, you would need a lot of integration done along with the underlying infrastructure to get the end-to-end view. Besides the transaction side, you will also need to set up the underlying infrastructure, database, and the whole holistic view, if you would like to have that.

One area to improve is the user interface, of course. The second one is their R&D has virtually stopped building a product roadmap. They need to really do a catch-up game with many of their incoming competitors. They actually need to completely revisit their product development strategy and overall product approach, if they wish to remain relevant in the APM market.

If there are any issues they have been resolved, either by test fix, bug fix, or patches. We found this to be a stable product.

We haven't had any challenges with scalability. The fact is, scalability also leads to a linear requirement on the infrastructure needed to deploy the solution. That effectively means that if you have more applications, more transactions need to be managed, you need to use a lot of provisioning on your infrastructure that hosts an APM solution of that size. This will turn out, eventually, to be a costly affair.

I am not satisfied in their technical support, of late.

The initial setup has two components. One is building the infrastructure to monitor and the other is building the configuration for monitoring. The first part is straightforward, but we have seen many challenges building the configuration for monitoring.

The product is not working. I'm talking about issues that last a year and a half. The product does face some challenges, in terms of bugs and taking a longer time than expected to fix those bugs.

It all depends upon the size of the deployment, so it could probably take from two months to one year. More importantly, in your test product, the one-time deployment is not good enough because you need to continuously refine and improve it. That needs to be ongoing to get the product to reach a certain level of maturity, in order to get the best benefit out of it.

I would go one step back. I would like them to consider the overall holistic solution they have chosen. If they're choosing the end-to-end infrastructure management solution also from Micro Focus, then they need to identify what APM functionality they are really looking for. They should get the POC done for those functionalities in their own environment for the Micro Focus APM solution. If they are satisfied, they should go for it. Otherwise, they should not. If it is a standalone solution, however, I would not recommend Micro Focus. A standalone APM should be ideally considered.

On a scale of one to ten, Micro Focus APM is not more than five.

We use RUM and BSM and so far it has been really good at getting real user transactions from a real user monitor and then tying it to a BSM single view dashboard, where we get the whole realistic picture.

They're moving to a new solution called AppPulse, which I just selected. So AppPulse will not just only have the real user monitoring and the synthetic monitoring, they also have a new thing called trace. I have used comparable products to the Trace function.

Recently we have been facing some stability issues. The Java dashboard can sometimes be really slow depending on the machine you are using. Sometimes it's difficult to look at the dashboards, but I have heard they are moving away from Java with the future iterations. That's what I heard in the conference, that they are moving to HTML 5 which will be much faster.

It's very scalable.

We have been experiencing issues with the Java based things. So recently I have been working on a couple of the cases with tech support. So far they have been helpful, but they could be better.

We're also using Dynatrace, and there were other solutions in the past that I used which were from CA. They performed a same similar kind of trace work that HPE is coming up with. I'm really hoping HPE's trace is more scalable and more reliable than other products. So I'm really hoping they'll come up with something new compared to the competitors.

It could be better and I'm hoping that is what will happen with future release they are talking about.

Do a POC with your own environment and don't rely on the list of capabilities that a solution gives you doing a demo in your environment.