OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

The flexibility and the integrity of the product. It allows me to have a rock-solid platform for change, problem, and incident control.

It's been in place for many years, and it's given us a platform that we can rely on for audit and for change. We know it's always going to be there.

The licensing model could be made more flexible. Some of the reporting capabilities could be adapted for some of the modern reporting tools.

Very stable.

It's salable for a price.

I haven't had to use it very often but when I have it's adequate.

I know there are competitors out there that have a little more flexibility and a little more ease of implementation. For what we use it for, it's good.

Look at everything out there. Think about how you're going to grow in the future, because that's going to certainly impact the cost of the product.

• It integrates well with multiple Management Information Bases (MIB's).
• It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition

• It detects abnormal network traffic -- even from a PC network interface card
• It provides us with many types of logs with hundreds of thousands of log entries

It's not user friendly (too complex), and it gives limited guidance documentation of how to filter all the logs detected. We struggle with filtering over 50 types of logs with more than 200,000 lines of log information.

It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition, but I'm unable to find any documentation to provide me the value insight of these logs, hence reducing the power of risk management for my customers' network environments.

We implemented it around 2008.

It takes around 24 hours to detect all the network equipment & VLANs. If any of the network equipment or VLANs are missing from the finished network topology, you need to delete the whole topology, reset the system, and scan again.

We previously used a very old version Solarwind, which could only detect CPU & memory. The main purpose for the upgrade project, was due to a broadcast storm occuring with my previous customer.

It took my HPOV classmate and a team of more than 10 people to implement this product, and it has lasted less than four years due to a lack of research of their requirements. Due to the complexity (depending on your project scope, implementation can take around two months to finalize all the needed settings.

We used some very skilful vendors (two freelancers, and a wiring company). The vendors were HP NNI for the server, and HP PI for the manual setup – (including reporting), then the wiring company

There are three types of licenses, so make sure the license you select fits into your project scope. It took ove two weeks to verify the licenses, but it has lasted with my customer for more than six years.

We implement some modules of this solution for our clients, mostly we did the integrations with the MF PPM. They are a medium-size development that focuses on a particular functionality.

It's flexible in terms of configuration and making changes. It can adapt to any process in the organization. It can be customized.

It's a new version with a fresh interface and incident management. The SMAX is the most recent that I remember and behind that is the smart service, it's a smart search when entering the system, it automatically recognizes an incident, takes a screenshot and opens a ticket. It's nice progress made to the user interface and incident management.

The codeless configuration is more simplified. Most of the customer's requirements can be done without coding, it's simple and very quick.

It has nice charts.

The reporting is not very strong. it can be improved. Customers need to combine different data from different sources to the same report, but it's quite difficult to do. You have to do it with many different versions.

With the new version moving toward the codeless configuration is good, but it's losing flexibility. There should be a larger selection of configuration tools made available to allow some parts of coding to be codeless and others allowing you to make some coding for business rules and workflow. You need some coding ability and functionality. It is difficult to find a customer who doesn't want to make any kind of customizations. It comes with many limits making it very difficult especially with on-premises customers.

I like the support but they could improve.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to reporting and the dashboard. Also, I would like to see the configuration simplified without losing flexibility. The best model that I have seen was with PPM where you can provide some coding with flexibility allowing you to configure to the customer's requirements but having limitations at the same time, but they are meaningful limitations that are easy to negotiate with the customer explaining that it is to prevent it from being a completely customized tool that will be very difficult to maintain, upgrade and update the versions. I would like to see a balance between the two. Flexibility plus simplifying the configuration.

I have been familiar with this solution since 2013. We work with this solution based on the customer's needs. It was periodically job and experiance until 2018.

There are always some amount of known issues in any tool, but I can conclude that the solution is stable, as long as all hardware and software recommendations and requirements are met. There were between one to two hundred employees in operating.

I have contacted the technical support team. We had open tickets with them, especially with the last year.

The technical support is ok, we have dealt with them for many years.

I would rate them a seven out of ten.

It's quite straightforward.

It only took one day to deploy for our testing purposes, but for customers, it can take anywhere from one to three days to ensure that all of the technical requirements are met. 

We implemented it ourselves.

I would recommend this solution. It's a classic with an operating system that can easily adapt and be implemented.

70 to 80% of the time with different cases the customer's requirements can be met.

The customer can start to implement the incident management with just one post. if you feel that you want to add more, you can add the change management, it can be implemented step by step.

There is always a place for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

• ITSM service processes
• The richness of supporting standards, such as ISO 20000.
  

We have inherited a customer base with Micro Focus Service Manager. It gives us better understanding and control of service management.

• Configuration options with very granular control parameters.
• Workflow support and ability to support events.

• Pure cloud-based native functionality is lacking.

• It lacks templates to support out-of-the-box best practices.
  

It's mostly so reliable and has a lot of functionality. We're using a lot of HPE tools and we can do a lot with it. So, its functionality is the most valuable feature.

When I attended the conference, I just saw a presentation about the Containers part and am really looking forward to that, because installing a new version/upgrading is always a pain. I think that this could be a big improvement.

It, still, has a bit of more of improvement possibilities in the codeless part. But, I can see that they are working on it, so that's quite good as well.

I think there are still some improvement possibilities and flexibilities needed, but, overall, it's a good solution as it is right now.

I have been using this solution since 2011.

I started using this solution in 2011, it has improved a lot in the past years.

We have just installed Service Manager 9.41, the new version and I'm really glad about this version; it's really nice and is making me smile.

It has scaled mostly over the past few years, but I think it could be a bit more flexible in terms of how it scales and the upgrading aspect.

Sometimes, it takes a while to find the right person or to get a point over but mostly, the support is okay.

I'm in finance, so it's mostly the reliability part that is important while selecting a vendor. As a company, we are trying to be reliable to the outside world, so we need reliable suppliers that can support this ideology.

I don't use it as a technical person, but just as a regular user. It helps to register things, to see the changing parts, and to correlate incidents. I'm talking about Operations Bridge with automation. We also achieve a lot, such as deploying infrastructure, automating our daily routine tasks, and things like that.

I would like to see more connection to DevOps, but not in terms of deploying the suites, deploying the tool itself. Rather, I'm talking about DevOps and self-service for our customers so they can, as users, do something in our tool without getting too many rights or using the wrong options.

There should be some front desk provided or some options to let our users serve themselves, because we have about 5000 servers and 400 applications. Those applications are developing continuously with DevOps and that means that they release everything, every day. They need extra monitoring, extra automation, or some corrections.

Our service time-to-market is very long. We need to free them and let them do things by themselves in our tools.

Previously, I was an HPE consultant, so I was not only using these tools, but also developing and integrating them. If I start from developing, it has been around 10 years.

Stability is getting better. I’ll put it this way.

It's enterprise level, so it’s scalable. We do have some questions about deploying server automation globally, because we have integration with another part of our organization. It should be possible.

When support is dedicated, it works well.

I know that that at our site, almost every two years we go to events like Gartners to ask for additional advice. Choosing a vendor actually comes down to the ability to integrate and scale and be enterprise level. There are a lot of small tools. They are good at some point features, but when it comes to the global picture, then you need to have quite a lot. For instance, to contain the rights. We are not there yet.

Life cycle management is a drama. For almost every tool we have, it's a project for a couple of months to upgrade something to the next level. It's not next, next, finished. No way.

The fact that it's highly customizable is the most valuable feature for us. We can change it to suit our business needs. It's also really intuitive and easy to use.

It's seamlessly integrated across our business. It's multi-user, but we can tailor it to each individual user as well as make sure that each user group gets exactly what they need. In this way, it brings our business units together.

We have a rather old version, so naturally there have been improvements to the latest versions. The issues we have with web-based access, user-based knowledge access, etc. have already been resolved, I think. I'll know it when we eventually upgrade.

It deploys just fine for us.

We're coming to end-of-life on the product we've got. We're going to replace it soon.

We're not a massive organization. We don't needs hundreds and hundreds of people in Service Manager. So right now, it suits our needs perfectly.

Technical support is excellent. They really bend over backwards for us. We have access to demos and they suggest ways to do things. They're absolutely brilliant.

We're currently looking at the Big 4 vendors: ServiceNow, BMC, IBM, and HP. As we're already an HP customer, HP has a clear advantage.

It is a rich content solution. We use automation services on HPE.

We can use it very quickly. It's a good and complete solution, along with a lot of functionality.

The support and functionality of the portal could be improved. There was an old portal and they stopped it in the last version. Though there is a new portal, it's not really clear. It's a problem.

Stability has been fine.

We are a company of 3000 employees and we have been able to use it effectively in our company.

We had to take premium support. The standard support is not enough. Premium support is good but you have to pay more.

The integration is a little bit complex.

The user experience was great. The whole project was integration between the old version to a new version. It was better for the users and they agreed to upgrade to the new version.

We looked at ServiceNow and BMC. The reason we chose this tool was because we could not be on SaaS due to security issues. We were already using an HPE solution so it was easier for us to stay consistent.

Another reason was that ServiceNow is SaaS based and Service Manager is not.

We also looked at Service Anywhere but we could not go into a SaaS solution.
Maybe in the future, our next step would be to move to Service Anywhere within HPE.