OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

It allows us to manage all of our incidents and requests in a single location where we have multiple applications previously.

It allows us to perform better tracking, especially manpower, and then tracking incidents and things back to particular configuration items.

It could have better user control of the user interface. You have to either sacrifice seeing what you can see or having to scroll a lot, one of the two.

It's been pretty stable.

It hasn't been an issue. We're fairly small, so it doesn't need to scale much.

We've always had good experience with tech support.

There's a lot of features we're not using currently, some of which we're thinking about using. There's just a lot to it, a lot more than we really need in most of our cases right now.

Definitely check in with Packard App. There's a lot of good software applications that they provide. They've got a good integration with their hardware. Overall, HP will just give you a really great solution.

It's pretty well-structured in modules.

It's easier to roll it out within the company and to sustain the processes.

It needs good integration with the configuration database, that's lacking at the moment, It's not that good. 

It's very important to integrate also with other tools. They've shown the four suites that they are going to have in the future, so it's very nice. It's slim, but it needs a very good integration, and it needs a very good analysis and a relationship within the topic, so that you get the information for performance, quality, costs, and so on. 

The integration of all these topics and how they are interlinked, interconnected with each other, it's not that great at the moment.

It's more for tracking and documentation purposes, not that much for operation management purposes. You need to do a lot of customization to use it for operation management purposes.

It's stable.

Not that scalable. The functionalities still need to develop some, so that it's really scalable, and you can use it for operations management. 

It was, I think, a CA solution. SoftDirect, I think; there were several. It was a company decision to switch but I wasn't at the company at the time.

I wasn't at the time, but I think they were further considering the SoftDirect that they had. They had HPE and also another provider. There were three in the running.

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 most valuable features are the ability to track tickets, analyze incidents, and get dashboards on how the environment is performing in terms of incident management. For example, when there's network downtime, you're can track how long it takes to resolve incidents. So you can see how long it took from the time the ticket was created to escalate it if necessary, and how long it took to close it.

There's a lot of accountability now. You can hold somebody accountable for incident resolution. You are able to see when a ticket was created and when a ticket was escalated for resolution. At the end of a period (week or month), you're able to see how the environment is performing in terms of how many incidents have been created, how they've been closed, and how the teams are performing. You get meaningful reports on how teams are doing.

In the release that we currently have, the biggest challenge was reporting. It didn't have the reports that we needed out of the box. In fact, it didn’t have reports at all out of the box. It was a nightmare.

You need to use Crystal Reports to customize your reporting. In the next release, I want Service Manager to have its own reports. Straight out of the box, click a button and you get the report you want. I'm sure that with all the implementations that have been done, there must be some common reports which have been used.

We implemented it in 2014. So far, it's been good.

The product is quite stable. It is quite good.

The scalability is quite good because we've been able to integrate other products like the Business Service Management into it. From a monitoring perspective, we are now able to create tickets as incidents happen, and correlate the ticket with other incidents. So, it's quite stable and scalable. You can do a lot of stuff with it.

We have used technical support through the HPE partner, the guys we use to implement the solution; and, in some cases, through HPE itself.

Previously, we were using Siebel HelpDesk. It was not suitable for our purposes. We needed something that was ITIL based; so HPE Service Manager fit what we wanted. It is easy to use, cost effective, and ITIL based.

The installation was straightforward. Having previously used a service management tool, I’d say that usage was not so bad. Adoption is where the challenge was. Users were used to calling in with incidents, but now they need to raise tickets. That was a challenge, but it's been sorted out.

It's a good product.

I would advise colleagues to get the latest release because I’ve been told the reporting has been sorted out in this new release. I am interested in upgrading to get that. If what I'm told is true, then that's a good product.

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 gives me all the components I need to support my enterprise. It provides me with instant problem change, knowledge, configurations, and, specifically, gives me the functions to perform a good service test.

We've been able to come from a base of 27% to maintaining an average of about 92% every month. We improved our service levels and have been able to maintain them for the last four and a half years.

It needs to be a lot more flexible, a lot more user friendly, and a lot lighter, not so heavy. If it were lighter, it would react a lot quicker and take less of a toll on CPU resources.

We've used it for four-and-a-half years.

It’s a bit of a beast to manage, so I'd give it 3/5.

The stability is magnificent. The availability of the system and its stability is perfect. I have no issues with it whatsoever.

My technical support comes through my technical partner, and I rate them extremely highly. Without them I would be dead in the water.

No, I didn't evaluate other options.

• 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.
  

We are an organization with 45,000 assets. Service Manager gives us a single system where everything is centralized in one base. We can log onto the equipment so we know when the equipment is, for example, freezing in the live environment.

It's web-based so we don't need to buy the spoke. Just log into it and away you go.

The user interface is very clunky. It's only now beginning to be a web-based interface, but for now it's still very clunky.

It deploys without issue.

It's very stable, but that's part of its clunkiness.

It scales for our needs.

We have an HP on-site support contract, which is nice and easy.

Get it. It's a one-stop-shop solution.