OpenText SiteScope Reviews

We use the solution for agentless monitoring of network and systems infrastructure including Linux and Windows, multiple versions, and multiple "flavors".

The primary use case is for meeting the needs of basic level monitoring of multiple devices across a single-site network. 

When accompanied by APM tools from the Micro Focus stable, Sitescope provides a useful "bottom-up" (technology --> Application) view of performance and availability. Other APM tools provide a "top-down" (i.e. a user-centric view) of performance and availability. 

Sitescope is a very useful solution for agentless monitoring. I must emphasize 'agentless' as this is its biggest advantage as well as disadvantage. Sitescope makes it easy to monitor key aspects of performance, availability, and capacity by collecting metrics.

The aim of Sitescope is to help reduce downtime and provide information to help maintain performance. It does this reasonably well.

Sitescope though is better thought of as a component within a wider Micro Focus-based ITOM/AIOPS solution rather than as a solution in itself.

VM monitoring is pretty good showing good visualizations of how VMs are operating within the context of all the VMs running on the same hypervisor.

The ease of configuration is an advantage as Sitescope simply requires entering a host's credentials and a connection protocol (e.g. SSH, FTP, script, WMI, etc) in order to begin collecting and graphing raw data.

Alerting is basic but functional as a standalone product but provides an additional dimension when used alongside Operations Bridge (which is expensive).

Most modern-day solutions in this area include both agentless and agent-based monitoring in the same package. The lack of an agent makes for a simple installation and relatively simple configuration, however, in these days of highly-distributed computing resources Sitescope is missing a number of critical features.

1. The lack of an agent means that remote monitoring requires multiple firewall ports to be opened. This is often a problem when connecting multiple sites. It also makes cloud implementations less attractive too.

2. As data must be "pulled" from the system being monitored, there is a reliance on a performant network and a well-specified Sitescope server.

Sitescope scores well for basic simplicity and it integrates well into other products within the Micro Focus software family - e.g. Operations Bridge.

I've used the solution for five to ten years.

If you already have other Micro Focus products, especially the testing tools, then you may already have licenses for Sitescope. Licensing is (typically for Micro Focus) very complex, so speak to your account manager to check.

The setup cost is minimal if you already have the hardware and that's reflected in the functionality.

There are some great pre-packaged monitoring templates known as "solution templates". These are excellent kickstart ways to accelerate implementation - however, be aware that some of them are licensed separately.

If you're considering Sitescope as your sole or primary monitoring tool, I suggest you take a look around - there are better options for you.

Sitescope has been around for many years - since 1996 in fact. Over the years, it has become a highly stable solution. Now though, as Micro Focus now owns HPE Software (who in turn bought Mercury Interactive from where Sitescope came), Sitescope is but a small cog in a very large AIOPS engine.

The solution is primarily used for monitoring the servers, log files, and network devices.

It's a very good tool. It's user-friendly and it's very good at monitoring the infrastructure and the applications. It's very reliable in our environment and is helping the customers a lot in their monitoring of the application and the infrastructure.

The URL monitoring is excellent.

The product needs to offer better configuration with an SMS deploy. Right now, it's not configurable. There is no configuration for that.

They need to offer better technical support, which, right now, is not helpful or responsive.

I’ve been using the solution for five years.

The solution is very stable and reliable. The performance is good. there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn’t crash or freeze.

The product can scale. It’s easy to expand if you need it to.

Technical support isn’t really that good. They are not technically capable. They are not helpful and they do not respond fast enough.

I don't know about the financial details surrounding the solution.

We’re partners and I am a consultant.

We’re using the latest version of the solution. We have around 200 people using the solution.

I’d recommend the solution to others. It's good, it's handy, it's easy to use, easy to configure, and the UI is great.

I’d rate the solution an eight out of ten.

SiteScope is deployed on our network perimeter, and gives our operations teams an end user perspective of service availability. In the past, we'd get caught up in the old silo arguments. - the server looks fine, must be the network - the network looks fine, must be the applications etc. now with SiteScope, we can show the ops teams that there is a problem from the client perspective, and SiteScope can help determine root cause.

We use this product for monitoring client user experience. It's easy to template standard monitoring configurations, and automate monitoring configuration. (NOTE: there is some missing functionality in API's). SiteScope has a lot of common API's out of the box, and this saves coding and maintaining these interfaces.

Full application functionality available via the API. There are some functions you can perform managing monitors, that are only available through the UI.

Version 11.2X: Within the SiS GUI, you can individually add remote servers, and then configure multiple monitors to use this remote server. Via the API, this is not possible. You must use a template to create both the remote server and monitor. If you need to configure another monitor to use the same remote server, it became problematic. The API also has no ability to configure the stored credentials, and so on and so on. Basically, full automation of the SiS config is not possible, even using HP tools like HP Operations Orchestration, as the application, as I said, does not allow full configuration of monitor components via the API.

There are now subsequent versions released, and I have looked at the API updates included in these.

We have some ongoing stability issues, specifically with SiteScope monitoring Windows servers via SSH, connecting to OpenSSH. There appears to be a compatibility issue with the SSH client deployed with SiteScope, that causes SiteScope to leave a stable connection open, and eventually SiteScope runs out of resources.

I only deal with HP support, so cannot compare to other vendors. I will say, over the past 12 - 18 months, I'm assuming due to HP's multiple splits and cost cutting, and their attempts to be a somewhat agile software provider, the overall quality of code and documentation has fallen.

The initial deployment was easy and quick. Ongoing management and hardening can present some challenges, but no show stoppers.

If you read the manual it is quite straightforward and enables you to get a quick ROI. Full hardening and automation can present some challenges, but none insurmountable.

Depending on your requirements, there are two licensing models available. A simple point model, or an endpoint model. Points are consumed simply by number of monitors deployed, so if you are wanting to do end user or application monitoring, you want this one. Endpoint licensing is best suited if you don't have a monitoring solution, and want SiteScope to be your agentless monitor. This way, you can deploy any number of monitors at the one server (e.g. CPU, memory, disc, event log) and if they all share the one remote connections, that's one license. As opposed to the point license, where each check (CPU, memory, disc) is a point.

As far as agentless monitoring goes, we did paper based reviews of other products, but never PoCs. SiteScope was chosen as we required a supported solution, and obtained entitlements and discounts due to our relationship with HP.

Most answer are found in the manual except for licensing, which you'll need to contact HP for. There is also the SiteScope Community edition I believe, which allows you to use the product for free to test it, but, from memory, limits you to 100 monitors I think.

Quicker time to meet the requirements of our customer. Because it's agentless as opposed to install and manage agents, we're just focused on what monitors we need and getting those deployed.

It's lightweight, and its ability to address numerous gaps in our other monitoring tools. It's a very flexible product so you can run a script out of it, even straight out of the box. Unlike other tools, you can write a script, run it, and integrate it. It's another monitoring tool and also gives the customers, on demand, the ability to pull or have the monitors go out and interrogate the system and validate the health of the system on demand.

More out of the box Cloud integration and capabilities. Currently there's one for Amazon. There's numerous other platforms like, MS Office 365, Exchange or IBM. I haven't seen one for HPE. Those capabilities are solutions to where they're just ready to go.

We have had no issues with the stability.

I have not personally used it so I can't speak to it. My own experiences with most of them is that they're OK. They're probably above or below average.

We went away from SiteScope many years ago and came back because of its simplicity. In the interim we switched to some of the IBM product lines. SiteScope is very intuitive and we've been able to accomplish what we want very quickly and efficiently compared to IBM.

From my perspective right now, it seems fairly simple or straightforward. Most of it we had up and running in a couple hours. We spent more time trying to fulfill our own requirements. The only gap or complexity we've added is around provisioning of monitors because we're driving it from an automated service catalog.

Don't over think it, it's a simple tool.

We are using the solution for many things.

There's no agent you need installed on the servers. In our environment, we have some servers out of our control so we cannot manage them. We use SiteScope to monitor the availability, the resources on the servers, etc. This allows us to do this job without installing agents so there's no need to take care of anything on the server.

The interface is good. It's great for our technical team.

Sometimes in a huge environment, I think the documentation does not provide the required calculations so you can't know what the required set up should be. You need to test. We have some cases where we need to monitor the vCenters and the whole ESXi, available under this, and VMs. It may impact the server if you don't have the required experience.

The solution is normally stable, but in some environments, it's a bit more complex. For example, in our environment, we have more than 80 services published to the customers. Every day we have new items and new technologies. We have tests to retest, so sometimes when they move to new release, SiteScope itself will not work on it. You need to go to another release or wait for the R&D to provide you with a fix.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is good, but not perfect.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's really simple.

I would recommend the product. I would suggest that those considering implementation of the solution need to study their environment first. You need to know what you're going to do before installing SiteScope. Everything needs to be prepared. Communication metrics should be ready. If your communication metrics are not ready, then SiteScope will not work with you. Once you do, however, it will be a piece of cake. Just install it and install the mutation.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

We use the tool for database queries of specific thresholds. 

The product's readymade templates are perfect. It supports us a lot when we don't have much experience with the product. The templates offers us direction to proceed. 

The tool needs to support new technologies like Kubernetes. It also needs to improve scalability. 

I have been working with the tool for 16 years. 

The solution is scalable. We have 50 users for the product. 

The support team supports us on basic issues. 

Neutral

The solution is easy to deploy. The tool's installation takes one hour to complete. You need just to configure it and then its plug and play. 

The product's pricing should be lower since there are many open-source products that can do the same job with better user interfaces. The tool's pricing is yearly and you need to pay for support. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

Our company manages four different city hospital environments and all of them have SiteScope but each uses a different version depending on how long ago the product was implemented. We're a government organization. 

We use and manage SiteScope monitoring tools in our different projects. Each project has different kinds and numbers of users. For example, one has 2,300 users, but normally we use SiteScope for the servers. Physical and virtual. SiteScope monitors 200 virtual servers in one of our projects. I'm a managed services manager and we're a customer of SiteScope.

I can say for the system environment, SiteScope can be useful.It is easy to monitor using WMI protocol to get CPU,Ram and disk status. Also, you can monitor URL. Managing site scope is not as difficult as its reveal. 

The tool dashboards are not good and don't meet our customers' needs. Because of this we generally use open source tools like Grafana and we also use Nagios for monitoring as a free tool. We're able to gather gather information from SiteScope or the other network tools like NMI to create a dashboard in Grafana.

When we use the OMI tool as an umbrella, and SiteScope attempts to allow that, the problem is that a technician can only do one alert from OMI. The integration doesn't work properly. We need to see it in both tools and we're unable to do that. Finally, SiteScope isn't productive if you want to monitor RAM or if you want to monitor some URL.

For additional features, I return to the dashboards. Normally Micro Focus has an integration tool, OPR, for the dashboards. It's not useful and it also needs a high source, at least 24 CPU, and at least 96 gigabyte of RAM. I doubt Micro Focus will develop SiteScope dashboards and other tool dashboards because they'll say they have another tool for it, but it's not a useful tool.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

We've just had one serious integration problem between two tools, OMI and SiteScope. Other than that, it's been a very stable solution. 

We've only carried out minimal scaling over the last two years. We started with 180 servers and are now up to 200. It's not much so it's difficult to judge scalability.

Maybe we were unlucky, but I don't like Micro Focus support very much. Sometimes they are good, sometimes they are bad. It depends on the products and depends on the problem. 

Initial setup is reasonably simple. We've installed four times for the four different projects. It takes a short time to install one tool without any configuration. The configuration takes about a day. 

We do the implementaton ourselves and then our customers deal with maintenance which is done on site. 

People should know that if they only use SiteScope, it won't be enough. They will need to get support from other tools. For example, without HM tools, without network manager tools, it will not work. They won't get the old alerts from their environment and they will be unhappy. SiteScope alone is not enough.

I would rate this product a seven out of 10. 

The main use case is basic infrastructure monitoring.

The most valuable feature of OpenText SiteScope is that it is easy to manage and user-friendly.

You can use OpenText SiteScope for small or middle environments. But if you want to monitor a large environment, it is not scalable. If you can monitor a large environment with OpenText SiteScope, it can be a valuable product.

I have been using OpenText SiteScope for the last 15 years as a customer.

As for the stability, it is not good, not bad, something in the middle.

Our company has 15 people in the monitoring teams using OpenText SiteScope. 

The technical support team is not bad, but they are not very good with the first level of support. If we go to the second or third level grade, they are good.

We decided to use the product because they have many local partners and a very big sales team in Turkey. So, if there is a special need or requirement, they can help us easily. Additionally, we choose it because of the product’s pricing and the quality.

The initial setup is easy.

As a technical person, I have to ask you some technical questions but for generic people, I can suggest you can use OpenText SiteScope as it is very easy to manage.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.