While working with OpenText, I noticed sometimes teams refuse intervention due to compliance issues. Overcoming control restrictions for different applications could be improved.
In terms of improvement, OpenText SiteScop could become a better solution by adding more monitoring templates, like RedScope, to make it easier to track specific technologies. It should also improve its integrations with various tools, especially service management tools, for smoother interactions and data sharing in wider deployment situations.
Unit Manager | Management Systems and Automation at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
2023-07-31T08:56:23Z
Jul 31, 2023
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.
In terms of improvement, each customer will have a different requirement. So, our company has to configure and customize the solution, including customizing pre-defined templates to meet the customer's requirements. The graphs and dashboard in the solution are areas that need improvement. In short, integration is a bit complex when installing the solution, and dashboarding has some limitations, so it could be fixed in the future.
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.
We have four or five data centers around North America where we have it deployed into a single or a two-server primary backup type of deployment. All those are made available under a single GUI provided by Micro Focus that allows you to put them all together. A room for improvement would be an appliance or a server that would manage all of our other servers so that I don't have to remember to log on to all different servers and data centers. I could manage them from a single location. We've had it for quite a while, and I've never done an upgrade on it, but from what I understand, the upgrades are not as straightforward as you would think. I know that we've run into some issues related to porting the database through different versions. So, it's a slow slog. The process has been longer than expected. I don't like its licensing because you have to license it by individual licenses.
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.
Head -Consulting and Delivery at Avekshaa Technologies
Real User
Top 20
2021-05-18T13:11:21Z
May 18, 2021
The setup should be simplified. It would be helpful to have documentation on how to use this tool correctly from the beginning. I would be very interested in having transaction traceability included in the product, to give us a better view of what is really going wrong in a particular method and action. This would essentially mean that the tool comes packaged with complete EPM capabilities. You would not have to purchase any other product such as Dynatrace, App Dynamics, or New Relic. If some of those capabilities could be integrated into SiteScope, it would have a very compelling value proposition.
Managed Services Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2020-04-02T07:00:11Z
Apr 2, 2020
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.
We are evaluating AppDynamics as a potential solution. We want to understand how that compares to and may be better than SiteScope. So I don't know exactly at this time what can be improved, but that is why we are evaluating AppDynamics. We are taking the opportunity to compare the features in both of these products to see if SiteScope measures up to other products in the category. At this point in the comparison, I think what I would say AppDynamics does provide one capability that I think SiteScope does not. This is the ability to track a business transaction from the client through all the layers spanning the architecture. So there is more continuity in tracking from the user to the webserver to the database. This might be something that they could consider adding to SiteScope. So what I would like to see included most in the next release of SiteScope is the ability to do better transaction tracking. The other thing I would like to see is SiteScope should provide capabilities to display some graphs of information summaries. For example, say if I want to look at the resource utilization of a system or part of a system over a period of time, it would be nice to be able to get a quick preview of that provided in a graph to get a quick idea without a lot of other evaluation.
Service Assurance, Senior Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
2019-09-22T06:41:00Z
Sep 22, 2019
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.
It was a great tool for a long time. My go-to tool for everything. However, something happened at HPE years ago and investment in the development of the tool seems to have tanked. They have not kept up with browser security requirements or advances in GUIs, they switched to a corruptible database architecture instead of text config files, and the licensing is way more expensive than other tools that do the same thing (like LogicMonitor). Monitors have bugs that sit unfixed for multiple versions (file age and SOAP/XML Web Service monitors). The GUI is cumbersome, and it requires a Java client!
OpenText SiteScope is an agentless monitoring program that tracks the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures such as servers, network devices and services, applications and application components, virtualization software, operating systems, and other IT enterprise components.
OpenText SiteScope is an autonomous hybrid IT monitoring system that can monitor more than 100 different types of IT components in real time, thanks to a lightweight and highly customizable...
While working with OpenText, I noticed sometimes teams refuse intervention due to compliance issues. Overcoming control restrictions for different applications could be improved.
In terms of improvement, OpenText SiteScop could become a better solution by adding more monitoring templates, like RedScope, to make it easier to track specific technologies. It should also improve its integrations with various tools, especially service management tools, for smoother interactions and data sharing in wider deployment situations.
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.
In terms of improvement, each customer will have a different requirement. So, our company has to configure and customize the solution, including customizing pre-defined templates to meet the customer's requirements. The graphs and dashboard in the solution are areas that need improvement. In short, integration is a bit complex when installing the solution, and dashboarding has some limitations, so it could be fixed in the future.
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.
We have four or five data centers around North America where we have it deployed into a single or a two-server primary backup type of deployment. All those are made available under a single GUI provided by Micro Focus that allows you to put them all together. A room for improvement would be an appliance or a server that would manage all of our other servers so that I don't have to remember to log on to all different servers and data centers. I could manage them from a single location. We've had it for quite a while, and I've never done an upgrade on it, but from what I understand, the upgrades are not as straightforward as you would think. I know that we've run into some issues related to porting the database through different versions. So, it's a slow slog. The process has been longer than expected. I don't like its licensing because you have to license it by individual licenses.
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.
Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope could improve by adding more features, such as cloud, APM, and DevOps monitoring.
The setup should be simplified. It would be helpful to have documentation on how to use this tool correctly from the beginning. I would be very interested in having transaction traceability included in the product, to give us a better view of what is really going wrong in a particular method and action. This would essentially mean that the tool comes packaged with complete EPM capabilities. You would not have to purchase any other product such as Dynatrace, App Dynamics, or New Relic. If some of those capabilities could be integrated into SiteScope, it would have a very compelling value proposition.
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.
We are evaluating AppDynamics as a potential solution. We want to understand how that compares to and may be better than SiteScope. So I don't know exactly at this time what can be improved, but that is why we are evaluating AppDynamics. We are taking the opportunity to compare the features in both of these products to see if SiteScope measures up to other products in the category. At this point in the comparison, I think what I would say AppDynamics does provide one capability that I think SiteScope does not. This is the ability to track a business transaction from the client through all the layers spanning the architecture. So there is more continuity in tracking from the user to the webserver to the database. This might be something that they could consider adding to SiteScope. So what I would like to see included most in the next release of SiteScope is the ability to do better transaction tracking. The other thing I would like to see is SiteScope should provide capabilities to display some graphs of information summaries. For example, say if I want to look at the resource utilization of a system or part of a system over a period of time, it would be nice to be able to get a quick preview of that provided in a graph to get a quick idea without a lot of other evaluation.
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.
It was a great tool for a long time. My go-to tool for everything. However, something happened at HPE years ago and investment in the development of the tool seems to have tanked. They have not kept up with browser security requirements or advances in GUIs, they switched to a corruptible database architecture instead of text config files, and the licensing is way more expensive than other tools that do the same thing (like LogicMonitor). Monitors have bugs that sit unfixed for multiple versions (file age and SOAP/XML Web Service monitors). The GUI is cumbersome, and it requires a Java client!