HPE Intelligent Management Center Reviews

I am using this solution for network monitoring, links monitoring, and complete monitoring of my infrastructure. I also deploy FortiVAF, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiManager as part of a complete security solution.

The most valuable function is that the IMC takes an entire backup of my network devices, and I can also redeploy them. The really beneficial feature is the link monitoring. 

I had checked Check Point's product, however, my requirements are better fulfilled by IMC. The main feature is that IMC automatically configures the device for my use. I have over 200 features in my network, and IMC manages the complete environment. Automation is good, but I mainly use it for monitoring. I am too satisfied with this product.

I face the issue with the integration with links on Fortinet Firewall. This will be sorted out with the help of IMC, and now I have a modem dialing as per my needs.

I have been using the solution for six to seven years.

HP IMC is a one hundred percent stable solution. I do not experience any glitches or bugs.

It is understood that I can scale my network. I have already used some other switches like Cisco where they have issues with scalability, however, all features are available in HPE products.

Customer service is satisfactory. Sometimes I require support, and I open a ticket, and the HP engineer helps me on that issue.

Positive

I was using SolarWind. SolarWind is an expensive solution with high licensing and SQL costs, whereas HP is not that expensive. I decided to switch in 2015 when I reconfigured my network, and HP offered IMC as part of the solution.

The installation is simple. One technician is enough to install it. I manage the system myself with minimal support.

I manage the system myself and only reach out to HP engineers when I encounter issues.

It saves me time and costs. It automatically deploys my switches' configuration on the network. I just schedule them, and during that time, it backs up and installs. It saves me approximately 60% of my time.

I had considered Check Point and SolarWinds.

I rate the overall solution nine out of ten.

I use it to oversee the administration of switches within our network infrastructure. The platform allows me to manage users efficiently, perform equipment backups, and generate reports.

It allows me to manage around five hundred switches in my LAN and handle them remarkably straightforwardly.

One of the notable advantages is its ability to provide quick responses, especially in critical situations. Compared to alternatives like SolarWinds or larger fleet solutions, HPE IMC delivers rapid insights. It stands out for its reliability, speed, and user-friendly interface. Navigating and working with the platform is particularly seamless, especially for HP/Aruba equipment users.

Despite its effectiveness in managing numerous switches and network equipment, it lacks diversity in models. It comes across as rather simplistic without additional modules, and while they have introduced some models over time, safety features are notably absent. One notable deficiency is the lack of online support for the product.

I have been working with it for over fifteen years.

It provides high stability capabilities.

While it is possible to achieve scalability, the process is not straightforward and may pose challenges.

The absence of online support is a notable drawback.

I have experience with SolarWinds. It is a comprehensive suite with various models and integrated functionalities for managing servers, network equipment, and databases. It allows for a holistic view of your entire installation. In contrast, HP is primarily designed for managing network equipment or phones and lacks the broader range of functionalities provided by SolarWinds.

The initial setup is not simple. It requires some research beforehand.

The deployment process depends on the complexity of your network. If you're setting up a straightforward network, it might be relatively easy. However, if you require customizations or changes, the process becomes challenging. The basic installation typically takes about an hour and a half, but the real challenge lies in the subsequent steps where you need to manage all your equipment.

While it's a great product for its intended purpose, the value for money may not be justified if you're looking to manage a broader range of devices. It excels in managing switches and network equipment but proves challenging when attempting to install and manage other types of devices. Its strength lies primarily in handling network equipment rather than providing versatility across various devices. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

I use HP-IMC for monitoring switches and bandwidth, deploying new firmware, saving switch configurations and creating network maps.

Dynamic maps with links to auto-discovery allow you to control your Visio maps. You also can plan firmware updates during non-working hours without doing it yourself.

It's a very complete product with a lot of functionality.

You can deploy firmware on a schedule.

It allows you to monitor all of your SNMP equipment. It is not only limited to HPE.

You have many report options that you can customize and there are several templates available.

HPE Intelligent Management Center is a bit slow when you navigate between the different pages. 

It is not a VM performance issue: CPU and memory utilization are not full.

I would like to see full support for third-party devices. We can monitor any third-party devices with SNMP, but we can only deploy firmware on a few. 

I have been using HPE Intelligent Management Center for seven years.

HPE Intelligent Management Center is a stable product. We have not encountered any major issues with it. We have had some bugs but very few.

I have not contacted technical support. The only time I needed support, I was able to find the solution on the HPE forums.

There are some very helpful people on the HPE Forums who know the product very well and I have always been able to find the answers I needed there.

I used Nagios/Centreon, but I didn't manage to do configuration for our firmware management with it.

I would rate HPE Intelligent Management Center a seven out of ten.

We are using this product for end-to-end network monitoring.

This is a module tool and we are only using the base platform. We are not using many additional modules.

The most useful feature is infrastructure monitoring including switches and servers.

We are satisfied with the user interface, and the compatibility with other products.

I would like to see additional modules included.

We have been using the HPE Intelligent Management Center for almost a decade.

This is a stable solution.

It is fairly well scalable, as you only have to buy additional licenses.

I have not recently been in contact with technical support.

We worked with HP OpenView for a while, as well as a very old version of the Cisco Monitoring Tool, but that is absolutely obsolete.

The price of this solution is not at all cheap, but it's reasonable compared to SolarWinds.

I am not sure if this product is still available on the market because I recently looked into HPE Aruba, and visited Aruba Central, and IMC isn't mentioned in their portfolio for monitoring at the moment. For this reason, I am in doubt that it is still supported and have started searching for alternatives.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The main use of this solution is to do patch management, especially for HP products.

The most valuable feature is the interface and its ease of use.

The integration with other network devices needs improvement.

The stability could be improved, as well as the price, which could be reduced.

I would like to see better integration.

I have been using this solution for more than eight years.

It's not a stable solution. It took us some time to get stable.

At this time we have five people who are using this solution.

We will be using this product for some time.

We have not contacted technical support recently.

Previously, we did not use a different solution. This was the first product for managing our switches.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took us three months to deploy.

We did not use a reseller, consultant, or integrator for the deployment. We did it ourselves.

There are licensing costs and they are quite expensive. However, there are no costs in addition to the licensing fees.

If you have HP devices, I would recommend this solution. If you do not have HP, then I would not recommend this product for you.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

It is amongst the most versatile NMSs on the market. It provides better device management for even some of their competitors' devices than their competitors' management software (particularly Cisco).

The ability for IMC to interrogate a network of any size (even thousands of network devices) in almost no time and quickly reveal the most intimate details and relationships is unmatched in the market. Coupled with this is HPE's constant improvement of the product with even minor releases offering significant enhancements.

Using the Application Monitor add-on allows you to go deep into server, platform and even application topologies, allowing this one tool to provide a complete overview of the health state of very broad and complex environments.

This is far and away the best tool of this type I have ever used.

I make a habit of installing IMC as the first step when I start analysing networks for issues and improvements. What I gain from 24 hours of analysis with IMC usually exceeds what I can derive from hundreds of pages of documentation. My end-state for an IMC deployment is that IT becomes the documentation for the environment, including tracking every historical change and issue that occurs from installation onward.

Documentation is pretty weak. HPE have an excellent They have a Youtube channel that provides some excellent guidance but the content is sporadically released (there have only been 2 videos in the last year) and unstructured (it seems to follow whatever the author wants to present rather than some structured curriculum). I think they could invest in building a more consistent training library for this product.

Additionally, it isn’t very intuitive to use. I understand why as they have had to make most elements as generic as possible in order to support as many equipment vendors as they can. This has the unfortunate flow-on effect of often being fairly difficult to configure specific elements; this could be easily improved through better documentation and design examples. These challenges make mastering IMC a fairly steep learning curve.

I have used it for six years.

Deployment in an enterprise environment - where you are using a separate SQL Server rather than SQL Express - can be somewhat counter-intuitive and requires a certain knowledge of SQL to do it right. IMC does not support integrated user accounts or dynamic SQL ports - two features that Microsoft recommends using. Based on my experience, I would suggest a SQL Server dedicated to IMC (virtual is fine).

When managing over 500 devices, you really need a bare-metal install rather than virtualized, or you can get terrible performance. This is documented but in a fairly vague location. Once moved to bare metal, even 5000+ devices caused little issue.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. I have deployed IMC for thousands of devices and spoken to people managing tens of thousands of devices. The scale-out ability of IMC - where you can split functions onto different, or even multiple, servers - means there are few real limits in an enterprise deployment, as long as you understand how to do it properly.

One of the key benefits of IMC is that they are aggressively developing this product. They are very open to feature requests with any that make sense for multiple customers making their way into near-future releases.

technical support is the one area where I have to rate HPE fairly poorly. Whilst I haven't seen many issues with IMC, when we have encountered them (particularly around inconsistencies in the topology views), getting them fixed can be a cumbersome process.

I have used other solutions in the past, but none have compared to the versatility of IMC.

I would say initial setup was medium, between straightforward and complex. The challenge, as with any NMS, is ensuring your devices are in a state to be managed (i.e., consistent SNMP communities, passwords, etc.). On the plus side, since many environments use default credentials, once all devices are ingested, creating scripts to establish high security (e.g., SNMPv3, SSH/SSL only) is a breeze.

An in-house team implemented it.

It is difficult to put a dollar value on ROI, but in the last instance I would say that IMC allowed us to free up about two FTEs through the reduction in operational costs of the network.

For a 50k user environment - ~1200 switches across 10 sites - we probably spent around $100k getting IMC fully perfected. The ongoing cost of maintenance is negligible.

As we were deploying a predominantly HPE network, we didn't really need to consider other offerings.

Out-of-the-box IMC is pretty good, but to really make it work for your organization, you need to invest the time to tailor it to your specific requirements. If you don't have someone with reasonable IMC experience in-house, consider a consultant to analyse your needs and assist in the overall deployment.

Interoperability with non-Cisco, and non-HP equipment.

There are a lot of alerts with a lot of information coming our way that we weren't aware of before. It just started showing up after we configured it. It's a network management monitoring solution. We can get more in depth information, better troubleshooting, more information to troubleshoot with, which all helps us to solve problems faster.

The ease of use needs to be improved. It needs better automated provisioning, automated alert creation, automated scanning of the devices you add to do a better job of knowing what needs to be probed and what doesn't.

It's very stable. It doesn't crash.

Issues with scalability and data retention. We're not a large enterprise and we have issues with data retention, with storing enough data so that we can get enough history. It's not a space problem, it's a database problem. They need to do a lot better job of optimizing the way the database is accessed by the solution. We're not even a big company and we have those problems. We switched as we needed something that was built to be on the server and run all the time.

It's horrible. 90% of the time we're figuring out the solution ourselves. 10% of the time we'll get somebody that knows what they're doing and it's solved quickly. They don't even really know what their menus do. Most of the time we ask them, "What's this for? What's that for? What's this for?" They can't answer it. There aren't that many people who know it, there's not enough right people.

Lack of visibility into what was going on in our network. We had another solution, but it was not an enterprise class solution, it was unstable. We had SolarWinds Private Tool Set, which is not for enterprise. They have other enterprise products, but we didn't own it.

It's not very straightforward at all. Very very difficult. Very time consuming. It is worth it, but it's very difficult. It's a deep, wide solution, there's a lot of technology in there, but it's difficult to get out of it what you need.

We considered Cisco Prime, and it was far and away better than Cisco Prime. We chose HPE for its interoperability with non-Cisco equipment, interoperability with non HP equipment, and customizable, and a deep feature set that Cisco Prime just didn't have because it's focused on Cisco stuff only. If I had to it over again, I'd probably go with an enterprise SolarWinds product.

Look at SolarWinds. Look at PRTG.