Micro Focus Operations Bridge Reviews

Operations Bridge is designed primarily for large enterprises with highly complex monitoring and service quality demands. These may include legislative requirements.

OpsBridge is a scalable, integrated solution to monitoring geo-diverse, very large infrastructures and applications on a worldwide scale.

OpsBridge actually consists of a suite of products that are installed separately and integrated together under the "Operations Bridge" banner. The full list of products in the suite is here: https://docs.microfocus.com/it...

OpsBridge has good event correlation facilities and root-cause identification algorithms. This can reduce the number of alerts that an operator sees, potentially improving operator efficiency and reducing the "cost-per-alert".

To achieve this though OpsBridge depends on accurate topology mapping, i.e. it needs to understand the dynamic relationships between items being monitored. Maintaining this can demand additional software.

As owners of the Vertica database, MicroFocus can exploit this technology to improve the handling of the vast amounts of monitoring data that its enterprise customers generate.

Event correlation is useful. The increasing use of a common "data lake" approach to monitoring and other ITOM disciplines could be useful, but it is resource hungry and not capable of being cloud-hosted (at least the last version I worked with wasn't).

OpsBridge also promotes a service-oriented approach to monitoring, which is valuable for larger MSPs.

Better distributed monitoring - "proxy" monitoring whereby a small device can gather metrics and alerts on behalf of the main management server would be useful. At last use, this architecture needed an additional full-function server at extra cost.

The solution is overall "heavy", requiring multiple servers, even without HA. For instance, a full OpsBridge deployment of all the products in the suite can demand upwards of six servers or large VMs (8+ CPUs, 32+GB RAM). 

I have been using Operations Bridge for a significant number of years, from the days of OpenView Operations. 

I did not use another solution previously, although I do have experience with other ITOM products.

Installation can be conventional or container (Docker) based. This gives the potential for auto-scaling and resilience; however, the last version I used (2019) was not able to exploit the full benefits of containerization. In either case, installation needs very careful planning - which is good as it focuses the mind on what needs to be monitored.

Consider OpsBridge as being the "SAP of ITOM". It requires dedicated resources to configure and administer.

Licensing is still difficult to comprehend despite numerous improvements over the years and it is easy to incorrectly license the product. This should be improved. My advice is to do your licensing estimates very carefully.

As OpsBridge is a suite of products bundled together, you may find yourself paying for software functionality that you don't actually use, e.g. Real User Monitor (RUM).

Don't forget the cost of maintenance and support starting in year two and onwards.

As part of forming Nobius, we performed technical and business reviews of many monitoring solution tools

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to engage with MicroFocus professional services if you want to implement effectively.

Don't under-estimate the need for formal training. New customers will not get the best out of OpsBridge by flying solo from day one.

OpsBridge is powerful, comprehensive, and well suited to organizations with the budget to justify it. Its service-driven approach is good and the increasing inclusion of machine-learning features is welcome. Don't underestimate the amount of hardware needed to run the full suite on and plan that into your project.

If necessary, validate its suitability for running on a cloud environment. Earlier versions c.2019 didn't fully support installing on AWS or Azure.

If you are considering MicroFocus OperationsBridge, run it as a major project with a fully-resourced project team and associated budget.

With great power comes great administration !!

We use this solution primarily to monitor servers, to do some log file monitoring, events correlation, and events duplication as well as dashboarding.

We have a bunch of critical servers and applications. We are able to monitor using this product to create a dashboard and have automatic alerts to notify the responsible team.

The event correlation is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

The UI could be better. The ease of use, deployment, upgrades, and licensing could be better. The license, not only the model, rather, the way you manage your users and things like that need to be worked on.

The initial setup is a little bit complex. 

Technical support could be better.

The solution can be more stable.

It's not easy to scale. 

The solution needs network monitoring, and support for more cloud providers.

Anomaly collection could be better. They need better reporting. 

I've been dealing with the solution for ten years. 

While it is a lot better in the current version, it is not as reliable. You need people constantly checking everything, to keep it running. It's a complex product so some components, internally, can cause some unexpected behaviors.

While it can scale, more or less, it's not a straightforward process. 

We have between 50 and 100 people using the solution right now. There are level one, two, and three operators and a few system admins. 

We do not have plans to increase usage. 

We aren't very satisfied with technical support.

Neutral

I did not previously use a different solution. I use something similar in parallel, however, it's not a replacement. 

The initial setup is a bit more complex than straightforward. I'd rate it a three out of five in terms of ease of setup.

I was not here for the latest deployment. However, based on my experience, usually, it takes at least one month to more to plan, prepare, deploy, and configure.

We have five people who can handle deployment and maintenance. 

The deployment was handled in-house with some professional services helping as well. 

While we don't precisely calculate the ROI, we have seen it.

It's quite an expensive solution. I rate it five out of five in terms of the high cost.

I did not previously evaluate other solutions. 

We're using a mix of versions 2020.11 and 2022.05.

I'd advise new users to be prepared to face issues and have problems with the support.

I would rate the product seven out of ten. 

The solution is mainly used for server monitoring as well as consolidation integration with the various data sources. We use this for where we want to consolidate event performance rates and capture all those tools that were a single unit.

The even consolidation is great and the extract mechanisms give you very good correlation features.

The stability is good.

I've found the solution to be very scalable. 

The setup process can get a little bit complex. 

There is new development happening, however, it's important that certain legacy applications should be supported in the future.

I've used the solution for eight to ten years at this point. 

It's highly stable. It's worked well for me for eight to ten years and I haven't had any issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable and the performance is good. 

The solution scales quite well. It's not a problem at all. If a company needs to expand it out, it can do so.

The initial setup is not exactly straightforward. It's complex as it's not just one product. It has to integrate with many other products. A standalone product can be simple, however, when you have an integrated environment, definitely the complexity is increased. How you design it and whether it is standalone dictates the process. Every setup is unique and different according to each individual company.

The cloud version does have a subscription cost.

While the solution is on-premises, we also have a cloud deployment that has just started. It's available via subscription and companies can use both models. 

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite happy with its capabilities and have been quite pleased with that solution overall.

It is mostly used for event management. We use it to consolidate events from different data collectors.

The correlation feature is the most used feature. It allows you to correlate events from different sources and have more meaningful events.

The deployment of agents on new CI should be improved. There should be some kind of automation to directly deploy them from the console.

It can maybe have some more AI functions because most of the other tools are going in that direction.

I have been using this solution for around two years.

It is stable. It has got high availability.

I haven't done that yet, but its scalability must be good. It must be easy to add new servers.

In terms of usage, mostly the operations teams work on these events. We have a team of around ten members.

Their support is good. The community is also helpful.

It was pretty straightforward.

It was actually management's call, so I didn't get a chance to look at other tools.

I would rate Operations Bridge an eight out of ten. It is a very good solution for event management and agent-based monitoring.

We are using this solution for incident management, and event automation.

In Micro Focus OBM, everything was controlled at the node level and now everything can be controlled at the console level. 

It's a very good product overall.

The pricing could be improved.

I have been using Micro Focus Operations Manager for ten years.

We are using the latest version.

It's very stable.

It's a scalable solution. 

We have approximately 45,000 users in our organization. 

We are only working with two products, one is Micro Focus Operations Manager, and the other is Orchestration, that we are trying.

It's very easy to install.

We have a team of 15 members to deploy, maintain, and support this solution.

The cost is very high.

We plan to continue using this solution. We are already working on a new project using Micro Focus and I recommend it for other users.

I would rate Micro Focus Operations Manager a nine out of ten.