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 !!

First case of installation of the tool with the business branch of a French telecom provider.
We installed the tool with SiteScope, Network Node Manager and Network automation.
I don't remember the exact environment but we had more than 2000 network nodes and a number of servers.

Installation of a preprod and prod environment. Not much customization. Some rules for enriching and installing the different connectors. Some business view was created too

Great experience but I moved to network automation for a new project.

the implementation of Operation Manager made it possible to centralize the events of several supervision tools such as sitescope, Network node manager or Nagios.

This is one of the big advantages of the product, the connectors developed by microfocus.

All the enrichment part allowed to reduce the processing time of support tickets. All the information was already present in the alarm.

We could have gone further with the connectors to the ticketing tools.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

the most important aspects in Operation Managers are:

* The total environment provided by microfocus. All the tools can be implemented together with a certain ease.

*A lot of documentation provided by Microfocus and a fairly large community. The forum is provided in response from members.

* Enrichment is also a strong point but also found among competitors

level 1 technical support is incompetent. I'm almost afraid to open tickets because I know I'll be asked the same thing 8 times.

The price is very expensive for a tool that doesn't evolve very quickly compared to competitors.

I've been working with the solution for five years.

We haven't faced any stability issues. There hasn't been any crashes or glitches.

We haven't faced any issues with scaling the solution.

lot of bug with queue

We've been in contact with technical support, and we find it to be unreliable. They always ask the same questions and they don't fix the problems. We're very unhappy with the level of support they provide.

We're currently looking at switching to Canopsis, which is an open-source product. It has all the modules we need and it's absolutely free. It's very similar to Operations Bridge, for the most part.

I didn't participate in the original setup, so I'm unsure as to if it was straightforward or not.

The solution itself is quite expensive. We did have to pay extra for technical support when we purchased the solution, however. It was included in the price.

We don't have a relationship with the solution; we're just a customer.

It's a good solution overall. On the market, there aren't many other solutions, other than maybe BMC or a few more. It's expensive, but it's very good.

I'd rate the solution eight 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.

We use Operations Bridge to monitor our environment.

Similar to Micro Focus Network Node Manager, the most valuable features of this solution are its modern look and usability.

It is easy and quick to use.

Both are very powerful tools. It is not necessary to program. We can program less to make it worse, which means that fewer side scripts are required to make it work.

When we complete the security requirements, it is hard to manage. If we miss or skip a step, it is very difficult to find.

I have been working with Operations Bridge for one year.

As we use it fully in production, it will also be interesting, but for now, it is stable.

Operations Bridge is a scalable product.

In the beginning technical support was a bit taken back, possibly because they did not realize that we were more technical.

You start off the same way you do with IBM. You start with the first level, then the second level is when it is difficult to resolve issues.

Now, things are better. We have access to an engineer, and it's very fast. They take care of us, and they trust us. When we issue a report with an issue, they resolve the issue very quickly.

We also use Micro Focus Network Node Manager.

The installation is complex when trying to set up the security other than that it's easy.

The pricing of Operations Bridges is acceptable to us.

Overall, it's a very good solution.

I would rate Operations Bridge an eight out of ten.

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.