Micro Focus Operations Bridge Reviews

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.

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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.

This solution is used for centralized infrastructure and application monitoring. It will take monitoring data from other tools and contribute to the central repository. Sometimes it is integrated with the service desk to create incidents when something goes wrong.

I have used versions of this product for Windows and Linux, and they are slightly different.

The most valuable feature is the seamless monitoring of both Windows and Unix servers.

You can create an application topology that shows relationships between different components.

The advancement of this solution seems to have stalled. These types of products have a long history and it may be best to create a brand new application, from scratch. It is difficult to suggest significant improvements.

The initial setup of this tool is complex for people who lack experience with it.

It would be great to improve the automatic discovery of application topology.

I have been using Micro Focus Operations Manager for more than six years.

We have had no issues with respect to stability.

Scalability has been good enough for our needs.

I have been in contact with Micro Focus support a few times and I would rate them a four out of five. Sometimes, they took to long to solve problems. The response time was always good, but it was the time it took to actually resolve the issue that was slow in some cases.

The initial setup is complex. It is not easy to understand how to correctly implement it for the first time. Subsequent implementations were much easier because we had some experience. You have to understand what you want to monitor before you start with the implementation, and a technical person is required.

The deployment takes approximately three to five months for a medium-sized implementation.

This is a product that I would recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily used it for monitoring. We used the desk portal that you have for IT support. We also installed the OBi and the BBD to do a lot of the analytics and to prevent difficulties within the BBD dashboard.

The most valuable feature of the solution depends on a few factors. Sometimes if a user is working with, for example, Norton systems, and uses the consoles or monitoring desk ports, if they work with the system feed, they can present a performance report. It's very useful because users can do quite a bit of analytics just from that.

The core manager also allows for the creation of a custom dashboard, and users can use the cache from the dashboard which can include images. You can import the images to the custom dashboard and create basically whatever you want or need.

It depends on the contract a user holds with the company, but technical support could be improved. We work with a vendor of Micro Focus. If you need support for the OBi or BBD, you might be able to use R&D. If we need something we call R&D and get level one support.

The stability of the solution has become problematic and should be improved.

The pricing is a bit expensive for smaller companies. 

If I recall we used the solution for an agency installation, or we used the site for monitoring agencies. For operations, if you have Micro Focus 2003 to 2008 you can do this. 

The stability isn't so great. Stability was really good in the past, but now, even if you have software on the network the operating system is very problematic.

The solution is quite scalable. Even now, with the new system that they have. Recently, they changed the platform out to a licensed model and it's very easy to change the license if you need to grow. If you have an agent license you can apply it with the agent side license or with an APM induction license and scale up quite well.

On our client-side, we have a lot of users. We work with enterprise-level clients as well as smaller companies and have a lot of users on the system. This includes IT managers and operations center managers among others.

We've previously used a variety of other solutions. 

We've worked with CA, Nagios Spectrum, Unicenter (which is the older version of Nagios), and Tivoli. Most customers have been on or are on Tivoli as well.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It's not complex at all.

The solution is easy to install, which is wonderful.

The pricing may be a bit high for smaller customers. If a customer doesn't have more than 2,000 users, they might prefer to go with an open-source option, which won't cost much, if anything. Smaller companies can find a lot of other solutions besides Micro Focus, which is more suited for larger companies.

We're partners with Micro Focus as well as Microsoft and BMC and we're based in Isreal.

We use the on-premises deployment model. We don't use the cloud deployment model. A lot of the systems are not on the cloud yet. 

We also internally developed a system on the AppSwitch platform to help our clients gain more advantage. We have it monitoring all systems.

If the customer is an enterprise-level customer with more than 1,500 or 2,000 users, Micro Focus can help. Users can do a lot on the IP in terms of the monitoring systems and will find a lot of boot code. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

My primary use is the consolidation of monitoring tools and dashboards.

The most valuable feature is that everything can be consolidated into one dashboard.

The service takes a very long time to start and it requires a lot of resources. A huge amount of memory is required.

The setup process should be simplified and faster to complete.

I have been using Micro Focus Operations Manager for 15 years.

I have experienced no issues with stability.

I have not needed to scale this solution. We have fewer than 100 users and we do not plan on increasing our usage right now.

I have not needed to contact technical support within the past year.

My team has been in contact with the local Micro Focus partner and my understanding is that the local partner's skills could use some improvement.

We are using another similar tool in the company, but it is not in my department.

It took approximately one week to complete the installation and setup. I would say that the setup process is painful.

I implemented and deployed this solution myself.

I don't remember exactly how much it costs but I know that it's affordable.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for event monitoring and evaluation.

The most valuable features of the solution are its grouping scripts and event focus.

The solution needs to improve its general performance of the interface. Especially when there are lots of events, it takes forever to load, especially the closed events. 

In a future release, we would like an improved upgrade process. When you upgrade it now, it first uninstalls everything and then reinstalls all the packages, which means any customization that you've done in the directories on the surface disappears.

The solution is reasonably stable. The performance is not always up to scratch, but it seems to be pretty reliable in most cases.

The solution is scalable. The UI seems to be a bit slow sometimes, but otherwise, it's fine. We have between 50-100 users.

The past year has not been very good in terms of technical support. There were long waits before replying. I think up to one year ago it was all right, but now it takes a very long to find solutions to a problem. Very often we find the solution ourselves before the support engineers do.

We previously used Operations Manager. We switched for the added features, better scalability, overall experience, and better resolution to end of life issues. 

The initial setup is simple.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would advise others to look into the correlation techniques and adaptability through grouping scripts. The out of the box functionality is great, but there's so much more that you can do with it including dashboards, etc.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use the on-premises version to monitor our systems and manage emails. All our systems use Operations Bridge, especially the critical systems.

It is a very complicated product. It's difficult to manage. Nowadays, products are very easy to manage, deploy, and integrate, but Operations Bridge is very complicated to manage. Maybe it is an improvement point for this product. It's not easy to integrate with Operations Bridge.

It should be plug-and-play.

It was a very stable product, but now I noticed it's not a very stable product anymore. Under its previous name, it was very stable, but since they changed it to Operations Bridge, it's not very stable. When the product is complicated, it can lead to the solution being unstable.

Our entire administrative team uses Operations Bridge. That is around 50 people at the same time. We send lots of events by email from Operations Bridge.

Their technical support is also not very good. If we open a case, because we couldn't solve the problem, the case comes back. We don't open a case just to ask a question to the support team.

The setup was very complex.

It should be easier to use this product, because once you're in production, systems are more complicated. This kind of tools should be very simple and straightforward.

I would rate this as six out of ten.

With our HPOM installation, we monitor the European (and part of the global) infrastructure of our financial services, consisting of around 800 servers in various regions.

It has greatly reduced the number and duration of outages as support teams are notified immediately when something goes wrong or even before something breaks. The integration with the ticketing tool makes sure that there is a record for every issue.

The various types of monitors are very useful. We use them all:

• Threshold monitors
• Log file monitors
• Open message templates
• SNMP trap monitors
• Process monitors
• Database and infrastructure SPIs.

Additionally, the Performance Manager provides great insight into our systems' performance.

Installing and upgrading the HPOM and Operations Agent software is not always easy and the process can be quite fragile. Once it is running, it is very quick and stable, but an upgrade can quite easily break something or terminate unexpectedly.

For additional features, we are looking forward (and implementing) OMi 10.6x.

Organizations using multiple tools for monitoring their infrastructure, namely storage, UPS, etc. rely on multiple consoles to view the events from respective elements to manage consoles. This causes delay in isolating the fault. OMi helps in the consolidation of events on a single dashboard from several sources via the available APIs.

The biggest strength of the Operations Bridge is the consolidation of events from various sources. For one customer, we were able to consolidate events from more than 25 sources, most via Traps using a BSM Connector. Once the Head of IT Operations saw the value, then the expectation was that all the other siloed departments would work together to send the events to a central console.

Event consolidation

Cross domain event correlation

Run Time Service Model (RTSM)

Flexible dashboard with the availability of widgets

Agent and agentless monitoring

The most important feature is availability of the software on Docker, hence reducing implementation & upgrade timeline

Remove the dependency of Java technology. This is a feature used for admin purposes to update the modeling.

For high stability, I would recommend a HA setup with the recommended configurations.

Single server setup should only be considered for small environment.

Micro Focus Operation Bridge is highly scalable. It can support multiple server architecture for HA, DC-DR setup, and is also available as a container for the Docker, which can be ported on private or public cloud.

The customer service response is good.

I have helped organizations to switch from other tools to OMi. The main reason was event consolidation and seamless integration with the Service Manager for incident management and SLA reporting.

The setup is straightforward. Depending of the architecture/integration, it can take from one to 10 days.

Highly recommend to go for CDF (Containerized Deployment Foundation)

I have implemented this product with the help of a team.

ROI will depend on the modules available.

E.g., if Orchestration is integrated with events, the fault can be fixed with the given sets of SOPs. This can give up to 90% ROI in a short period of time.

Pricing is very flexible and depends on the modules selected as per the requirement. You can select from the available modules Micro Focus Operation Bridge (SiteScope, Operations Agent, Reporter, Operations Analytic, Cloud Optimizer, Orchestration, CMDB, and several Management Packs for various technologies like Oracle, DB2, Citrix, etc.).

Not applicable.

Implementation of Micro Focus Operations Bridge will need a long-term perspective while solving today's problem. 

• To monitor the complete IT infrastructure. 
• To consolidate various products into one and various screen NOC were using to monitor the environments into one single screen, so they can act quickly on the issues and resolve the issue faster. 
• Correlate the events from servers, network switches, routers, and present single or few events with the help of correlation techniques stream-based event correlation and topology based event correlations to reduce number of events, so NOC can find root cause more quickly and help with the ROI. 
• Migration from Operations Manager of Linux to Operation Bridge products. 

Single pane of glass. NOC has to view only a single screen to monitor the entire infrastructure. All events can be seen on single screen and they integrate well with other products. 

Well integrated OMi with Network Node Manager (NNM), Operations Bridge Reporter (OBR), Operations Manager for Linux (OML), and Operations Connector and Universal Discovery to correlate events using SBEC event correlation. Event correlation helps to consolidate and reduce event counts, so operators can act quickly and resolve the issue in a timely manner. 

It has the capability to display overall health of the infrastructure and is very useful for executive reports on the health of the infrastructure.

It helps to integrate and consolidate various products, such as Operation Manager, Operations Bridge, OMi, Operations Bridge Reporter, Operations Connector, Network Node Manager, Universal Discovery, ServiceNow, and NOC, which use one single screen to monitor the entire infrastructure. SBEC (Stream-Based Event Correlation) event correlation has helped consolidate events into one event helping to reduce events visible to operators letting them act and find root causes more quickly. It has helped to handle message storm situations. Earlier NOC were using different screens to monitor different environments. Now, they have to look at single screen as other products are well-integrated with OMi. 

Topology base event correlation. Topology-based event correlation does not work well with NNM events. NNM does not understand well and collect information needed to correlate the events. Separate active and history tables from one single table and improve performance. It should be improved to view more than 100K events from closed browsers without impacting performance. QA of the products should be thorough before it is released and documentation lacks the information needed to implement the products, upgrade the products from one version to next version, and there is integration with other products. If events goes beyond 100,000, performance is degraded and sometimes the browser freezes.

No.

No.

Technical support is good, but it could be improved. 

No, we are migrating from OML to OMi. 

Initial setup was straightforward and integration was easy. 

In-house. 

Not applicable.

It is competitive. 

No.

The product is great, but it could be improved. 

Monitoring our hybrid infrastructure, where we have AWS, GCP, and on-premise.

Also, the container monitoring was a good point.

The preloaded rules and ways to monitor your systems are a must. We did not want to create rules for each system and software.

We are able to better identify the root cause of an incident. It also reduces the number of tickets that we have received, because there is some correlation.

Implementation could be improved. We also need training and a good partner in order to install and configure it.

No issues.

We used Nagios, but it was not able to monitor container and cloud well.

The first setup was complex. That is why we asked for a partner's help.

Setup costs can be high depending on the partner, but it is worth it.

No other options.

It allows us to build dashboards for individual parts of the business. Our team members appreciate that they can just get a view of their part of the world without having to worry about anyone else's. This seems to be the most valuable feature for us right now.

We have a central screen that alerts us to problems from all parts of the business. This enables our operations team to have visibility of all issues and deal with them or call out as required.

I know that in the next version, X1005, they're moving to more graphical overviews, which should help our senior managers. We're looking forward to that upgrade.

I think it's been seven years since we first used it.

We've had no issues with deployment.

It's been stable though we've had issues in the past. I'm not sure whether they were hardware related or OS or the product, but it seems to be quite stable in the past few years.

I haven't bumped into any issues, so it's scaling well.

I would evaluate them as weak, unfortunately. They're barely bearable in the quality of the guys that support us. There are not always specialists in their support system. They seem to be learning as much as we are. So support is weak, I'd say.

The initial setup was straightforward. I had no problems with it.

Plan your implementation. Learn what's really important to your business that's not even from an IT perspective. That's only natural production or sale side or whatever it is and use that to map it onto your implementation. That's what I would say.

The most valuable feature is the event correlation and how we handle the events. There are a lot of possibilities and it's a new experience for us. I used to work with IBM. It's another way of working and thinking and it's a revelation for us.

It helps us the most with correlations of events and events handling; how we do that in SM9, it is a new way of working for us. I'm very pleased with it.

There are a lot of locked files and I don't know always to search for the good locked file that can show us more information. There are a lot of locked files, about a thousand. You cannot always find the correct information to solve an issue.

We have worked now almost two years with OpsBridge and it is a very stable system. We hardly experience difficulties or down times. It is the most stable system I ever used.

We have almost 50,000 employees. I know that a lot of customers work with OpsBridge. They find it easy to use, and how we implement it makes it very nice for the customers. I know that the customers are satisfied.

We have a deal with HPE and we have all the tools of HPE. I think they make good tools. There is always room for improvement, but basically they always have good tools.

I have only compared HPE products that I work with and I have my experience with HPE. I have not evaluated other solutions.

The most valuable feature of Operations Bridge is the centralization of all the alerts, events, and topology-based statistics that you can see in a centralized view for different customers internally. It could be your support groups, your management, or your governance. That's what we feel like it's giving us. It is the ability to look at it holistically, even though it's pure statistics from events and notifications. Your key performance indicators can be validated very easily and centrally.

From our monitoring perspective or from a visibility perspective, HPE UCMDB is a must have. It's an amazing piece of software. Regardless what other systems you have in your environment, you should have UCMDB in place because it performs a very good classification and discovery of your CIs. This tends to build up that service model that can be utilized between any piece of software. This is a great value we are getting out of UCMDB.

Operations Bridge, as is the OMI 10, is a great piece of software. It has a lot of potential that needs more exploration and we'll be doing that. We will be engaging my competent team, because we are working with HPE very closely, even for the developmental aspects. We are providing our inputs and we are bringing that change which is required for the tool. I must say that OMI 10 has great potential. This is where our core focus is, to improve on that potential aspect.

Reporting has to be tackled a bit more. Conceptually, it is there and conceptually it is amazing, but somehow the module itself is suffering. This is one of the issues with stability. The reporting module from HPE is not a very stable module, which is OBR to be very specific.

I'm going to have a round of meetings with the product development and the management to talk about that and to have more design plans and roadmap on this.

Not all the modules are very stable, but definitely we know from our practices and operations which ones are stable. Regarding the ones that are not stable, we are constantly having engagements with HPE support, as well as HPE development, to make it more stable. There are a few unstable modules, but most of them are very stable and long running. As our environment is changing, the requirements are changing and we are adapting based on our plans.

Initially, we started with the normal support. We had a lot of hiccups. Then we had a lot of discussion with the product teams, as well as the HPE account managers. Then we went for the FlexCare support, and that actually changed the way support works with us. We were able to receive Level-2 support directly instead of going to the log procedures and wasting time over the initial assessment of the cases. Then we were able to get guys directly involved in our support issues or the cases and incidents, which actually helped us a lot.

Purely, its flexibility is the most valuable aspect. It is hugely configurable. We have a huge amount of different kinds of technologies, different kinds of operating systems and management packs that effectively are run and managed by Operations Bridge.

The latest versions of the service reporting dashboards need improvement, such as service modeling. A lot of our customers want to be able to understand and look at their solution end-to-end, including all the components, all the management elements of the operations, and the system's databases. I think that's the way the market is going anyway. People want to see an end-to-end service and they want to have that visualization of it as well.

We first started to install the components that make up Operations Bridge in 2005.

It is hugely stable. Actually, I would have to say that was one of the main reasons why we have kept it. We run it on what is probably an ancient platform now, but it is rock solid. Fingers crossed, it never fails.

We were an HPE Gold partner at the time of the initial setup. That's primarily why it was brought into the organization. It has shown itself to be worth its weight and not very much was paid for it. Our business has quadrupled in size since 2005 and we are a much larger organization than we once were. It has scaled and grown with the business.

It's supported pretty well. We've got some really good in-house guys who know their stuff. We haven’t raised a call about Operations Bridge for a good few years now. This is primarily because we install our own installations. We manage them, we develop them, and we understand how they work.

When choosing a vendor, I look at the solution. My directors look at cost.

The setup takes a lot of planning and preparation, like any upgrade. You just have to make sure you have a basic plan. I think it goes like the old adage, “If you fail to plan, then plan to fail.”

Transparency is one of the big features. We reduced our attempt to repair by forty percent. That was one of the big benefits. The other one is transparency between the departments, as well as for the executive members, the board of directors. They look actually at that data on a daily basis.

The transparency shows us where we still have to add things, monitor things that we don't have under our control yet.

Stability could be improved. Also, it could be easier to upgrade and patch.

Stability could have been better. We were running into problems sometimes where the whole system was not performing as we expected. We ran into strange phenomenon like data not being presented as it's supposed to be or overall system instabilities, such as when a database breaks away and it just doesn't recover gracefully.

For what we use it for it works just fine. We used a larger size already and we don't have a need for increasing it right now.

I was involved in the initial setup. The initial version, that was still BSM 9, was more difficult to deploy than it is nowadays. It has definitely improved in that department. With containerization it would definitely further improve the deployment of the solution.

We looked at BMC. I was not part of the decision making process in that area.
But we choose to stay with HPE. We don't switch that kind of software for every two years out. That's not feasible budget-wise. But the initial reason for choosing HPE was that graphing and alerting were easier to implement than it was with BMC.

The most valuable feature is its ability to integrate with everything.

It identifies parse issues pretty quickly. Instead of logging multiple tickets, we actually deduplicate those and just create one ticket, which makes our operations a lot easier to manage during the incident.

When the systems talk to each other, it becomes sort of a drop and go. And I'm talking purely in our instance, because, from what I see, it seems like none of the other countries have that issue. But it goes back to not having enough skills within the African region, with HPE and with all their suppliers. Once they sort that out, we won't have to get all the people from other countries to come and do it. It should make it a lot easier to manage.

Our issues are largely support related due to where we are and the knowledge base that we have here. This issue relates both HPE in general and to the technical products.

We have worked with other vendors, but the difference is that the knowledge or the course and certifications are made available in our country, whereas with HPE you have to actually go to a different country. So our challenges are more pronounced with HPE because people are less certified.

The functionality of OMi itself is actually cool, but if you can't use it, or if you can't get your teams to set it up properly, then I have to rate it lower. If we could implement it fully, I would rate it probably to be about a nine or a 10.

The product itself is a nine or a 10, but because of the limitations within South Africa, it's more of a seven.

It's pretty stable. The only real issue we've had is knowledge of the solution in Africa. I have discussed this with the team at a recent conference as well. Knowledge and skills are not really something that is sold in South Africa.

There are no issues with scaling. We are looking at adding new sites, which it pretty much copes with easily.

We use VMware, Fortinet, and Cisco. We are staying with HPE because we use HPE for all our server and storage. Cisco for the networks, Fortinet firewalls does load balancing now as well; we've actually moved that to them. We don't want to be a single vendor shop. That's why we stick with HPE for this solution.

It's difficult to assess the valuable features. We are living in a small country while HP is more focused on larger companies, so for us it's quite expensive. It's very powerful, but it's quite expensive.

The broad integration possibilities, I'd say, with any kind of product, are probably the most valuable feature.

We are waiting for quicker release cycles. Also containerized upgrade, so that you don't have to bring a system entirely down to make a minor upgrade, in fact, or a minor patch.

With support, you have to apply some changes which require a restart. That is in fact unacceptable. It's a good product, but there's still too much development to do on the customer's side to have it really working.

We have been using the solution, all through the versions, about 15 years.

It's quite stable.

In the latest versions, it is quite scalable. The problem is, when you want to extend, it takes a lot of work. It has a lot of consequences. I hope this will be improving very soon.

Technical support is improving. I'd say they're rather reactive in most cases. I'd say that on the later versions of Operations Bridge, for instance, responses are quite good. Looking into all their systems, which are still supported, we're missing some information.

I have the impression that the engineers are not skilled enough anymore because they evolve. All the older products tend to be forgotten. But we're still dealing with them. It's a bit of a challenge.

Setups are complex, not straightforward. First of all, there are all the checks that you have to do. You have to see if it does not interfere with other integrated products. There are some parameters that might get lost.

There's a whole bunch of eventual hot fixes and patches that should be installed first. This requires down time, so you bring down the entire system. That's a very bad situation.

We consider mostly the solution itself when assessing vendors.

The ability to integrate directly with the RIPM on top of DSM. We're looking to use the event feed into OMI, the metrics feed, and using things like SHA. There might be opportunities later to try for a faster root cause analysis.

At the moment, we're still building the system, so I can't say.

When installing against IIS, you need to expect a fully locked-down IIS, rather than expecting a fully out-of-the-box. It is sold to enterprise customers and I can't believe any enterprise customers would be happy to leave IIS out-of-the-box. I would think that everybody would have locked it down. You add what you want to include in a white list, rather than blacklist out what you want to exclude. So, the IIS configuration definitely needs to be improved.

The installation instructions need to be improved, as well.

We had a designated person with FlexCare. He was fair enough with the installation in general. I think we worked out what the problems were with the filters ourselves, because we've seen that on other HPE products. We were kind of expecting it.

We are combining it with other monitoring tools. They did a huge proof of concept to determine what the right fit was. I wasn’t involved in that. It was all vendor engagement, and so on. It wasn't just HPE, we had other vendors as well, such as IBM and Compuware.

The installation instructions are a mess to the point where the advice given to us by other HPE people has been to not follow the instructions, but to follow the VMEs instead.

The installation for an enterprise IIS solution, rather than just an out-of-the-box one, doesn't work very well. We ended up needing to troubleshoot the installation to get it to work. Installing the IIS filters was a big headache. We installed them, but we couldn’t do anything until we went in and adjusted them. When I left, there was still a problem creating users. We couldn't do any of that, so I don't know if they fixed that yet.

For people doing this for the first time, if you have support from HPE, use it. Milk it. Use your FlexCare points and grab somebody. You might sail straight through. If it works, and you do not have any problems with that, then maybe you're fine.

The most valuable feature is the integration with other HPE products because it enables us to feed all the information into same area; whereas before it was in different sites.

It is very adaptable and relatively easy to install.

I can't think of any areas for improvement at the moment, but we haven't had it for long enough for me to say. We're still in the process of assessing it. It's been pretty impressive so far.

The stability has been very good so far. We've only had it a short time.

It is very good on scalability.

The technical support is normally very good, but occasionally patchy.

We were coming to the end of life with the hardware and software we were running, which are also HPE products. We've moved into this new area, so it was a combination of the hardware and software.

The initial setup had some challenges; but since it was completed, it has been very stable.

The initial installation document didn't have some of the prerequisites we needed to install the software; but we looked at the installation document again recently and they added all that information. So, in our particular case, it was good.

We're with HPE anyway, but the other vendors would have been Microsoft or IBM. But, really, it's generally going to be HPE because we're already using them.

I would recommend this product to colleagues given our current assessment, but we haven’t fully utilized it yet.

The most important criteria to us when we choose a vendor are stability and support.

I think it's a practical solution for taking a lot of different inputs from our operations and transforming them into sort of unified, actionable events that you can automate and make sense of automatically. We get a lot of different inputs in a lot of different formats which usually, once a person looks at it, it comes down to something very simple, like an event type.

Operations Bridge works with the idea that these events are mapped, sometimes manually, sometimes from pre-existing templates, into event-type indicators and then you can build automation logic on those indicators. That's valuable because it means we can do automation on events that come from different sources without going through each source every time to do the same automation, over and over again.

Actually, we're going to see measurable results maybe next year. We haven't had it in wide production use for that long yet, so I can't mention percentages, really. But so far, the experience has been that it enables automation from sources that usually don't support automation.

Also, it's just a very nice place to do some basic correlation and things like that. We've been using fairly old technology user interface-wise before this, so it's a nice upgrade for operators to operate in.

I'd like more integration between the separate systems that make up the Ops Bridge part of the thing. There's a separate reporting component, which is very separate at the moment. There's the operations analytics, which is also a separate product and has a very different stack from OMi and the other Ops Bridge core components. Mainly, I just want more harmony between those things.

That is a huge thing. There are a lot of different components you need to understand before you can get proficient at the product.

Also, the less Flash we can get in the UI, the better. That would be great.

We haven't put that much load on it, so it's difficult to know from that point of view. It's OK. The UI is web-based, but it requires both Java and Flash and these days, that's not really the cutting edge by any means.

We haven't had that many issues with it, but Java replaces native operating system and web components with Java components. Sometimes the functionality or the stability isn't what a native component would be, so we've had some issues there, but it's never been really that serious. It's just like, some scrolling thing doesn't work or you have to refresh the page; that kind of thing.

There are pretty heavy limits on what the system can do. It hasn't been an issue for us, really, but the philosophy of the system is not a big data product. You can't just push thousands and thousands of events to it per second. It's not meant for that.
The idea is that you filter events below Ops Bridge and then just the ones that the element managers think might be actionable are thrown forward. For that, it's fine, but there is the risk that you lose a lot of visibility into events that you don't beforehand know that you should be pushing forward to Ops Bridge.

We’ve used technical support for a few small things. It's been fine so far. We've gotten some pretty good patches and things for specific issues, so it’s been mostly positive so far.

We switched because it was beginning to be mainly in-house built software. We didn't want to take on the burden of developing it much further. It lacks these features and it was just essentially scripts running other scripts. We wanted something that had actual enterprise-level support, had a concrete development plan, and that integrated well in the systems that we already have.

We did the initial implementation of the environments together with HPE; we built the production environment, they built the test and development environments as references. It was OK. In hindsight, there were more things that we should have taken into account before we started building, some of which we understood, some of which we didn't. All in all, there are a lot of components.

I think the changes they're proposing now to the product in the next year or two, those might help. We'll see. Or, at least we'll have new problems. But there are a lot of components to install on a lot of virtual machines, if that's your architecture.

We did a few proofs of concept with CA. We did proof of concept installations and went through some of the licenses that we already have elsewhere in the company, with both CA and HPE. We ended up with HPE because there we saw how we would develop this level automation that we're heading for, without the amount of work getting just ridiculous. I think CA might even had better monitoring components, but the event management wasn't as strong, at least for our use case.

If you're researching this solution or something very close to it, before you begin implementation and the careful planning, look into your CMDB and data structures. Figure out what CIs and what information in your configuration management database you actually need to orchestrate monitoring and to orchestrate the views from the events that you get. Having too much information makes it impossible to test the solution, and not having enough doesn't give you the functionality you need.

This is a mature product. There is good support from HPE and it involves constant updates. There is a path to move on to the next product.

It's our monitor of managers. It's our monitoring tool and it looks after all our servers.

At the moment, I don't know what the roadmap is for this solution. There's a product that's been out for two or three years now, called Operations Bridge. There is a migration path to that, but it's not an obvious one. HPE has not made that obvious to us, so I'm trying to find out how we move on.

The product and the UI need updating. Everything about the user experience needs updating. I work at the other end, which is the more technical end, and I like what it does. But when a user sees a GUI that looks like it was written in the 1970s, it doesn't fill them with any confidence. It needs more dashboards, more graphs, and more everything that management wants to see.

We've had this solution for 12-13 years.

It's fairly complex deployment, even though it's supposed to work out-of-the-box. It's a product that can be tailored. It probably will work straightaway, but if you want to get the best out of it, you've got to change it to suit your environments.

It's a mature product and has good stability.

The product has good scalability. We've gone from 100 to 700 servers without any hiccups. It's a very scalable product.

I have used technical support. They are good; perfect. We don't raise many cases, but when we do raise cases, it's good. They are the same as any other company. It's just support at the end of the day.

There is an issue at the moment with HPE, in that their support for this product has moved over to Sofia, Bulgaria. That can pose its own problems, but it's like anything that's off-shored. It's going to take a little bit longer, and you have to accept a few more difficulties when you're trying to explain problems or reject solutions.

I've looked at Moogsoft and Nagios as alternative products. There are lots and lots of other ones out there. I’m not sure if we will stay with HPE.

We've got a very mature product that would be awful to try and replace. However, if we don't get what we want out of it, and we can't go forward with it, then the new kid on the block will just come in and slot straight in.

When selecting a vendor, I look for attention to the customer and the support you're going to get when you're going through this. If we do move, it will be a fairly fraught experience. We want to be confident that either HPE or another vendor will be behind us and helping us down that path.

I've been working with it for 15 years, and I know how powerful it is. If you spoke to some of our end-users, they probably wouldn't even mark it, because they don't even use it. They don't use the interface, because they don't like it. There are so many other things on the market now.

It helped us move from a company that looks at its network from a resource perspective to a service perspective.

It helps me on a day-to-day basis. We used to have our services monitored by two isolated islands. One island was from the IT perspective, with servers and operating systems. The other island looked at the service from a resource perspective, with routers, switches, and an aggregation layer.

HPE helped us aggregate, and we now have all these layers in one layer. We're now looking at the service from the core of it, not from a resource perspective or from an IT, servers-based perspective.

I see room for improvement in the licensing scheme area. It's getting more complex day by day. Every day there is a new rule, so it's hard for me to plan every year and determine what I need to buy. I have to find out what I need to merge together because the license scheme changes constantly.

My company is very large. Most of the implementations in our area involve 250 or 300 nodes. We have tens of thousands of nodes serving over 2 million users. We are a large enterprise in the telecom area.

It's pretty stable right now. Every batch increases it more and more.

Scalability is great. We are an example of HPE worldwide. We are one the few sites that has 45,000 devices managed by HPE. Scalability is very huge.

The HPE setup is very straightforward. However, once you go into scalability and grow larger, that requires expertise and needs some hard work.

Through a partner

I looked at IBM, CA, and BMC. I chose HPE because it gave me all that I needed in one suite. With others, I have to integrate multiple solutions and vendors to get what I need. With HPE, I have one vendor and one source where I can get almost 96% of what I need.

It helps us to take into account all of our infrastructure. It's monitoring all our infrastructure and is one single point of truth. It's also quite flexible for configuration. You can correlate certain systems with each other along with applications. Thus, we like the HPE product very much as it keeps our systems under control and in-check. You can also filter out the different alarms from your systems.

It has improved the working of our company, especially the working of our operation team. They have much more view on the servers and what is happening with them. They know when to act and on what to act. The alarms are very clear. There is only one central database for all the alarms; before we had to look on different systems.

It has not only the servers but also our network is in there. It's an all-in-one dashboard for our operations team so that is very helpful.

There is need to have more out-of-the-box support for HPE products itself.

For monitoring of HPE 3PAR, it doesn't come out-of-the-box with OpsBridge; we still need to install third-party stuff to it. At a recent conference, HPE announced that they will have their own software material, so that's improving. But we would like to see much faster support on the HP products themselves (including this product).

We've had some issues in the past with the previous version. Currently, we are using version 10 and with this version all the stability issues are all fixed. We still have some issues with certain connectors but they are also getting fixed by HPE as of now. The issues are within the third-party connectors for Nagios and NNMi. But that is now being handled by HPE; hence we are very happy with the product.

It's quite okay. You need a few backend servers to run it on but it scales very easily. If we run into performance issues, we just add some vCPUs because we can virtualize the installation. It scales very well with that.

I'm not involved in the technical support that much.

We were previously using something else but it was not fulfilling our needs. I think they were using a BMC product before I joined the company.

I took over once the product was already running. It's now handled by my team, but I have only recent joined the team.

We wanted the manager of managers so that we have one single point of truth for all our alarming activities, cross server applications and so on.

We also checked with BMC but decided to select HPE as it is the most flexible solution.

I would advise them to check this product out and to have a good look at it because we think it is a valuable system.

It is important to keep in mind the amount of work involved in setting it up. It is a lot of work because you need to have your agents installed on your machines, so it takes some time before everything is running like you want it to. For example, we have a license for 4,000 agents now. We use about a 3/4th of that number at the moment. Hence, its installation is intensive but once it is installed, it's fine.

There is no out-of-the-box support for HPE products. We have the feeling that it's going a little bit too slow. If they launch a new product, it's always taking some time before we get the connectors for the OpsBridge.

After I think ten years of using OML, we finally had some nice dashboards, which enabled us to get more insight and produce reports.

I would like the scalability and stability improved.

For OMi, it's not stable enough to get an enterprise solution out of it. I was interested in a solution presented at HPE Discover London because we are talking about 7,000 servers. They had 50,000. So I will follow up on that to talk to the technicians involved to see what was involved to get that working.

I want to investigate that further because I'm not sure whether the scalability is currently in there out of the box. It will be in there, but it will need a lot of tweaking and tuning.

Technical support could be better.

The initial setup went quite well. It was smooth.

When we were looking for a solution, we were looking for something that had the same features as where we were coming from; so it would be just a natural step to take. We were with OML before. We have them both now.

We looked at other vendors, but we have a five year contract with HPE, so it wasn't necessary.

Plan right.

It's very scalable and it does seem capable of accepting the volume. You can just keep expanding it as your organization grows.

It integrates with a lot of other products. You can integrate it with ticketing systems and all sorts of software. There are links to software that allows it to be monitored. It's a monitoring system, so it makes sure that everything is up and running. You can have dashboards and just make sure everything is up, working, and functioning correctly.

There is a new release which is much more GUI based. We haven't moved to the new product, which is OMi. So that probably does more of what I want, and has more to do with event management and is event based.

We're using Operations Manager (OM). I want to see better event planning. I would like event correlations. This is the thing I've always been interested in, but with the existing tool, it's been very, very difficult to do. I think this has been addressed in OMi, but I've yet to see that. When I really move to it, then I might increase my rating to closer to a nine. The event correlation is not there and it is a complex tool.

Even though it claims to do event correlation, in reality, you could just write a program from scratch to do this. That is fine, but it's not part of the product. For the new one, I believe it's supposed to do that. OMi is supposed to be much better for event correlation. So I'm looking forward to getting down to really using that.

This has been in our company for 20 years.

It's very stable. There are always some issues, but they tend to occur when changing the product. When it's up and running, it tends to stay that way. It's a very stable product and its origins are about 20 years old. It’s been around for a long time and it has a good basis.

It's capable of being expanded to extreme levels.

I use it. We've got dedicated technical support and that's very good. Because the product was not so well known year ago, it used to be a lot more difficult. We would get put through to people who didn't understand the problems at all and it took quite a long time before you could speak to somebody who did understand. Now we've got dedicated people and it's much easier. Everything happens really fast now.

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I've been involved in migration to a later product. The migration was very complex. It is a very complex product. It probably took me a year before I really felt I understood the product at all. It wasn't something that you can learn in two or three weeks.

It's just a vast complex product and it has also evolved. That's the downside of the product evolving, because there's lots of things that come from its origins and there are some things which have been added, and you can tell the difference. You can tell that it's not brand new because it keeps changing names. It used to be called OpenView and all those commands are OV this and OV that, so I it wasn't updated on that part of it.

Because they've been here for 20 years, it's very difficult to move away. At one time, I was trying to influence a change, but it proved to be impossible. Now that I've got more used to the Operations Manager, I'm happier with it. We'll see whether or not the next generation is really good, or as good as it says on the box.

No one would actually use Operations Manager now, so go straight to OMi. I also recommend to study, study, and study to learn the product.

It's helped us to increase transparency of our line of business, as well as both transparency and visibility of the IT department within the company.

Currently the BVD, it's not living. We would like to see more sensors in the dashboard. If you go over 60 miles on the screen, nothing happens. Part of our BVD is a map of Switzerland with some highlighted agencies where there is something specific happening. If it moves over 60 miles over this location, nothing happens. But there are 160 locations and it's not always very easy to find out if there is a yellow light there and which location it is exactly.

The first implementation of the Business Value Dashboard went live early this year, so we have now 11 months of experience with it.

It is very stable. We don't have any vulnerability or issues like that.

The BVD does not have a problem with scalability. You can add additional sources and increased uptake frequency. We don't see any problems going forward.

It's a very new product so support is not very mature. You have to find the right people in HPE to support it correctly. Then it works great.

Well, implementation is straightforward. It's a reason to implement the dashboard. The more complex things are the numbers that will be produced, but that's not a problem of the product. That's a problem of how to consolidate these numbers.

The initial trigger was that we had a new head of communications and she has been working for a newspaper before where they had a very large newsroom. So we had to have a newsroom too and we had to fill it with content and the BVD was the best thing for it. At the time, we were approached by HPE to be the first user of this product and then we started the work with them. That was the way we went.

The ability to automate a lot of the repetitive tasks so that many human tasks are taken over by Bots. That is the most valuable feature in HPE Operations Bridge.

In today's world, we are under constant pressure to reduce IT resources. The more we can automate, the better it is.

It decreases our time to fix problems and it takes less time to find the root cause. A lot of the process is done with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) that is built into the system. It helps us nail down the root cause faster. It has also reduced our costs.

I would like to see more Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality. Because of the large amount of tasks, it makes more sense if you have an AI plug-in. We still depend on people to operate a lot of the events.

We also need a better road map and a more affordable price.

This solution is part of our long-term initiative for operations to go into a more automated mode. We started this journey back in 2008. By 2018, it will have been a 10-year journey and we have almost completed it.

Stability is good. Although we do have problems, the problem is more in our data center provider than in the software itself.

We are running an environment for over 100,000 users, so it's very scalable. It's good.

We have used them through HPE partners. They are fairly knowledgeable. Because we are a tiny resource, we rely on them a lot.

We looked at CA and a couple of small players.

When selecting a vendor, look at the roadmap. Look at how the product is going to evolve over time. Very often, we make the mistake of only looking at the current features and not what's out there and what is going to be there in three to five years or more from now.

Plan long-term and not short-term. This is not a short journey. It's definitely at least a five to ten-year journey to change the operations mode.

HPE has a reputation as a modern leader in this domain. They have a proven track record.

I think what I'm really looking for is being able to get a faster root cause analysis for events and incidents that happen, including correlation of events across networks, servers, and applications across our infrastructure. We have a real hybrid landscape where we are on premises, as well as in the public cloud, across AWS, and in the Azure cloud. We want to make sure that we have our operations running brilliantly with fantastic up-times. We think that getting our resiliency right is possible, because we get faster root causes and event correlations that can actually come from the solution itself.

When we first transformed from being on premises to going significantly into the cloud, we had to go ahead and change a lot of our enterprise architecture and landscape. We needed to be networking very differently and to be leveraging virtual machines on the cloud very differently and in a cost-optimal way. This clearly meant that our internal IT had to operate very differently from what they were used to in the past. We needed to get them to change themselves and work differently so they could provide these kinds of services. IT needed to be able to give me the kind of resiliency, simplification, standardization, agility and the promise of the cloud with optimal cost. This was something which was important, and that's what it did to transform our IT.

I would like to see a lot more ease-of-use, as well as easier deployment of the product itself. Considering that the people who end up using these tools are much more cloud native for everything else, they would want to see something which is cloud native and as brilliant as some of the other products which are out there. That's something that I believe can be much better. I think HPE has this on their roadmap to actually get there.

Our level of implementation is not so deep as yet to be able to go ahead and say whether it's stable or unstable, but whatever I have seen it has been fairly stable.

We are a very large organization with 170,000 employees. This product completely scales to meet our needs. We have 4,000-plus network devices, about 2,000-plus on-premises servers and about 1,000 cloud-based virtual machines, all of which are managed through the HPE solution.

I think we need to get a lot more depth to be able to see how much technical support we'd actually require. So far it's been okay, but I would think that when we get much deeper entrenched into HPE Operations Bridge and use it significantly, that's when we'll really need technical support and that's when we'll figure out how good or not so good it might actually be.

Initial setup and deployment has been fairly complex. There are specialized skills and expertise required to run deployments. Once deployed, I think the solution is fairly robust for us to go ahead and use.

I was not involved in the actual buy decision when that was made some time ago, but I do know that there are competitors out there. But I think some of them would be more collaborators rather than competitors.

As an example, at a recent conference, Scott Guthrie from Microsoft talked about the OMS suite of products, and that’s amazing because we are on Azure. I know that OMS has a set of capabilities that the HPE suite doesn't. On the other hand, the HPE suite has some capabilities that are not there on OMS.

We really like the synergies between both of these products, HPE Operations Bridge and Microsoft OMS, going forward. That got me thinking that maybe I should get OMS as well so that we can do some of the things that I want to be able to go ahead and do on Azure. We're heavy on Azure anyway and we would then be able to get the best of both of product lines.

Remember that Operations Bridge can do a lot, but it's fairly complex to get started with. It means getting people to adopt the product significantly for them to be able to maximize that kind of investment. Once it is in there, it's extremely robust. The kind of value it can provide to the business would be significant. It should be maximized by all businesses, so go ahead and invest in the suite itself for the enterprise.

I think HPE has a fairly good roadmap. They're taking advantage of the kind of movements that are happening in the cloud. Going hybrid IT means being able to bring the best of legacy services that you've always had, with the strength of the solution that you've always had, over to the newer technologies which are really disrupting.

For us, the most valuable features are the ability to identify IT issues in your estates and to be able to rectify them hopefully before they cause outages to services.

It keeps our IT systems functioning, which for our company is absolutely essential.

I can’t think of anything that particularly needs to improve. I think their functionality is there now, so I don't think we need more functionality. I think we just need to get that more stable and get it quicker and maybe a bit more intuitive and easy to use. I think the functionality has just gone through the roof from what the previous products would do. So with all of these stands up and looking around, your level of automation in that has gone right up. I don't have a problem with functionality at all. It's almost too much to use all the functionality. They need to go in and start low, get what you need working and then build up.

If you're using the full functionality, it can be a bit naive to think, “I'm going to just deliver this all singing, all dancing gold plated Rolls Royce in the solution; all in one go." For a large organization it's quite a task, so we're starting off with minimal migration and not just put another in. We are migrating from old versions of HP Operations Manager. So we have that path of migrating our legacy systems and our old monitoring policies onto the new.

We were using an older version of Operations Bridge and have migrated to the new version. Originally, when it was first based on Java, it wasn't as stable as the newer version, which we like. So, it's getting better. But we appreciate that it was a completely new product with a total rewrite and re-architecture. So you expect that sort of thing, and you expect a few patches and stabilization issues. Nothing that we didn't expect, but on the whole good.

We're reasonably large, so we started large-scale, and we've stayed large-scale. So we haven't had to scale up and we just came in at the level we needed to come in at.

Technical support has occasionally helped fix problems. They're good.

Operations Bridge was on our road map; HPE Operations Manager and Operations Bridge. It’s the enterprise tool of choice, and that's what we're sticking with. Our guys know it, and we're used to it. We've invested in time and all our monitoring is around Ops Bridge. It's a big jump to migrate to Operations Bridge from Operations Manager, let alone migrate to a different product.

Initial setup was fairly straightforward. The documentation is good, so we didn't have a problem with that. There are lots of different ways you can set it up and lots of different architectures. So choosing the one that was right for us was challenging. The documentation was valuable in that it enabled us to choose what we needed to choose.

I would advise them to look at their infrastructure and think very carefully about what they need. Only buy what they need, and start small and build up. I've seen so many projects and programs fail because they tried to deliver too much too quickly. And even with the might of HPE and HPE's contractors and the whole of HPE, we still have problems with a huge implementation of trying to bite off too much too soon. So I would advise to find out what you need, try and build on it. Get that foundation and level of understanding and eye out the problems as you go. Rather than trying to put everything in all at once and then have a stack of problems.

I don't know about anybody else, but for me, as a technical consultant I want to make sure that the products enter my strength, that it scales up properly. It's all well and good having a part, and then when you try and scale it up it all falls to bits. The support structures need to be there, and when there's a fault the labs get on it and the patches are written and issued quickly. All those sort of boring, technical reasons for me. I'm the one that deals with the errors and issues. So for me, it's less about the finances, if somebody else pays for it.

As a total offering, Ops Bridge is a strong offering in the market. It adds value; it's competitive in its entirety, from network scanning to enrichment, up into event information. The implementation is challenging with customers, so we see added value, but there are diminished returns due to the complexity of the implementation and also the maintainability in general. There are some challenges, but overall there is added value.

For its fundamental proposition and as far as the way it works, it works well. It's a strong product; it has a wide capability - especially if you integrate it with more application performance-related solutions - and if you have infrastructure scanning, those two work together well. The data model and the data flow is pretty good, so overall it's a product that definitely adds value in a complex organization; complex in terms of infrastructure and application infrastructure. It's definitely a good product.

The application is stable; it's about when environmental changes impact what you do and how you look at it. Increasing the reach of the application adds additional work.

When you look at it - for instance, in event detection – that’s when you want to understand how an application relates to the infrastructure, and how that works. There's some modelling involved; you need an understanding of how that application relates to the infrastructure. There's automation for that, but not everything can be captured. There's overlap between what different applications see in an infrastructure and how they report that back. To merge that information correctly, to make sure that you have the entire stack - the technology stack and application stack - properly configured, that requires attention, that requires configuration.

We worked with customers who want to manage critical applications. They have to map out the applications into the different infrastructure components; if it's mainframe related, for instance, which is still a big part of the picture, especially in the financial sector. They need to map the individual jobs and the alerting to an application, so that's a lot of manual work.

Depending on where you land, if you get stuck in generic level-two support, then it’s quite uninspiring – that’s probably the best description. There's a high return of returning tickets back to the pending customer; getting tickets closed without adding value to the solution. Every step has one question. A ticket goes to a pending customer, you send a response immediately, and 24 hours later you receive the next update, which says something like, "Thanks, now we need this piece of information." The ticket then goes back to the pending customer, so you can easily lose a week just trying to get to a point where they're looking at your issue. Even if you set up a WebEx in which they look at what you're doing and understand the issue, we still go through the same process; there's additional information we request.

It's really tedious to get through that. When you switch to level-three or more of the ACE-type support, that goes away. In a discussion with HP, they typically say something like, "You should upgrade your support levels."; buy better support instead of actually maybe fixing their L1, L2 support. If you have the product and support is part of the license you buy, then I would expect to have a certain level of quality in that support, without having to upgrade to some kind of premium plan. It's not about having a dedicated comm tech, or someone who understands your environment, or all these additional things. It's actually about getting a proper response to a well-formulated question.

For greenfield implementation, which still happens, fundamentally I think Ops Bridge provides a deeper level of understanding of what's going on in the infrastructure. If it's a complex environment, it's difficult to find toolsets that will address it correctly. If you look at the entire offering of Ops Bridge, it's one component in the suite that is relevant for monitoring your environment; detection of what's going in that environment.

If you look at Live and more holistically, all those components that include a BSM, OMi, and other products that I forget, that by itself offers multiple layers in the different technical areas of infrastructure. They work well together for some data modelling challenges, I guess, but overall it works well together and it provides a many-layered insight into what's going on in the infrastructure. You have different levels of how you can see what's going and analyze what you should be doing to address that.

In a complex environment, I don't think there are many good alternatives that offer it more or less end to end. You'd be cobbling different vendors, maybe with the exception of BMC, which probably could do it. The overall offering is consistent and as wide a technology as you can find, so there's strong benefits because you can do it all with a HP stack with augmentation of some of the specific domains with other vendors, which you have to do anyway.

I don't know if there’s any alternative. I think the main driver there would be how comfortable they are with the existing product suite. I think IBM is probably the strongest alternative in the field. I think they're behind, from a technology perspective. The only thing that they seem to be stronger with is related to the visualization.

At the Ops Bridge level – basically, at the highest level - how do I view my environment? What do I see going on? And, can I use that information in an aggregated way to prevent or limit the impact of occurrences of events in my environment? That's what Ops Bridge, or the OMi component, doesn't have to that level. You can't go from all the way to the top to all the way at the bottom to drill down, you have to use different environments for that. IBM does have that.

If that's important to have on there, then that's one of the things the people that manage the infrastructure need to be able to do. Especially if it's over multiple sites - a strong geographically dispersed environment - then they would be an alternative, but for all other situations, there isn't much else out there.

As with anything, it's not just a tool and switching it on. They need to realize that it's a journey with a lot of challenges. Especially organizationally, it's not only about putting something in to existing systems; it’s also the desire to be compliant in organizational departments; it's invisibility of infrastructure because of security reasons or appliances that don't allow access. There's a lot of challenges organizationally that, even though you have the best software, you're still going to have to put a lot of effort in.

Overall advice is that if you do this, you need to commit and to be ready to put in a lot of effort in getting your organization to basically comply and help out. I think these products are really strong in terms of UI, but there's room for improvement in some of the usability and some of the integration components could be stronger.

Operations Bridge is a solution that will bring together a lot of various operation data sources from the network server's applications and help the customer to focus in one area, one place, so they can escalate and route the issue to the proper resource for particular incidents. I've applied that type of software for various customers.

It optimizes their operations efficiency, and makes people more focused on the issue at hand instead of trying to figure out what's going on. It gives them an up-to-date status. If there's an issue in the IT system - whether it's a server, network, application, or resource issue – the product emphasizes it and gives you tools to troubleshoot and resolve it.

I think they are moving toward the whole platform format. They need to move away from Java, Flash, and plug-ins to streamline the integration with third-party products. This will make it easier for customers to use and deploy; using wizards and those type of things. I believe these are in the lifecycle and will be in v12.

It's been a pretty stable product. In its earlier years, it had typical lifecycle and maturity issues, but now it's at version 10 or 11 and seems to be running fairly well.

It's been very scalable; as a platform, it handles various data sources, both from HP products and third-party products.

The support team has had its struggles; it is getting better. I think the split of HP into two companies has helped, but that on-going process has created some issues. However, they seem to be working through it and getting better. I think it could be improved with regard to response time, and getting the proper resources.

I'm a senior consultant, so I've extensive experience with the products, so my issues probably should be escalated to a higher-level person from first-level support, rather than have them going through the routine scripts, because I've already done that. No reason to repeat it.

For various customers, I deployed it and helped them run it. It has its complexities because IT has its complexities. When you're monitoring IT, you're going to inherit those complexities, but HPE did make pretty good strides to pull in the data sources and make out-of-the-box integrations, both for their products and for third-party products. Making it the most seamless product possible.

We do work with other solutions. I would say HP is probably one of our largest partners but we do work with other software vendors. We do some integrations with IBM's NetCool, and with legacy products. HPE make their products modular, even at the data cluster level. We can integrate into another Ops Bridge, but we have also done some other conversions of customers’ ideas and IBM's, and converted them over to HP's products. Sometimes it's a toss-up. Sometimes it is politics in the customer's technology.

You have to have an IT operations background, be familiar with the processes of IT operations, have that type of mind-set. A lot of technologies are based on previous HPE technologies, so some history with HP's legacy products helps. Even though this is a new product, that's always helpful.

I think it's ability to bring in obviously the HP products into one place, gives you a meaningful lens, meaningful correlations, and the ability to process and to take on third-party data, event streams, and metrics. Bringing it all together and it being not as complex as building your own integrations from scratch - they give you a nice, good jump start to bring the third-party data in - is where I give it strengths.

I recommend it and obviously I do make a living deploying it, but I also like to see whether it has value at a customer's site. Can I solve some of their problems, some of their use cases? Because even if they deploy it initially, if they can't use it and get value out of it, it won't last very long. You have to make it fit in their environment and solve some of their use cases and scenarios, and then they'll continue to use it and grow with it.

It's really the basis for everything we do for event management, for enterprise management. It's a single pane of glass and it has the ability that when you select a particular event that you can see all information required in a single pane versus having to launch four or five applications.

You don't waste time launching multiple applications. You can actually have information right there in front of you. Again, it quickens the mean time to recover.

It's not mature enough. Like I said, we're being forced to go from OM to OMi even though OM overall, or OMi, as part of Ops Bridge, has many, many more features. Ops Bridge is a suite of tools. Most of the suite of tools in there are less than two years old. There are a lot of growing pains. They're forcing people to go from OM to OMi where OMi, even though on some parts it has many more features, the functionality that is really utilized by a lot of the industry is only about 70% of what OM could do, imported into OMi. Then the developers tend to be in an Ivory Tower development area instead of a real world area, so there's people that say, well why would OM people do that? I used to be a consultant prior to working here. I can tell you 150 companies that do it this way because these are all your Fortune 100 companies.

Their documentation points have spaces that don't exist. They will change their command lines without anybody telling you what it is. Like I said, it's a new product. I've been working with HP on this stuff and everything for over 30 years and I haven't opened up 50 tickets in those 30 years. I have already opened close to 60 just on Ops Bridge and had already seven enhancement requests. I should never have to do that. HP used to do very top quality testing before they would release a product.

We've been using OM for years, and it is at the end of life, so we had to migrate or we've been forced to migrate. Ops Bridge still has a lot of tweaks that has to occur, but we're working with HP to try to help resolve most of those issues.

Well, the whole installation was a nightmare. They have the evolution guide and the evolution guide is very incomplete. Like I said, that's the biggest thing. It says, well go do this, but it doesn't tell you how to go find the documentation on how to do that or it doesn't exist at all. It's amazing, one of the biggest answers that you get from the supports folks of that is that, boy I wish the developers would document it. Thanks for letting us know how it works. That's not a mature product. They also don't have training from an administrator perspective, only from an operator perspective. How can you release a product and there's no training for administrators?

The potential of what the product can do is amazing once you figure out how to do it. The latest release, I guess it's 10/11, of those 57 tickets I've opened up, I would say probably 50 of them have already been corrected in that version. It's becoming a much more stable version.

Hold off on it a little while. Wait for the next major release and hopefully all of the issues that have created a nightmare for me will be resolved. Even though they said it was out for over a year, it was not a product ready for release.

The most valuable features are that the main console, which our customers really like, the sexy UI, its complete passivity, and ability to work with non-HP vendors. But the main advantage is the reporting capability.

My customers are happy and satisfied with the monitoring capabilities that give them a more precise picture of company performance. The company can can improve and make changes according to the data that monitoring provides them.

It can run a little slow if not configured correctly or if a customer doesn't use it properly.

The product is very flexible and can be adjusted to our needs. It has good scalability as you can use Ops Bridge for 5000 samples and then increase it to 10,000 with no problems.

Israel lacks tech support for this product. I could only get sufficient support from California. I don't think there's a large enough market in Israel.

I am from an integration company and I'm not obligated to any vendor and I recommend HP.

What's most valuable for us is the ability to see all events that occur on our network.

It gives us the ability to monitor the entire infrastructure proactively and reactively. We can build incident event management and problem management processes in case of a problem so that an event is registered. We can then change the event to an incident and resolve it in the least amount of time as possible. If we can't resolve it, it enters our problem process where we can determine the source, possible fixes, and prevent the same problem from occurring in the future.

There are a couple of areas of improvement:

• Performance needs to increase; and
• Better correlation from the box rules.

We've used it for four years.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

Stability is pretty OK. We previously had issues with a large amount of correlation rules, but OM has mostly eliminated these problems. We've thrown 1000 different correlation rules at it and it's working just fine.

Scalability is not relevant because it's a standard solution that's built for a particular purpose, which it accomplishes.

3-4/5

We performed the initial setup, which I'd rate as 3/5.

We did evaluate other options, but the suite of HP solutions -- Operations Manager, SiteMinder, Essentials, Service Manager -- is better than anything else out there.

Plan and then integrate. Planning requires a good assessment of your needs. Be prepared also make some in-production investments because you'll likely need to make changes on-the-go as you determine how to correct mistakes.

For me, the most valuable feature is the presentation of the status of business services. It takes events and topologies and shows you the health and performance of your business services.

It gives businesses the ability to monitor their services with dashboards that show whether those services are working properly. For example, if the business is a bank and its customers can't take money from an ATM, the bank ultimately loses a lot of money. They need to be able to constantly check their the health and performance of this important business service.

At times, there are performance and configuration issues. In regards to the performance issues, the system can be a little slow if it's not configured correctly or if it's not used properly.

I'd also love to see the correlation mechanism work even better. It's a nice feature -- correlation between different tech system, application, and network events -- but it requires a lot of configuration for that mechanism to work. I'd like to see it work simpler, better.

I’ve been using HP products for almost 10 years, and Ops Bridge for the last three or four years.

There's been no issues with deployment.

It's a great product stability-wise. Like every complicated platform, it has some issues, but the stability is excellent.

We have only about 10 or 20 users because we restrict its usage to operators or managers. Each person who logs into the system is a critical user.

The level of technical support depends on who's handling your case. Some cases are very slow, taking one or two months, and some cases take half a day. It depends on the issue or the guy handling it.

Setting it up is very simple, but you need to design your architecture properly.

We looked at Microsoft, CA and BMC. They all have similar products, but HP is the strongest.

Compared to other products on the market today, I think it's the best in terms of architecture and capabilities. Like every product, it has its issues, but at the end of the day, it provides its users with business value.

We use it for event correlation as the manager of infrastructure-consuming applications and of network events. This is the first time that Vodafone has consolidated all tiers of service delivery. We now have a consolidated dashboard that shows availability and performance across key business services. The value is cost optimization, scalability, and efficiencies. We're able to transform multiple monitoring teams into one working off one console instead of 3, 4, 5, and 6. We have all the data in one place.

We’re now transforming three teams into one, and others will follow in the coming years.

It needs additional scalability, completely remove Flash and Java from it, and improved visualizations. What's there now is a bit ridged.

Also, simplifying the architecture would be great as well, moving to a more standardized approach.

It also needs more simplified licensing.

It's very stable. Before with version 9, it couldn’t scale to what we wanted, but HP worked with us to help us scale this to the platform we’ve built which has over 200 servers.

It's very scalable. We have the largest deployment worldwide and it has scaled and coped with the load easily.

We have about 100 support tickets because of the size of our deployment and they’ve been fantastic.

We needed to consolidate our teams. We had an enormous deployment of Operations Manager already, so to evolve that to OM 10 was a no brainer. The financial terms were also appealing.

It's very complex, but that is reflective of our network design and local delivery. The product could be simpler, but the complexity we experienced was our problem.

Early on there was some discussions about BMC, but HP are our assurance partner, so strategically it made sense to stick with HP. There isn’t really anyone else in the market that has what HP has in terms of a complete vision, particularly anything that brings it back to DevOPs and deeper into the APM space at scale.

I think HP gives you everything you need, but they are not agile and innovative enough. They are following market trends, but others are more innovative. In terms of the products out there, they often the 2nd best, but in terms of the overall offering combined with the support we receive, they are number one. They listen to their customers well and adapt and change accordingly.

The OVPA plugins for the various OS levels.

I'm not using it now, but when I was, it was the capability of auto fixing issues that could be customized per device, OS, or application. That seemed to make people the most excited.

It can be cumbersome to get up and running. And it's very expensive.

I used it for, probably, a total of 12 years.

Just some compatibilities with certain OS levels that I remember.

No issues, it was very stable.

No issues, in fact that's one of the features that I like about the tool.

Great.

It used to be great, but now it's off shore and is much more difficult.

No, but I've used Nagios after the fact at other places because it's cheaper, but it has much less flexible.

It wasn't complex, but, the DB behind it was the toughest part.

I implemented at the last place, alongside Pepperweed at Intrado. They were excellent.

No other options were looked at.

Be patient, and take things step by step to get it going. Once that takes place, it's pretty self-sufficient.