Micro Focus SiteScope Reviews

Our experiences with Micro Focus SiteScope have been mostly positive as we can easily work with multiple monitors and different types of monitors pretty quickly. There are a lot of out-of-the-box solutions for us through Micro Focus SiteScope, so we don't have to do that much custom coding for the vast majority of requests that we get for monitoring. There are some limitations that we've run into and some problems every once in a while, but they've been relatively minor.

In terms of issues with Micro Focus SiteScope, some that we've run into were unintended, for example, extra executions of monitors and some false alerts when there were problems connecting to endpoints or there were issues with the application that sometimes resulted in false positives. We had a few issues with the way time zones were configured when the system time differed from the time indicated during the monitoring, but those were just little things that weren't too bad.

As far as the limitations of Micro Focus SiteScope, the types of scripting files that can be executed are rather limited unless you go to some third-party plugins. These are the areas for improvement in the solution.

I've been using Micro Focus SiteScope for six or seven years now.

In terms of stability, Micro Focus SiteScope has been mostly stable. My company ran into some memory leak issues, especially in its earlier versions, but after it was set to automatically recycle every 24 hours, there weren't many issues.

As far as new instances, specifically each standalone instance, I'm unsure how scalable Micro Focus SiteScope could be because there's an upper limit to what it can handle, but in terms of spitting up additional instances, it hasn't been too much of a problem. The horizontal scalability of Micro Focus SiteScope hasn't been a problem.

I've spoken with the technical support team for Micro Focus SiteScope lots of times, and in terms of how good it is, I'd say it's mixed. For example, support is good for simple issues, but for more complex issues, it usually takes a while to get a resolution. A lot of times, my company had to escalate the cases and because it's paid support, you'd expect a little more from the support team.

The initial setup for Micro Focus SiteScope is not super complicated, but it does require that you have administrative access to the server where you're installing it and that, in a way, presumes that you do, even if you don't, so you have to keep that in mind. You have to make sure you have certain rights on the server that may be above and beyond the power a user would normally have.

In terms of deploying Micro Focus SiteScope, it could take between one and two hours depending on how fast it can get through the actual installation portion. There's installation, then there's configuration, but the installation takes longer than the configuration. Upgrading, on the other hand, is a little more complex. You really can't do an in-place upgrade. Between certain versions, you have to uninstall the application after exporting a configuration, then install the new version, and then apply that configuration you exported. I've heard that the upcoming, latest version of Micro Focus SiteScope is getting better at that, but this was still a problem even after multiple versions.

We deployed Micro Focus SiteScope through our in-house team, though we did utilize some consulting partners for troubleshooting and case resolution. Nowadays, we do most of the work.

In terms of ROI from Micro Focus SiteScope, it's been mostly positive. We haven't had a whole lot of complaints from our end users compared to some of the other products we've had. Though the cost of using Micro Focus SiteScope can be fairly steep compared to Nagios, all in all, when we talk about full-stack monitoring solutions, cost-wise, Micro Focus SiteScope is still on the lower end.

The pricing or licensing cost for Micro Focus SiteScope is often bundled with other things, so the cost for each individual would be difficult to calculate. Pricing could be $2,000,000 a year. My company pays for technical support because it's part of the contract with Micro Focus SiteScope. You buy the licenses, but you're also paying for the support.

With Nagios, it's much more bare-bones as far as paying for licenses and the software itself, and my company didn't have to use as much Nagios support yet in one or two years because there weren't too many problems using Nagios, and it's much more cost-effective, so that's one of the reasons why my company is migrating to Nagios from Micro Focus SiteScope.

We are in the process of migrating most of our Micro Focus SiteScope fleet to Nagios though the two solutions are a little different and they're not directly comparable. There's a lot more work in Nagios in terms of getting monitoring started up. For example, we have to understand the plugins and the number of cases, and we might have to do some kind of work such as going in and writing our plugins and scripts for Nagios to do what it needs to do, but as far as getting a Nagios implementation up and running, it's real simple. We could have a server built and configured within one or two hours, and that's from start to finish. A limitation is that Nagios currently only runs on Unix platforms, so we can't run on Windows, while Micro Focus SiteScope can run on either of the two platforms.

I've used two different versions of Micro Focus SiteScope. I started on version 11.30 of the solution, and now I'm using version 11.91.

The actual number of users of Micro Focus SiteScope who administer and use the application is less than five hundred because my company tends to do most of the work and maintains the monitors as opposed to allowing other teams to do that. The end customers or the people who requested the monitoring and get the alerts from Micro Focus SiteScope are in the range of quite a few thousand, numbers-wise.

What I would tell people looking into using Micro Focus SiteScope is to download the trial, try to dive into it, read the documentation, and utilize the user community forum, which was recently revamped, making it a little more streamlined and easier to search. Honing up on scripting, for example, PowerShell, Perl, etc., could be useful as well.

My rating for Micro Focus SiteScope on a scale of one to ten, with one being bad and ten being very good, is a solid seven. My company is not going to have a chance to dive into the new containerized version of the solution when that gets released, but that might push the rating even further up.

My company is a customer of Micro Focus SiteScope.

It's used for monitoring all of our internal URLs, certificate expiration dates, as well as database connectivity, database queries, and internal URL availability.

Being able to do your queries from a single location and being able to nest all your monitors within folders is valuable. It makes it easy to reference or store your monitors in a library, and then you can use that for having a single dashboard that shows you your URLs for a specific product. We have hundreds of products. So, it makes it much easier to track them.

Being able to create your monitors for monitoring your internal URLs and databases and other things like that is valuable.

It's easy. It's simple to use and straightforward. I've played with some other tools that are not quite as straightforward, but it's straightforward for me. It's easy for me to be able to come in and add in a monitor. For everything I need, it's pretty straightforward.

We have four or five data centers around North America where we have it deployed into a single or a two-server primary backup type of deployment. All those are made available under a single GUI provided by Micro Focus that allows you to put them all together. A room for improvement would be an appliance or a server that would manage all of our other servers so that I don't have to remember to log on to all different servers and data centers. I could manage them from a single location.

We've had it for quite a while, and I've never done an upgrade on it, but from what I understand, the upgrades are not as straightforward as you would think. I know that we've run into some issues related to porting the database through different versions. So, it's a slow slog. The process has been longer than expected.

I don't like its licensing because you have to license it by individual licenses.

I have been using this solution off and on for about five years. I was using it more a couple of years ago. Now, every couple of weeks, I get into it to enable or disable a monitor or set up something, but I don't spend a whole lot of time on it.

It's good. It's stable.

Because you can group your monitors in collections and you can group collections in folders, it's pretty scalable. I've seen worse products, that's for sure.

We probably have a hundred people using it off and on, and they include DBAs, application owners, NOC people, subject matter experts, and on-call staff to support it.

I don't know about the plans to increase its usage. I'm just a consumer of the product. I don't manage it. There is another person who manages it. I just use it.

I've never used their support. If there are issues, somebody else takes care of them. I've never had issues on my watch with the new version. In the older version, I had lots of problems. I had to constantly restart the servers or services because the web service or something else would crash, and we'd have to try to get it restarted, but the new version has been stable.

I'm not aware of any other solution at this company. I've been with the company for just over five years, and this has been the product that we've used.

SolarWinds has a product that you can use for URL monitoring. I used it at home at some point, and it was relatively easy. It was pretty easy to use. It wasn't as big and as bulky as this. Micro Focus SiteScope is a little slow to load when I go to load it up, and it's not as intuitive as some of the other programs, such as SolarWinds.

It was done in-house. There is only one guy for deploying and managing it.

It is expensive. I don't like its licensing. I don't like anything where you have to license it by individual licenses. I'm not a fan of that, but that's just me.

I would advise mapping out the strategy of how you want to manage or what you're going to use it for. I don't know all the functionality of the tool. We use it for three things. We use it for monitoring internal URLs. We also monitor certificate expiration dates, and we monitor some of our database queries with it. These are the three major things for which it's used, and it does them very well. It probably can be used for other things, but I have no idea what those could be. So, map out what you want to do thoroughly and when you deploy or when you're building out your collections in your folders and groups, make sure you do them as accurately as you can. That’s because it's difficult to go back and change them all.

I'd rate it a seven out of ten. It's a pretty big product, and I don't know everything that it does, but it does really well on what I need it for.

We use the solution for agentless monitoring of network and systems infrastructure including Linux and Windows, multiple versions, and multiple "flavors".

The primary use case is for meeting the needs of basic level monitoring of multiple devices across a single-site network. 

When accompanied by APM tools from the Micro Focus stable, Sitescope provides a useful "bottom-up" (technology --> Application) view of performance and availability. Other APM tools provide a "top-down" (i.e. a user-centric view) of performance and availability. 

Sitescope is a very useful solution for agentless monitoring. I must emphasize 'agentless' as this is its biggest advantage as well as disadvantage. Sitescope makes it easy to monitor key aspects of performance, availability, and capacity by collecting metrics.

The aim of Sitescope is to help reduce downtime and provide information to help maintain performance. It does this reasonably well.

Sitescope though is better thought of as a component within a wider Micro Focus-based ITOM/AIOPS solution rather than as a solution in itself.

VM monitoring is pretty good showing good visualizations of how VMs are operating within the context of all the VMs running on the same hypervisor.

The ease of configuration is an advantage as Sitescope simply requires entering a host's credentials and a connection protocol (e.g. SSH, FTP, script, WMI, etc) in order to begin collecting and graphing raw data.

Alerting is basic but functional as a standalone product but provides an additional dimension when used alongside Operations Bridge (which is expensive).

Most modern-day solutions in this area include both agentless and agent-based monitoring in the same package. The lack of an agent makes for a simple installation and relatively simple configuration, however, in these days of highly-distributed computing resources Sitescope is missing a number of critical features.

1. The lack of an agent means that remote monitoring requires multiple firewall ports to be opened. This is often a problem when connecting multiple sites. It also makes cloud implementations less attractive too.

2. As data must be "pulled" from the system being monitored, there is a reliance on a performant network and a well-specified Sitescope server.

Sitescope scores well for basic simplicity and it integrates well into other products within the Micro Focus software family - e.g. Operations Bridge.

I've used the solution for five to ten years.

If you already have other Micro Focus products, especially the testing tools, then you may already have licenses for Sitescope. Licensing is (typically for Micro Focus) very complex, so speak to your account manager to check.

The setup cost is minimal if you already have the hardware and that's reflected in the functionality.

There are some great pre-packaged monitoring templates known as "solution templates". These are excellent kickstart ways to accelerate implementation - however, be aware that some of them are licensed separately.

If you're considering Sitescope as your sole or primary monitoring tool, I suggest you take a look around - there are better options for you.

Sitescope has been around for many years - since 1996 in fact. Over the years, it has become a highly stable solution. Now though, as Micro Focus now owns HPE Software (who in turn bought Mercury Interactive from where Sitescope came), Sitescope is but a small cog in a very large AIOPS engine.

Our organization is focused on performance testing and we use a variety of tools for this purpose, both open-source and enterprise. We are consultants and we use these tools for our customers.

This solution is being used for infrastructure monitoring. It lets us know what might be going wrong when we subject the application to a higher load. It gives us a fair view.

It is a dockerized application where we use SiteScope to give the application performance management.

Infrastructure monitoring is the most valuable feature. There may be other features but we are focused on the performance testing execution that happens.

The setup should be simplified.

It would be helpful to have documentation on how to use this tool correctly from the beginning.

I would be very interested in having transaction traceability included in the product, to give us a better view of what is really going wrong in a particular method and action.

This would essentially mean that the tool comes packaged with complete EPM capabilities. You would not have to purchase any other product such as Dynatrace, App Dynamics, or New Relic. 

If some of those capabilities could be integrated into SiteScope, it would have a very compelling value proposition.

I have been using Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope for approximately two years and we are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution. I don't have any issues with the stability of it.

Scalability is good. 

We had a ticket open with Micro Focus who helped us through the entire journey, but we could use more documentation on using this tool.

They have been very accommodating to our requests.

We use a variety of tools and the choice of which to use depends on what our customer requires. If they are looking for a mature tool that fits their budget, we choose products by Micro Focus.

We have also used Gatling, JMeter, Tsung, and Neotys for the performance testing.

The installation was a bit of a challenge. It took us almost two weeks to get it up and running.

The pricing is the biggest challenge that we face.

There are open-source tools that do 90% of what LoadRunner and Micro Focus tools are able to do.

We work on multiple models such as on-premises, and multiple deployments for our customers. More insight that could be shared would be very helpful. 

We have a great partnership with Micro Focus.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for monitoring the servers, log files, and network devices.

It's a very good tool. It's user-friendly and it's very good at monitoring the infrastructure and the applications. It's very reliable in our environment and is helping the customers a lot in their monitoring of the application and the infrastructure.

The URL monitoring is excellent.

The product needs to offer better configuration with an SMS deploy. Right now, it's not configurable. There is no configuration for that.

They need to offer better technical support, which, right now, is not helpful or responsive.

I’ve been using the solution for five years.

The solution is very stable and reliable. The performance is good. there are no bugs or glitches, and it doesn’t crash or freeze.

The product can scale. It’s easy to expand if you need it to.

Technical support isn’t really that good. They are not technically capable. They are not helpful and they do not respond fast enough.

I don't know about the financial details surrounding the solution.

We’re partners and I am a consultant.

We’re using the latest version of the solution. We have around 200 people using the solution.

I’d recommend the solution to others. It's good, it's handy, it's easy to use, easy to configure, and the UI is great.

I’d rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope could improve by adding more features, such as cloud, APM, and DevOps monitoring.

I have used Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope within the last 12 months.

The stability of the Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope is good.

Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope is a scalable solution. 

We have approximately 35 people using it.

The initial implementation of Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope is easy. The process can take approximately 30 minutes with one person.

I have found the solution simple to maintain, it can be done with some person.

When Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope has introduced approximately eight years ago and there was not very much competition making the price high. However, when comparing the price of Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope now to other tools, they should reduce the price. It is similar to a legacy tool at this point.

I rate Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope five out of ten.