Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope Reviews

We are using the solution for many things.

There's no agent you need installed on the servers. In our environment, we have some servers out of our control so we cannot manage them. We use SiteScope to monitor the availability, the resources on the servers, etc. This allows us to do this job without installing agents so there's no need to take care of anything on the server.

The interface is good. It's great for our technical team.

Sometimes in a huge environment, I think the documentation does not provide the required calculations so you can't know what the required set up should be. You need to test. We have some cases where we need to monitor the vCenters and the whole ESXi, available under this, and VMs. It may impact the server if you don't have the required experience.

The solution is normally stable, but in some environments, it's a bit more complex. For example, in our environment, we have more than 80 services published to the customers. Every day we have new items and new technologies. We have tests to retest, so sometimes when they move to new release, SiteScope itself will not work on it. You need to go to another release or wait for the R&D to provide you with a fix.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is good, but not perfect.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's really simple.

I would recommend the product. I would suggest that those considering implementation of the solution need to study their environment first. You need to know what you're going to do before installing SiteScope. Everything needs to be prepared. Communication metrics should be ready. If your communication metrics are not ready, then SiteScope will not work with you. Once you do, however, it will be a piece of cake. Just install it and install the mutation.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I have used SiteScope for over 10 years as a synthetic monitor for everything under the sun. 

The Monitor Templates functionality allowed us to spin up monitoring with .csv files pretty easily.  

We ended up using the "script" monitor the most, because the canned monitors didn't always do what we needed. It was easy enough to use, and the ability to use regex to monitor output in alerts and thresholds made the product very configurable.

For host monitoring, agentless monitoring requires no installs or special permissions, just a regular user account on the host and firewall access to SSH, WMI, NetBIOS, etc.  

DBQuery, URL, and Web Service monitoring were also valuable until we started using another tool for real transaction monitoring. Now, we rarely need to setup synthetic monitoring for applications, because we have actual user performance data.

It was a great tool for a long time. My go-to tool for everything. However, something happened at HPE years ago and investment in the development of the tool seems to have tanked.  

They have not kept up with browser security requirements or advances in GUIs, they switched to a corruptible database architecture instead of text config files, and the licensing is way more expensive than other tools that do the same thing (like LogicMonitor). Monitors have bugs that sit unfixed for multiple versions (file age and SOAP/XML Web Service monitors). The GUI is cumbersome, and it requires a Java client!  

Yes, some conditions trigger false alerts which is pretty difficult to recover from. The worst thing you can hear is that every monitor is opening a ticket from one server. Another admin built flood limits on the alert receiver side to prevent this issue from creating too many tickets to handle.

I did not see many issues with scalability which did not involve host infrastructure limits.

There are some very capable HPE/Micro Focus engineers on the forums, but overall opening a ticket was usually a waste of time for us. Most of the time we would have to figure out the problem ourselves through debug logging. Often, we would have to restore from a backup, in the event the monitor database would get corrupted.

Easy to setup and teach other teammates how to create monitors, templates, etc.

We implemented using an in-house team.

Easy to setup, but I’m not able to recommend this product any longer because there hasn’t been any real investment in enhancements that allow for cloud or container monitoring.   Apparently they no longer charge for solution templates and I’m not sure how they price the tool.  They’ve changed it over the years from “points”, metrics, and monitor count.  Not sure how they are selling this tool these days unless it’s to customers looking for an agentless onprem tool with no need to monitor new technologies.  

Completely agentless solution, i.e., no agent has to be installed on any services for monitoring, hence avoiding any troubleshooting of agents.

SiteScope is a very flexible solution. The organization where I have implemented this solution allowed us to create custom monitoring to suite the environment. When coupled with OMi and Service Manager, it gives a 360 degree view of the service availability and performance SLAs.

SiteScope supports several virtualization technologies (private and public), like AWS, Hyper-V, VMware, etc., without the installation of any extra modules. The dashboard is tablet friendly and supported anywhere on iOS and Android.

It can monitor over a 100 technologies with built-in solution templates (policies). Most importantly, one can even use SiteScope for monitoring application transactions recorded using Vugen.

Finally, SiteScope is available as a container for Docker, which is parts away from the installation & length upgrade procedure.

Direct integration with an SMS gateway for sending critical alerts to the support SME. This will help customer investing in third party middleware solutions for SMS.

No. SiteScope has built-in flat file DB, hence it removes the dependency of an external DB for higher stability.

No. SiteScope is highly scalable.

The support is good. Most importantly, the documentation is well-organized.

Depending on the requirement, we do recommend an agent-based solution. However, our overall first choice is SiteScope.

Has a simple setup. It can be up and running within hours.

I have implemented the solution myself for several organisations.

Not applicable.

SiteScope licensing can be node based-or monitor-based. I would recommend for node-based licensing.

For the first time users, it is recommended to make use of the experienced service provided for initial setup as they bring in experience and best practices.

No.

Go with a small install base (architecture) and gradually scale the solution.

Simplest tool for monitoring servers, web content, databases and other hardware. Its dashboard is really good.

• Complexity in template editing 
• They should provide more templates for new vendor devices.

Very stable.

No issues with the tools.

It fully depends on the costs, customer, and architect.

It was straightforward.

It depends on what the customer wants.

Before choosing a product, I want to evaluate to check all the requirements. Then, before implementation, check all the customer requirements accordingly. 

• Proactive monitoring based on real experience
• Configuring thresholds for warning events for proactive monitoring and actioning

Simple deployment: The deployment uses protocols such as NetBios, SSH, WMI, SNMP, which means that any device with any of these protocols will be monitored.

Great monitoring capabilities:  The monitoring capabilities have no limit; whatever you can imagine, you can monitor, even using URL monitors, database query monitors, and formula composite monitors, which are not common in other tools.

Reporting:  You have a lot of reports using different criteria - for example, dates, filters, events, and status - which let you analyze the monitored data, convert it into information and take actions.

Event-based actions: You can simply send an e-mail or take actions like restart the server, restart the service, etc.

Agentless Monitoring

Dynamic Monitoring

Dockers Monitoring

Dependency Configuration

Even though the log system is reliable, the tool must have a database. It could be more reliable using a database repository instead of a log repository. It could even improve performance and the ability for generating cross-domain reporting for better governance.

It has a wide variety of preconfigured monitors, and great capability for monitoring whatever you wish, including configuring formulas for monitoring.

It is an agentless tool, and very easy to implement. For better performance, try to use another disk different than the OS.

Configure HP SiteScope Restart option for releasing HW resources.

Use of Regular Expressions (regex) is a valuable feature

SiteScope is deployed on our network perimeter, and gives our operations teams an end user perspective of service availability. In the past, we'd get caught up in the old silo arguments. - the server looks fine, must be the network - the network looks fine, must be the applications etc. now with SiteScope, we can show the ops teams that there is a problem from the client perspective, and SiteScope can help determine root cause.

We use this product for monitoring client user experience. It's easy to template standard monitoring configurations, and automate monitoring configuration. (NOTE: there is some missing functionality in API's). SiteScope has a lot of common API's out of the box, and this saves coding and maintaining these interfaces.

Full application functionality available via the API. There are some functions you can perform managing monitors, that are only available through the UI.

Version 11.2X: Within the SiS GUI, you can individually add remote servers, and then configure multiple monitors to use this remote server. Via the API, this is not possible. You must use a template to create both the remote server and monitor. If you need to configure another monitor to use the same remote server, it became problematic. The API also has no ability to configure the stored credentials, and so on and so on. Basically, full automation of the SiS config is not possible, even using HP tools like HP Operations Orchestration, as the application, as I said, does not allow full configuration of monitor components via the API.

There are now subsequent versions released, and I have looked at the API updates included in these.

We have some ongoing stability issues, specifically with SiteScope monitoring Windows servers via SSH, connecting to OpenSSH. There appears to be a compatibility issue with the SSH client deployed with SiteScope, that causes SiteScope to leave a stable connection open, and eventually SiteScope runs out of resources.

I only deal with HP support, so cannot compare to other vendors. I will say, over the past 12 - 18 months, I'm assuming due to HP's multiple splits and cost cutting, and their attempts to be a somewhat agile software provider, the overall quality of code and documentation has fallen.

The initial deployment was easy and quick. Ongoing management and hardening can present some challenges, but no show stoppers.

If you read the manual it is quite straightforward and enables you to get a quick ROI. Full hardening and automation can present some challenges, but none insurmountable.

Depending on your requirements, there are two licensing models available. A simple point model, or an endpoint model. Points are consumed simply by number of monitors deployed, so if you are wanting to do end user or application monitoring, you want this one. Endpoint licensing is best suited if you don't have a monitoring solution, and want SiteScope to be your agentless monitor. This way, you can deploy any number of monitors at the one server (e.g. CPU, memory, disc, event log) and if they all share the one remote connections, that's one license. As opposed to the point license, where each check (CPU, memory, disc) is a point.

As far as agentless monitoring goes, we did paper based reviews of other products, but never PoCs. SiteScope was chosen as we required a supported solution, and obtained entitlements and discounts due to our relationship with HP.

Most answer are found in the manual except for licensing, which you'll need to contact HP for. There is also the SiteScope Community edition I believe, which allows you to use the product for free to test it, but, from memory, limits you to 100 monitors I think.

Quicker time to meet the requirements of our customer. Because it's agentless as opposed to install and manage agents, we're just focused on what monitors we need and getting those deployed.

It's lightweight, and its ability to address numerous gaps in our other monitoring tools. It's a very flexible product so you can run a script out of it, even straight out of the box. Unlike other tools, you can write a script, run it, and integrate it. It's another monitoring tool and also gives the customers, on demand, the ability to pull or have the monitors go out and interrogate the system and validate the health of the system on demand.

More out of the box Cloud integration and capabilities. Currently there's one for Amazon. There's numerous other platforms like, MS Office 365, Exchange or IBM. I haven't seen one for HPE. Those capabilities are solutions to where they're just ready to go.

We have had no issues with the stability.

I have not personally used it so I can't speak to it. My own experiences with most of them is that they're OK. They're probably above or below average.

We went away from SiteScope many years ago and came back because of its simplicity. In the interim we switched to some of the IBM product lines. SiteScope is very intuitive and we've been able to accomplish what we want very quickly and efficiently compared to IBM.

From my perspective right now, it seems fairly simple or straightforward. Most of it we had up and running in a couple hours. We spent more time trying to fulfill our own requirements. The only gap or complexity we've added is around provisioning of monitors because we're driving it from an automated service catalog.

Don't over think it, it's a simple tool.

It has been used in a wide area of monitoring systems and network devices in my company.

It has multiple monitors that can be deployed OOTB, which includes basic system monitors for CPU, Disk, Memory, NIC's, etc. It does not use an agent, which might tax system resources.

Licensing is a little steep. 

SiS, the abbreviated acronym for the tool, used to be owned by another company. You could purchase the product with unlimited monitors for $2500. Since HP's acquisition of the product, licensing is done on a points-per-monitor basis. Each individual monitor costs x number of points, an HP sales rep has those exact numbers, which change, seemingly., at whim! :-) You just get an error that you cannot add more monitors without additional licensing! With OOTB you get a few, not enough though to monitor any numbers in a enterprise. And, with literally hundreds of nodes and application monitors, database, web, etc. available, costs can get steep!

We haven't had any issues with stability.

We haven't had any issues with scalability.

It's a monitoring tool that's deeply integrated with Performance Center. We can put a load on it and see all the information we need. Plus, it's an inexpensive solution.

It's integrated with different monitoring tools, such as AppDynamics. When we perform testing, it gives us a single client for selecting which monitoring data we want for later analysis of the performance of our systems.

We'd like a uniform interface for monitoring our system, since that's the purpose of SiteScope. I think this would make it a true monitoring tool for the environment.

It just works.

We're able to scale when necessary.

We have not used tech support.

We'll probably remove SiteScope shortly because we've been using another monitoring tool in production. SiteScope is just not something we use very much of any more.

• Agentless monitoring
• Different types of health checks
• Web-based UI for easy interaction
• End-to-end monitoring
• E-mail alert messages along with SMS features

System health check monitoring and email alerts after reaching threshold limits.

Monitor mobile health status too.

6 years

No

No

No

7/10

8/10

No

HP vendor

100%

Little expensive

Splunk and Gomez

No

The most valuable feature is its ability to do what it’s supposed to do, which is to ensure that you have a wide array of tool-sets to properly monitor your infrastructure. Also, that it’s able to scale properly is valuable.

The products have been able to deliver the service to our business, which is to ensure that the applications that depend on our servers are always available. The business and support teams can be supported properly. We can choose how to use HP’s tools to monitor the changing dynamics of IT technology. Sitescope allows us to run queries to deal with different cases, so that we don’t have to go back to HP to open an ER for us. That’s one of the main things I love about the product.

I think, what comes to mind, to be able to reliably do more monitoring on a single Sitescope server in a more compact way, with fewer servers, would be an area for improvement. Right now there’s no way to really say that you’ve hit the limit for the server, but that’s important to know.

Every product has its issues, but I think overall it’s stable. It’s never perfect but it’s pretty good.

I think that the scalability needs to be worked on a bit. We can scale fine horizontally, but we’d like to scale less horizontal and be more compact. HP still has a bit of ways to go to ensure that this happens. I would give it a 6-7/10.

It depends. When you purchase the product, you have somebody managing your account that always handles your case, which ensures that you get the response from the right tier of service, which we’ve found extremely helpful.

About nine years ago, they were changing requirements in what we were doing, so we needed to find a solution that could cover as much that we needed.

Straightforward and very good.

We also looked at BMC, and IBM. We chose HP because of the pure requirements and matching functionality with the product. I think the key reason why we chose HP is that the solution gives you a tool-set to monitor the technology vs. other products that only gives you a very specific solution that you can only use to monitor one particular technology.

You need to ensure that functionality meets the majority of your requirements. Quality or proposed quality of their support as well as their ability to keep ahead of the curve in terms of the technology. But remember there’s no perfect solution – you always apply the 80/20 rule and find the solution that can match your current requirements and anticipate what your future needs are. That’s why we’ve had our product for over nine years now, which shows we did a good job with our selection.