OpenText AI Operations Management Reviews

• 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.