OpenText AI Operations Management Reviews

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.