OpenText AI Operations Management Reviews

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.