OpenText Network Node Manager i Reviews

We are able to have all network devices in a single place in order to send the alerts to an umbrella tool (Service Now). 

The stability is quite good.

It's quite a mature solution.

Technically speaking, I'm facing some issues when monitoring Barracuda firewalls. There is some room for improvement in this area.

The documentation for the initial/upgrade setup present errors sometimes.

This product has been used in our company for ten years, I suppose, however, I have been personally using it only for two or three years.

Regarding stability, we don't face any issues. It's reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

From the very beginning until now, we deployed to two servers in a fail over environment. Therefore, I can't really speak to the scalability of the product.

Technical support could be much better and work much faster.

Typically, is taking some time so solve tickets. If involving a higher level expert is needed, you should wait.

The initial setup is somewhere in between. It's both not so easy, and also not so complex. We have the Linux version. Some years ago we had physical servers and we migrated to virtual ones. 

There were some issues and we opened some tickets, however, in the end, they were solved. It's just that there are a few key steps that need to be handled carefully during installation. You need documentation to guide you. However, some of the articles meant to assist were not very accurate. If you're following exact instructions line by line, and you are not getting what is expected, you have to do a bit of problem-solving by yourself.

I don't handle the pricing, however, it's my understanding that the product is quite expensive.

I would recommend the solution to others due to the fact that it's quite stable and mature. That said, there are a few improvements that can be made.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

Real time network monitoring application: It is very stable, which provides quick root cause analysis (RCA) for any network faults.

Only to improve the GUI.

Only HPE/IBM/BMC and SolarWinds tools are very stable.

No issues in tools.

Not good compared to IBM or Zenoss support.

It is fully depends on costing, customer, and architect.

It was straightforward.

I evaluated this product this product before I chose it.

Before implementing, clear all the customer requirements, then choose products accordingly.

The HPE suite is amazingly beautiful, has a fantastic user experience, and provides a high amount of simplification across transactions when adopting cloud technologies significantly.

NNMi is super robust and seamlessly connects everything across applications, infrastructure, server, storage, and networks. We wanted to connect the dots together.

We have implemented not just NNMi, but the entire HPE suite. The trigger to do this was the digital transformation that we are undertaking at my company, which was really fueled by the desire to give a completely different digital experience to our employees.

We started out with adopting the cloud. We started out with an Office 365 migration a couple of years back. We did it in record time. We migrated 125,000 plus mailboxes in 18 weeks. We looked at a case study on the Microsoft website, and once we liked that, and IT liked it too, our users loved it. And users love Yammer, because that's their way of going ahead and chattering about with everybody else.

Then we said, “Why not get everything else on the cloud too, rather than being on premises”? We also had a lot of end-of-life infrastructure and we said, “Okay, we've got to go significantly into the public cloud”.

We're very heavy in Microsoft Azure and in about nine months we've migrated our entire enterprise application landscape onto the public cloud. We're talking about close to 200 applications outside of SAP itself, which we upgraded to SAP HANA. Everything else is in the cloud. We have a true hybrid infrastructure out there. We're also on AWS, of course. We have our trouble-ticketing system on AWS, so if Azure goes down, we've got something else up and running. And of course, we use it for disaster recovery.

NNMi has proved to be certainly better in a) giving us slightly better capabilities to switch to alternatives when incidents do happen, and b) being able to optimize our costs on the infrastructure monitoring side. Now we have the ability to monitor all of these networks globally from a single tool.

I want to have some of those nicer features for when networks go flapping. I want to receive alerts before problems occur rather than when it actually goes down. We need to have our service providers working very closely with us, which will not necessarily happen. We still have submarine cables getting cut which would completely leave us blacked out. But, those are not necessarily problems that happen very often.

Our first deployment started out earlier this year. We've been kind of up and about with NNMi probably a little more than a complete quarter. That's about the duration that we've had it operational.

This transformation has meant, and it continues to be, a lot of change management and adoption by IT with getting them used to this paradigm change and these new tools coming in. But I think there is a lot more recognition of the fact that automation is going to transform their lives and that this is something for the better. I think that's been something which has been really positive and that's the stuff that I'm really working with.

I'm not the super techie person. I run transformation programs. My responsibility and charter is really to make sure that wherever we're running digital transformation, make sure that we take our employees, as well as our IT group, along so that they're not hit by something big. We take them along through this entire change out there.

Stability has been pretty good. But like I said, it's been up and running about a quarter now. I know there are a lot of other enterprises that have had it for years and years and have it running for very long and are doing extremely well.

I'm guessing that it will be the same for us, too. I do know that it's really kind of “best in breed” as a solution, so I'm not expecting any stability issues coming out of there.

I think we shouldn't necessarily confuse usability, per se, with robustness or scale. That's something NNMi definitely goes ahead and gives us. I've heard it's really scalable. NNMi has been there, done that, for so long with very large, very complex enterprises at the kind of scale that we're talking about. I think I'm okay with usability.

Technical support is good, I guess. We are not having trouble so far. But when we did want to get help or support, we got it.

We used to have CA Spectrum and Wiley. During our transformation, we decided we needed something super robust to be able to seamlessly connect everything across applications, infrastructure, server, storage, and networks. We wanted to connect the dots together. That's what triggered us to go with HPE. I think it's doing pretty well.

I was not involved in the initial setup. The decision to replace our previous solutions with HPE and NNMi was not taken by me. It was taken before I came to my current company.

I think there is a steeper learning curve compared to a lot of other new age products. A lot of the new age products which have been built in the last couple of years or so, are very, very intuitive. They are built with so called, "design thinking"; what people really, really talk about. That's not necessarily true of some of the older products that are out there.

I work with big vendors like HPE as well as start-ups, especially now that we're on our hybrid journey. I'm using them to do backups for me on the cloud; both end-user computing backups, as well as server backups. Azure backup doesn't seem to work out for me.

I think what I would really be looking at in a vendor is does the vendor vision really synchronize very well with my vision of where I want to be? What is it that I'm looking for when want something to be provided to my end customers who are our 170,000 employees out there?

I have a vision. I have a roadmap. I have quarterly deadlines to say, "This is what I'm going to be doing and can a vendor really support me to do that?" I'm okay if they don't have some features, because I don't think everybody's figured out everything yet. As long as I know that: a) they really are gung-ho about the vision that I have and they're completely in line with that vision, and b) they have the capabilities to be able to solve some of those niggling problems which will definitely pop up when we're going to go through a transformation program of this kind of scale. Then I'm okay with them.

We install, integrate, customize and configure this solution for our clients. We are system integrators who resell tools to our customers and we are partners with Micro Focus. 

The great thing about this solution is its compatibility for enterprise level organizations. If you need to install 10,000 or even 20,000 devices, it's easy to monitor. The product's fault management is awesome. 

I haven't had a great experience with this solution because the dashboards are not customizable and it's not user-friendly. The market has changed and people are now focused on mobile solutions, tablet solutions, or dashboards, which I prefer to use. I'd like to see dashboard customization and customized reports.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The stability is good. 

The scalability is great. 

The customer service has improved drastically over the past couple of years and I think they're very good now. 

Positive

Deployment generally takes around two to three hours. It's a matter of integrating with the databases, and then connecting devices. It's not easy getting the connectivity right and that can be time-consuming because there are lots of configurations required on every device when connecting to the NNM. We use our own technical team for deployment, usually three or four people; two for delivery and two for follow-up support.

I think getting an ROI takes about three years but it depends on the customer and the scenario. For some companies, for example, if one site goes down and nobody is aware of it, the cost can be in the millions. In other scenarios, the loss wouldn't be so great.  

The license is a perpetual lifetime license and the subscription is on a yearly basis. It's an expensive product because it's an enterprise-level product with a big team working behind it for batch releases, maintenance releases, version upgrades, maintenance support, and professional services. 

I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

We are using the solution for network monitoring.

We had some issues with some of the features, some modules are not meeting expectations. Additionally, they need to start following some of the latest trends.

I have been using the solution for approximately 7 years.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable product. 

When we speak to the customer service about issues that we have been experiencing, they tell us that is how the solution operates, unfortunately, and we have to live with it. 

We have approximately 3 technicians doing all the installs and maintenance.

The solution is priced mid-range compared to the competition.

We are thinking about migrating to SolarWinds because of some of the issues we have been experiencing.

I rate Micro Focus Network Node Manager a six out of ten.

Topology creation is the most valuable feature.

We are using it for network discovery and troubleshooting enforced management. We are expanding it to cover the performance and the traffic part as well.

The deployment architecture and installation part needs improvement. In regards to the voice monitoring piece, there is a lot of scope for improvement. Voice monitoring/end-to-end voice monitoring, whether in a voice over IP(VoIP) or a voice over PSTN, if I'm making a call, it should be monitored irrespective of the path/carrier that I am passing through.

As of now, we are running on a single machine that is a VM Windows-based VM, so that is not quite stable. It frequently goes down and we have a lot of issues with that. However, we are now upgrading it to a distributed environment based on the Linux operating system. I'm hoping that it should be stable.

We are a quite large organization. we have more than 120,000 employees. In terms of the scalability, we have experienced no issues. As an organization, we consist of more than 120,000 people. The end users of NNMi are less, i.e., probably around 50 – 60 end users. The network operations team is the end-user for the NNMi and we still have had no issues with the scalability.

I was not part of the previous installation, but for the current one that we are deploying, I was involved in the setup process.

The setup was complex and needs a medium kind of knowledge. The documentation is also not very good, i.e., a lot of things that are not written in the document are surprises. The installation is definitely not easy. It is a complex one and it would be much easier if the product was redesigned in that way.

We are considering both NetBrain and Nectar Services, for a couple of the features that NNMi does not have.

You should interact more with the customers and listen to your voice.

Try to make the product better from the usability perspective.

The main feature we find the most useful for us is that it makes a map of the topology of the network.

Because of the topological network mapping, our management can quickly take action when there's a network problem.

It needs better management for the routing protocol, which right now is really not very good. While it does allow us to come in and quickly manage faults in the network, there are issues with the connection and packages between the physical and software layers of the router.

There are no issues when we deploy it.

We have no issues with stability. It's quite stable, in fact.

We have a large enterprise and a large network. We've had no problems regarding scalability.

We've had to contact them as sometimes we find bugs in the software. They're a little slow, but they're OK.

We've worked with CA and IBM, and they're still part of our architecture.

We mainly use it for monitoring notes, and if you've got outages and stuff like that.

So actually it makes our life a lot easier in identifying if you've got problematic areas.

That is a little bit difficult for me because I haven't been personally dealing with the software directly, so the subcontractor has been the face in informing us what the product is capable of. Hence we came to the sessions now in order for us to have first-hand information on what all these products are capable of.

I've been using it, let's say for four years.

So far it has been stable for us, although we might be using an old product. So we haven't really been upgrading and getting to the latest and greatest versions.

I can't really comment about scalability. Our company is a little bit stable, in the sense that the company hasn't grown much. We don't necessarily have too much control over what we can do because most things are regulated from outside the company. So getting to do new things is a little bit of a challenge for us.

We fortunately work with a subcontractor that is dealing with HP. So there's a middle-man to talk to in case we run into problems.

I wouldn't say I know about the setup because most of the work was done by the subcontractors.

We base our decision of vendor really around the support issue. It's really about stability of the product you have, and your escalation levels should also be playing a role, because if you run into problems, you need to know who your friend is.