OpenText Network Node Manager i Reviews

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 most important benefit is to have one controller and to get all information to a single point. This is easier than looking at different points to see where messages and tickets are coming from.

It makes our work easier.

I think the technical support should be improved.

There is not a lot of downtime. It's OK.

We have had no problems with scalability for our infrastructure and our dimensions.

Sometimes technical support is not so amazing. We need to wait a long time to get a solution for a ticket. And often they repeat the same questions. You open the ticket, and you get questions back that you already answered in the ticket. So it's often a long wait and not so easy to get the right people. Offices tend to get inferior support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We have used HPE software since about 1995. Sometimes it has been good, but at times it was very terrible. In the last year or so, there has been improvement and I think it's come a long way, but it’s not on the mark yet.

I think you should take a look at it. If it fits your needs, then it's OK. But it's not the only solution. There are other alternatives.

When choosing a vendor, the solution has to be a benefit to our companies. It must be a complete package. The best software turns out to be not the best thing if technical support is not good or there are other issues; then go with something else.

It is a good network monitoring, enterprise solution. It is a meta-monitoring solution with good visualization.

The benefit is that we are able to use some features and we can provide external customers with the ability to monitor their devices.

It has improved our workflow, which is now easier with the solution. However, it's not an enterprise scalable solution. We are serving over 500 managed customers and 10 to 50 customers are being added every month. There are limitations to the number of tenants and groups we can add.

The network monitoring side is pretty good, but the performance side is poor. I would like to see this improved in the next version. HPE has Vertica now. I am expecting to see in Vertica what I didn't see in Version 10.0 of this solution. I now have to wait until version 11. It's hindering us so much because we cannot give it directly to customer because after a number of connections, the systems goes down within one minute. After 10 people log on at the same time, the system stops. Generating a report can take from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Due to scalability issues, we have implemented another solution to take the data out from one database and put it in another one This is a big limitation.

We have been using this solution since 2002. We had Versions 6, 7.5 and upgraded to 8 and 9. We are now planning to upgrade to Version 10.

From the network management side, scalability is good. From a performance side, it is very bad. It doesn't support the building of a Sybase database. It has limitations on the number of connections. It is limiting because it slows down after only 30 connections. Even the HPE lab personnel came to our site and they agreed that the solution cannot support all of these connections. We have implemented another solution to take the data out from that database and put it in another one. This is a big limitation.

We have to give a lot of feedback to level 1 support so they can understand what the problem is. Our requests then go to the lab. Getting to the lab is very difficult. As enterprise customers, our requests should go directly to the lab.

The managed services side is moving to IBM and the IT side will remain with HPE. This was a management decision. There are limitations on the number of connections and on device support. New devices have to be released by HPE. You cannot connect to it directly because it doesn't integrate with all of the applications. That cancels performance.

I have no advice unless HPE comes up with the new version of Vertica. They are moving to HPE Vertica 8, I think, for the next release. I'm expecting some improvements with Vertica, but I'm not expecting it anytime soon.

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.

Effectively monitor networks physical and virtual devices. SPI's that provide functional reports and metrics. Integrates with other tools and products to give oversight of networks and systems.

Miss very few events. Rich reporting features.

A little better documentation, books updated like HP Network Node Manager: Getting Started.

Since NNM was version 4.

Some, but they can be worked though with HP Support.

No

No

Customer Service:

Good

Technical Support:

Good

No

Straight forward, though experience in installing or updating the tool is a must. The technical documentation is takes experience and much reading to master.

In house. I have installed, upgraded NNM from version 4 though 10.10.

Like any enterprise solutions it has a cost. Not only in initial price, but in time to do advanced configuration and maintenance of the product.

No

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.

The GUI and config manager.

The network Manager has improved incident tracking and speed of response to trouble tickets.

A year plus.

Configuration was a bit cumbersome for snmp traps on the routers and configuration of the SPIs was a little complicated.

None that I noticed.

Solarwinds was what was used by the organisation but the management decided on a unified solution IT and Telco.

It seemed a bit complex in some areas.

A vendor did the implementation and they were very experienced and responsive to issues.

I'd say about 0.3 for now as we really haven't used it for that long yet.

The solution is part of the HP NMS solution and the unification helps in keeping a flow of processes going in the organisation.

Multi-vendor equipment support Root cause analysis Multi-type and rich reports

Need a good estimation of the network (manly nodes) otherwise, the system will not work correctly. Many issues can be found during deployment due to the use of many components and features by the product.

Sizing should be estimated before deployment

A complete solution for network monitoring. The cost is high comparing to its competitors, but the results are awesome.