OpenText Operations Bridge Reviews

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.

Organizations using multiple tools for monitoring their infrastructure, namely storage, UPS, etc. rely on multiple consoles to view the events from respective elements to manage consoles. This causes delay in isolating the fault. OMi helps in the consolidation of events on a single dashboard from several sources via the available APIs.

The biggest strength of the Operations Bridge is the consolidation of events from various sources. For one customer, we were able to consolidate events from more than 25 sources, most via Traps using a BSM Connector. Once the Head of IT Operations saw the value, then the expectation was that all the other siloed departments would work together to send the events to a central console.

Event consolidation

Cross domain event correlation

Run Time Service Model (RTSM)

Flexible dashboard with the availability of widgets

Agent and agentless monitoring

The most important feature is availability of the software on Docker, hence reducing implementation & upgrade timeline

Remove the dependency of Java technology. This is a feature used for admin purposes to update the modeling.

For high stability, I would recommend a HA setup with the recommended configurations.

Single server setup should only be considered for small environment.

Micro Focus Operation Bridge is highly scalable. It can support multiple server architecture for HA, DC-DR setup, and is also available as a container for the Docker, which can be ported on private or public cloud.

The customer service response is good.

I have helped organizations to switch from other tools to OMi. The main reason was event consolidation and seamless integration with the Service Manager for incident management and SLA reporting.

The setup is straightforward. Depending of the architecture/integration, it can take from one to 10 days.

Highly recommend to go for CDF (Containerized Deployment Foundation)

I have implemented this product with the help of a team.

ROI will depend on the modules available.

E.g., if Orchestration is integrated with events, the fault can be fixed with the given sets of SOPs. This can give up to 90% ROI in a short period of time.

Pricing is very flexible and depends on the modules selected as per the requirement. You can select from the available modules Micro Focus Operation Bridge (SiteScope, Operations Agent, Reporter, Operations Analytic, Cloud Optimizer, Orchestration, CMDB, and several Management Packs for various technologies like Oracle, DB2, Citrix, etc.).

Not applicable.

Implementation of Micro Focus Operations Bridge will need a long-term perspective while solving today's problem. 

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.

With our HPOM installation, we monitor the European (and part of the global) infrastructure of our financial services, consisting of around 800 servers in various regions.

It has greatly reduced the number and duration of outages as support teams are notified immediately when something goes wrong or even before something breaks. The integration with the ticketing tool makes sure that there is a record for every issue.

The various types of monitors are very useful. We use them all:

• Threshold monitors
• Log file monitors
• Open message templates
• SNMP trap monitors
• Process monitors
• Database and infrastructure SPIs.

Additionally, the Performance Manager provides great insight into our systems' performance.

Installing and upgrading the HPOM and Operations Agent software is not always easy and the process can be quite fragile. Once it is running, it is very quick and stable, but an upgrade can quite easily break something or terminate unexpectedly.

For additional features, we are looking forward (and implementing) OMi 10.6x.

• 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. 

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.

It is mostly used for event management. We use it to consolidate events from different data collectors.

The correlation feature is the most used feature. It allows you to correlate events from different sources and have more meaningful events.

The deployment of agents on new CI should be improved. There should be some kind of automation to directly deploy them from the console.

It can maybe have some more AI functions because most of the other tools are going in that direction.

I have been using this solution for around two years.

It is stable. It has got high availability.

I haven't done that yet, but its scalability must be good. It must be easy to add new servers.

In terms of usage, mostly the operations teams work on these events. We have a team of around ten members.

Their support is good. The community is also helpful.

It was pretty straightforward.

It was actually management's call, so I didn't get a chance to look at other tools.

I would rate Operations Bridge an eight out of ten. It is a very good solution for event management and agent-based monitoring.

This is a mature product. There is good support from HPE and it involves constant updates. There is a path to move on to the next product.

It's our monitor of managers. It's our monitoring tool and it looks after all our servers.

At the moment, I don't know what the roadmap is for this solution. There's a product that's been out for two or three years now, called Operations Bridge. There is a migration path to that, but it's not an obvious one. HPE has not made that obvious to us, so I'm trying to find out how we move on.

The product and the UI need updating. Everything about the user experience needs updating. I work at the other end, which is the more technical end, and I like what it does. But when a user sees a GUI that looks like it was written in the 1970s, it doesn't fill them with any confidence. It needs more dashboards, more graphs, and more everything that management wants to see.

We've had this solution for 12-13 years.

It's fairly complex deployment, even though it's supposed to work out-of-the-box. It's a product that can be tailored. It probably will work straightaway, but if you want to get the best out of it, you've got to change it to suit your environments.

It's a mature product and has good stability.

The product has good scalability. We've gone from 100 to 700 servers without any hiccups. It's a very scalable product.

I have used technical support. They are good; perfect. We don't raise many cases, but when we do raise cases, it's good. They are the same as any other company. It's just support at the end of the day.

There is an issue at the moment with HPE, in that their support for this product has moved over to Sofia, Bulgaria. That can pose its own problems, but it's like anything that's off-shored. It's going to take a little bit longer, and you have to accept a few more difficulties when you're trying to explain problems or reject solutions.

I've looked at Moogsoft and Nagios as alternative products. There are lots and lots of other ones out there. I’m not sure if we will stay with HPE.

We've got a very mature product that would be awful to try and replace. However, if we don't get what we want out of it, and we can't go forward with it, then the new kid on the block will just come in and slot straight in.

When selecting a vendor, I look for attention to the customer and the support you're going to get when you're going through this. If we do move, it will be a fairly fraught experience. We want to be confident that either HPE or another vendor will be behind us and helping us down that path.

I've been working with it for 15 years, and I know how powerful it is. If you spoke to some of our end-users, they probably wouldn't even mark it, because they don't even use it. They don't use the interface, because they don't like it. There are so many other things on the market now.