OpenText Service Manager [EOL] Reviews

• It integrates well with multiple Management Information Bases (MIB's).
• It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition

• It detects abnormal network traffic -- even from a PC network interface card
• It provides us with many types of logs with hundreds of thousands of log entries

It's not user friendly (too complex), and it gives limited guidance documentation of how to filter all the logs detected. We struggle with filtering over 50 types of logs with more than 200,000 lines of log information.

It can detect the Cisco switch backplane's latest condition, but I'm unable to find any documentation to provide me the value insight of these logs, hence reducing the power of risk management for my customers' network environments.

We implemented it around 2008.

It takes around 24 hours to detect all the network equipment & VLANs. If any of the network equipment or VLANs are missing from the finished network topology, you need to delete the whole topology, reset the system, and scan again.

We previously used a very old version Solarwind, which could only detect CPU & memory. The main purpose for the upgrade project, was due to a broadcast storm occuring with my previous customer.

It took my HPOV classmate and a team of more than 10 people to implement this product, and it has lasted less than four years due to a lack of research of their requirements. Due to the complexity (depending on your project scope, implementation can take around two months to finalize all the needed settings.

We used some very skilful vendors (two freelancers, and a wiring company). The vendors were HP NNI for the server, and HP PI for the manual setup – (including reporting), then the wiring company

There are three types of licenses, so make sure the license you select fits into your project scope. It took ove two weeks to verify the licenses, but it has lasted with my customer for more than six years.

• Flexibility
• Scalability

This is our “go-to” application for all ITIL processes globally. All service desks and backline teams utilize this tool from a work intake and incident management perspective. Due to its flexibility, it allowed us to come together globally on our IT business processes.

The tool is constantly improving and has been able to meet our business needs for the most part.

I've been using it for nine years.

Recently, we wanted to deploy the application across multiple data centers, but with the multi-cast restriction, we weren’t able to do it. They are working on a TCP based communication which should remove this restriction.

Stability was a major issue in older versions of the product. As the product has matured, the stability has improved. It is a Java-based tool that utilizes Jgroups for communication across the servlets. Proper tuning is needed to stabilize the Java servlets and avoid 'Out of Memory' errors.

Scalability has not been a big issue. The only complexity comes from the amount of Web clients needed to support a large implementation. Maintaining them, doing certificates for SSL if necessary and troubleshooting them at an individual level can get complicated.

Customer service is good in the fact that they are friendly and want to help, and they do follow up on issues.

Their front line support is poor. They do not have real experience so most issues will take a week or more to address and normally requires their second or third level support, or even their R&D Team. Premier Support is highly recommended if you can afford it.

No previous solution was used.

It was complex due to the company still defining the processes as they were implementing the tool.

In-house implementation was done.

Have a firm grasp on your business processes and how you’d like to see them implemented.

It was easy to implement, as we currently have many HP solutions.

The integrated nature of the solution, from a service desk perspective, because we had so many other HP products, was easy to deploy. It was best that all our products could talk to each other without more strenuous challenges.

Part of the problem they’re facing right now is they’re behind the curve in SaaS offerings. Part of our reason for moving away from Service Manager is that HP was not on the leading edge of the technology and was consequently being surpassed by SaaS offerings. They’re offering one now, but I think it’s too quick to market and not all bugs have been worked out.

HP products generally have always been stable, and this is no different. I’ve been an HP user for 20+ years, so I definitely support their stability.

It's a very scalable product, as with all HP's other products.

On the development suite, technical support was very strong. On the user side, not quite as strong.

We own a number of other HP products that are related to Service Manager, I was brought on to deploy this package.

Complexities have more to do with our company’s internal environments, meaning that we have a third party management service that manages our desk environment, and so we needed to communicate with that system.

We also looked at CA, IBM, and Service Now. At the time, I felt HP was the stronger product. I felt that they were investing heavily in the product's future capabilities.

I considered the integration capabilities, that is, being able to integrate the suite of HP tools to already existing tools (in this case, also HP (SiteScope, AssetManager, BSM, etc.)). I was not involved in the initial purchase by Dignity Health, but I know price was important, so I assume it was also important when choosing HP.

Part of the challenge for any organization is the scale with which you intend to use any solution. This means that for larger organizations using Service Manager, HP could scale no matter what the demand was. However, many products are limited in their ability to scale. When looking at software, I think scalability should be important. If you can’t find that, walk away.

Also, they have a very poor follow-up. The technology itself isn’t very bad, but HP's lack of follow-up by its sales organizations has driven me the other direction. Not a single sales person followed up when I mentioned this a year ago. But, I still use the other tools pretty extensively and I intend to expand on them. I am, however, looking at a new service desk solution.

One of the big benefits that’s come out of this is a centralized view of all IT operations that really enable us to shift resources (people and money) in a real-time way to accomplish whatever we need.

If our company has availability issues or we need faster project timelines, or whatever our business need is at the time, this solution is able to allow us to shift our needs properly.

In the next release, I would like to see easier integration with the other tool sets, such as UCCB, business service management, etc.

Extremely stable – I have one person that manages all of it and it’s totally fine.

Once you get the reference architecture, you just have to add people and the same product.

We don’t have that many problems, but when we do have one, as long as we escalate effectively, it gets resolved in a timely fashion.

We bought every product HP offered back in 2007 when the Intel craze was sweeping the IT industry. We were running BMC Magic Solution before.

The product is easy to set up to operate the way the software was designed. However, our IT shop wanted to operate a legacy mode, so we had to re-train our team to learn how to use the software the way it was intended to be used as designed by HP.

BMC and CA. We chose HP because their functionality seemed to be fairly better, their product offering seemed to touch every area of our company’s needs, and we wanted to integrate it completely into our business.

We wanted to align with Intel, we wanted them to be a cloud offering, and we also needed a technology market leader that could offer diverse set of offerings. So for us, we wanted to invest in one company that could service all of our needs across the board.

We will upgrade to 9.40 before the end of the summer, but there are still some adoption issues. We struggle with and the simplicity of getting reporting data at a high level, and output is not where it needs to be for us. But as far as having an easily supportable and deployable product, it’s really changed the work we manage IT in the company.

Call HP, call BMC, call CA, call Service Now. Be skeptical of the guys that say “we can do whatever you want”. Partner with somebody that has a vision of how IT service management is supposed to work and shift your business in that direction.

Customization of SD, IM, PM, CM modules, general behaviour.

7-8 years

All the time, sadly.

Same, it wasn't always stable. Actually, I wouldn't call it stable now either.

Hmm, let's see. That functions pretty well...

Now, this is the point where I could write some serious stories about how HP failed to help us.

Nope, I'm all HPSM.

Fast, responsive and modern design. It's used throughout the company and is a very valuable asset.

Teams can collaborate with each other in a more dynamic and responsive way.

Bring in new requested features to give the product a faster development cycle, ahead of the game!

1 year

We encountered no major issues with deployment at all.

Stability has been above average. 

The ability to properly follow ITIL v3, from interaction thru request, catalogue, problem and change.

It has an intuitive front end which allows us to roll out good customer end user experiences.

In its current iteration, around 3 years.

No, I have been using HP ITSM solutions now for 13 years.

My only concern is the flexibility of the product in smaller environments. HP do recommend people use their Service Anywhere product for SMEs. Unfortunately the nature of some businesses and agencies is that this isn't possible and they insist on their own in-house tool.

The integration between HP tools.

• Stricter process implementation
• Better performance

Over 10 years

No

Stability was always an issue untill we did a full load and performance test, since then this is in good shape.

No

Great! 8 out of 10

Good, 7 out of 10

Service Center ran out of support, so we had to switch.

It was complex due to the organization's size, complex customers and a lot of dependencies with interfaces internal and external.

In house team

Stability, lower operation costs, and straight process implementation.