Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope Review

I have used SiteScope for over 10 years as a synthetic monitor for everything under the sun. 

The Monitor Templates functionality allowed us to spin up monitoring with .csv files pretty easily.  

We ended up using the "script" monitor the most, because the canned monitors didn't always do what we needed. It was easy enough to use, and the ability to use regex to monitor output in alerts and thresholds made the product very configurable.

For host monitoring, agentless monitoring requires no installs or special permissions, just a regular user account on the host and firewall access to SSH, WMI, NetBIOS, etc.  

DBQuery, URL, and Web Service monitoring were also valuable until we started using another tool for real transaction monitoring. Now, we rarely need to setup synthetic monitoring for applications, because we have actual user performance data.

It was a great tool for a long time. My go-to tool for everything. However, something happened at HPE years ago and investment in the development of the tool seems to have tanked.  

They have not kept up with browser security requirements or advances in GUIs, they switched to a corruptible database architecture instead of text config files, and the licensing is way more expensive than other tools that do the same thing (like LogicMonitor). Monitors have bugs that sit unfixed for multiple versions (file age and SOAP/XML Web Service monitors). The GUI is cumbersome, and it requires a Java client!  

Yes, some conditions trigger false alerts which is pretty difficult to recover from. The worst thing you can hear is that every monitor is opening a ticket from one server. Another admin built flood limits on the alert receiver side to prevent this issue from creating too many tickets to handle.

I did not see many issues with scalability which did not involve host infrastructure limits.

There are some very capable HPE/Micro Focus engineers on the forums, but overall opening a ticket was usually a waste of time for us. Most of the time we would have to figure out the problem ourselves through debug logging. Often, we would have to restore from a backup, in the event the monitor database would get corrupted.

Easy to setup and teach other teammates how to create monitors, templates, etc.

We implemented using an in-house team.

Easy to setup, but I’m not able to recommend this product any longer because there hasn’t been any real investment in enhancements that allow for cloud or container monitoring.   Apparently they no longer charge for solution templates and I’m not sure how they price the tool.  They’ve changed it over the years from “points”, metrics, and monitor count.  Not sure how they are selling this tool these days unless it’s to customers looking for an agentless onprem tool with no need to monitor new technologies.