My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to engage with MicroFocus professional services if you want to implement effectively.

Don't under-estimate the need for formal training. New customers will not get the best out of OpsBridge by flying solo from day one.

OpsBridge is powerful, comprehensive, and well suited to organizations with the budget to justify it. Its service-driven approach is good and the increasing inclusion of machine-learning features is welcome. Don't underestimate the amount of hardware needed to run the full suite on and plan that into your project.

If necessary, validate its suitability for running on a cloud environment. Earlier versions c.2019 didn't fully support installing on AWS or Azure.

If you are considering MicroFocus OperationsBridge, run it as a major project with a fully-resourced project team and associated budget.

With great power comes great administration !!

We're partners with Micro Focus as well as Microsoft and BMC and we're based in Isreal.

We use the on-premises deployment model. We don't use the cloud deployment model. A lot of the systems are not on the cloud yet. 

We also internally developed a system on the AppSwitch platform to help our clients gain more advantage. We have it monitoring all systems.

If the customer is an enterprise-level customer with more than 1,500 or 2,000 users, Micro Focus can help. Users can do a lot on the IP in terms of the monitoring systems and will find a lot of boot code. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I usually work with the latest version of Micro Focus Operations Bridge.

Micro Focus Operations Bridge requires maintenance, and the team that did the deployment also takes care of the maintenance.

Overall, five people within my company use Micro Focus Operations Bridge.

My advice to anyone looking into implementing Micro Focus Operations Bridge is that it's a good solution that gives you a complete picture of your organization and helps you find root causes and problems in your organization quickly, so you can fix the issues faster and save money.

My rating for Micro Focus Operations Bridge is eight out of ten.

My company is a partner and integrator for Micro Focus Operations Bridge.

We're using a mix of versions 2020.11 and 2022.05.

I'd advise new users to be prepared to face issues and have problems with the support.

I would rate the product seven out of ten. 

I think HP gives you everything you need, but they are not agile and innovative enough. They are following market trends, but others are more innovative. In terms of the products out there, they often the 2nd best, but in terms of the overall offering combined with the support we receive, they are number one. They listen to their customers well and adapt and change accordingly.

We're a customer and end-user. 

I'm likely using the latest version of the solution. 

The solution is a good monitoring tool. People should try it. 

I'd rate the product eight out of ten overall. 

While the solution is on-premises, we also have a cloud deployment that has just started. It's available via subscription and companies can use both models. 

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been quite happy with its capabilities and have been quite pleased with that solution overall.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would advise others to look into the correlation techniques and adaptability through grouping scripts. The out of the box functionality is great, but there's so much more that you can do with it including dashboards, etc.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

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

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.

The product is great, but it could be improved. 

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.

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

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.

If you're researching this solution or something very close to it, before you begin implementation and the careful planning, look into your CMDB and data structures. Figure out what CIs and what information in your configuration management database you actually need to orchestrate monitoring and to orchestrate the views from the events that you get. Having too much information makes it impossible to test the solution, and not having enough doesn't give you the functionality you need.

As with anything, it's not just a tool and switching it on. They need to realize that it's a journey with a lot of challenges. Especially organizationally, it's not only about putting something in to existing systems; it’s also the desire to be compliant in organizational departments; it's invisibility of infrastructure because of security reasons or appliances that don't allow access. There's a lot of challenges organizationally that, even though you have the best software, you're still going to have to put a lot of effort in.

Overall advice is that if you do this, you need to commit and to be ready to put in a lot of effort in getting your organization to basically comply and help out. I think these products are really strong in terms of UI, but there's room for improvement in some of the usability and some of the integration components could be stronger.

I would advise them to check this product out and to have a good look at it because we think it is a valuable system.

It is important to keep in mind the amount of work involved in setting it up. It is a lot of work because you need to have your agents installed on your machines, so it takes some time before everything is running like you want it to. For example, we have a license for 4,000 agents now. We use about a 3/4th of that number at the moment. Hence, its installation is intensive but once it is installed, it's fine.

There is no out-of-the-box support for HPE products. We have the feeling that it's going a little bit too slow. If they launch a new product, it's always taking some time before we get the connectors for the OpsBridge.

Remember that Operations Bridge can do a lot, but it's fairly complex to get started with. It means getting people to adopt the product significantly for them to be able to maximize that kind of investment. Once it is in there, it's extremely robust. The kind of value it can provide to the business would be significant. It should be maximized by all businesses, so go ahead and invest in the suite itself for the enterprise.

I think HPE has a fairly good roadmap. They're taking advantage of the kind of movements that are happening in the cloud. Going hybrid IT means being able to bring the best of legacy services that you've always had, with the strength of the solution that you've always had, over to the newer technologies which are really disrupting.

Be patient, and take things step by step to get it going. Once that takes place, it's pretty self-sufficient.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Plan your implementation. Learn what's really important to your business that's not even from an IT perspective. That's only natural production or sale side or whatever it is and use that to map it onto your implementation. That's what I would say.

I would advise them to look at their infrastructure and think very carefully about what they need. Only buy what they need, and start small and build up. I've seen so many projects and programs fail because they tried to deliver too much too quickly. And even with the might of HPE and HPE's contractors and the whole of HPE, we still have problems with a huge implementation of trying to bite off too much too soon. So I would advise to find out what you need, try and build on it. Get that foundation and level of understanding and eye out the problems as you go. Rather than trying to put everything in all at once and then have a stack of problems.

I don't know about anybody else, but for me, as a technical consultant I want to make sure that the products enter my strength, that it scales up properly. It's all well and good having a part, and then when you try and scale it up it all falls to bits. The support structures need to be there, and when there's a fault the labs get on it and the patches are written and issued quickly. All those sort of boring, technical reasons for me. I'm the one that deals with the errors and issues. So for me, it's less about the finances, if somebody else pays for it.

You have to have an IT operations background, be familiar with the processes of IT operations, have that type of mind-set. A lot of technologies are based on previous HPE technologies, so some history with HP's legacy products helps. Even though this is a new product, that's always helpful.

I think it's ability to bring in obviously the HP products into one place, gives you a meaningful lens, meaningful correlations, and the ability to process and to take on third-party data, event streams, and metrics. Bringing it all together and it being not as complex as building your own integrations from scratch - they give you a nice, good jump start to bring the third-party data in - is where I give it strengths.

I recommend it and obviously I do make a living deploying it, but I also like to see whether it has value at a customer's site. Can I solve some of their problems, some of their use cases? Because even if they deploy it initially, if they can't use it and get value out of it, it won't last very long. You have to make it fit in their environment and solve some of their use cases and scenarios, and then they'll continue to use it and grow with it.

Compared to other products on the market today, I think it's the best in terms of architecture and capabilities. Like every product, it has its issues, but at the end of the day, it provides its users with business value.

Plan and then integrate. Planning requires a good assessment of your needs. Be prepared also make some in-production investments because you'll likely need to make changes on-the-go as you determine how to correct mistakes.

I would recommend this product to colleagues given our current assessment, but we haven’t fully utilized it yet.

The most important criteria to us when we choose a vendor are stability and support.

No one would actually use Operations Manager now, so go straight to OMi. I also recommend to study, study, and study to learn the product.

We don't have a relationship with the solution; we're just a customer.

It's a good solution overall. On the market, there aren't many other solutions, other than maybe BMC or a few more. It's expensive, but it's very good.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I am from an integration company and I'm not obligated to any vendor and I recommend HP.

It should be easier to use this product, because once you're in production, systems are more complicated. This kind of tools should be very simple and straightforward.

I would rate this as six out of ten.

Plan right.

This is a product that I would recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We plan to continue using this solution. We are already working on a new project using Micro Focus and I recommend it for other users.

I would rate Micro Focus Operations Manager a nine out of ten.