As part of forming Nobius, we performed technical and business reviews of many monitoring solution tools

I did not previously evaluate other solutions. 

Early on there was some discussions about BMC, but HP are our assurance partner, so strategically it made sense to stick with HP. There isn’t really anyone else in the market that has what HP has in terms of a complete vision, particularly anything that brings it back to DevOPs and deeper into the APM space at scale.

I haven't validated all of the monitoring tools on the market. 

We looked at CA and a couple of small players.

Not applicable.

No.

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

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.

We did a few proofs of concept with CA. We did proof of concept installations and went through some of the licenses that we already have elsewhere in the company, with both CA and HPE. We ended up with HPE because there we saw how we would develop this level automation that we're heading for, without the amount of work getting just ridiculous. I think CA might even had better monitoring components, but the event management wasn't as strong, at least for our use case.

We looked at BMC. I was not part of the decision making process in that area.
But we choose to stay with HPE. We don't switch that kind of software for every two years out. That's not feasible budget-wise. But the initial reason for choosing HPE was that graphing and alerting were easier to implement than it was with BMC.

The initial trigger was that we had a new head of communications and she has been working for a newspaper before where they had a very large newsroom. So we had to have a newsroom too and we had to fill it with content and the BVD was the best thing for it. At the time, we were approached by HPE to be the first user of this product and then we started the work with them. That was the way we went.

In a complex environment, I don't think there are many good alternatives that offer it more or less end to end. You'd be cobbling different vendors, maybe with the exception of BMC, which probably could do it. The overall offering is consistent and as wide a technology as you can find, so there's strong benefits because you can do it all with a HP stack with augmentation of some of the specific domains with other vendors, which you have to do anyway.

I don't know if there’s any alternative. I think the main driver there would be how comfortable they are with the existing product suite. I think IBM is probably the strongest alternative in the field. I think they're behind, from a technology perspective. The only thing that they seem to be stronger with is related to the visualization.

At the Ops Bridge level – basically, at the highest level - how do I view my environment? What do I see going on? And, can I use that information in an aggregated way to prevent or limit the impact of occurrences of events in my environment? That's what Ops Bridge, or the OMi component, doesn't have to that level. You can't go from all the way to the top to all the way at the bottom to drill down, you have to use different environments for that. IBM does have that.

If that's important to have on there, then that's one of the things the people that manage the infrastructure need to be able to do. Especially if it's over multiple sites - a strong geographically dispersed environment - then they would be an alternative, but for all other situations, there isn't much else out there.

We wanted the manager of managers so that we have one single point of truth for all our alarming activities, cross server applications and so on.

We also checked with BMC but decided to select HPE as it is the most flexible solution.

I was not involved in the actual buy decision when that was made some time ago, but I do know that there are competitors out there. But I think some of them would be more collaborators rather than competitors.

As an example, at a recent conference, Scott Guthrie from Microsoft talked about the OMS suite of products, and that’s amazing because we are on Azure. I know that OMS has a set of capabilities that the HPE suite doesn't. On the other hand, the HPE suite has some capabilities that are not there on OMS.

We really like the synergies between both of these products, HPE Operations Bridge and Microsoft OMS, going forward. That got me thinking that maybe I should get OMS as well so that we can do some of the things that I want to be able to go ahead and do on Azure. We're heavy on Azure anyway and we would then be able to get the best of both of product lines.

We use VMware, Fortinet, and Cisco. We are staying with HPE because we use HPE for all our server and storage. Cisco for the networks, Fortinet firewalls does load balancing now as well; we've actually moved that to them. We don't want to be a single vendor shop. That's why we stick with HPE for this solution.

No other options were looked at.

We do work with other solutions. I would say HP is probably one of our largest partners but we do work with other software vendors. We do some integrations with IBM's NetCool, and with legacy products. HPE make their products modular, even at the data cluster level. We can integrate into another Ops Bridge, but we have also done some other conversions of customers’ ideas and IBM's, and converted them over to HP's products. Sometimes it's a toss-up. Sometimes it is politics in the customer's technology.

We looked at Microsoft, CA and BMC. They all have similar products, but HP is the strongest.

I looked at IBM, CA, and BMC. I chose HPE because it gave me all that I needed in one suite. With others, I have to integrate multiple solutions and vendors to get what I need. With HPE, I have one vendor and one source where I can get almost 96% of what I need.

We did evaluate other options, but the suite of HP solutions -- Operations Manager, SiteMinder, Essentials, Service Manager -- is better than anything else out there.

We're with HPE anyway, but the other vendors would have been Microsoft or IBM. But, really, it's generally going to be HPE because we're already using them.

Because they've been here for 20 years, it's very difficult to move away. At one time, I was trying to influence a change, but it proved to be impossible. Now that I've got more used to the Operations Manager, I'm happier with it. We'll see whether or not the next generation is really good, or as good as it says on the box.

I have only compared HPE products that I work with and I have my experience with HPE. I have not evaluated other solutions.

When we were looking for a solution, we were looking for something that had the same features as where we were coming from; so it would be just a natural step to take. We were with OML before. We have them both now.

We looked at other vendors, but we have a five year contract with HPE, so it wasn't necessary.

No other options.

We consider mostly the solution itself when assessing vendors.