OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB Reviews

Earlier, all assets in our environment were managed manually through Excel. The situation for customers involved an unmanaged asset lifecycle, making it difficult to manage. We have now transformed the manual process into automated management using the UCMDB Tool. Now, we have detailed and up-to-date insights into the nodes, their relationships, and dependency maps in an organized manner.

It is a great tool for automated asset discovery and asset management with advanced features.

Now Customer is satisfied with the asset inventory and management.

The discovery and customization through Enrichment Rules, along with CI Type Management, make the application more flexible and adaptable based on customer requirements.

Based on my experience with the UCMDB tool, I have faced challenges while discovering servers (nodes).

We need to define the IP list for discovery in RTSM and run jobs. However, over time, whenever new assets are added, we must manually add the new IPs in RTSM and run the jobs again.

From the agent's perspective, we need to provide the Data Flow Probe IP. This can be done in one of two ways: we install the agent at the server (node) level, define the IP of the Data Flow Probe, and then our Data Flow Probe will capture the data from the agent and send it back to UCMDB. This method allows us to eliminate the step of manually adding the IPs in RTSM.

In a dynamic production environment where changes are continuous, we need to stay updated on new servers (nodes). Ideally, the auto-discovery feature should automatically detect the new CIs (nodes/servers) in the environment and notify the IT personnel.

This process could be achieved without the need for agents, or with a one-time agent setup.

I am using the UCMDB Tool from last Three Years.

The stability is good.

The scalability is good.

The customer service and support interactions are good and responsive.

Positive

I haven't used any other solutions!

The initial setup is a bit complex; we were expecting more straightforward documentation.

We handled the initial setup in-house ourselves. The process was moderate.

The ROI is good.

I haven't worked with the sales and licensing part, so I'm not the right person to speak on it.

I haven't used any other solutions, so I’m curious to see what other solutions are given with additional features.

Yes, as I mentioned earlier, detailed documentation will help newbies learn and practice with the UCMDB Tool.

We primarily use the solution for network and server discovery. It's agent-based discovery. Also, we have integration with OBM for CMS to RTSM CMS integration and with NNMI to UCMDB integration.

It captures the changes from the device side and from the infrastructure. So it's good we can capture the data on UCMDB and note changes, and we can monitor that.

The product is easy to set up. 

It's secure.

Technical support is helpful.

Based on the latest version, there were multiple changes done. It had multiple fixes. However, it's based on the customer's requirements. They have modified and created, and released the changes according to those needs.

The UI could be better.

The page loading is very slow. The customer wants faster loading.

Before releases, it would be nice to be able to upgrade to the new release and check it out in order to see the new functionality and what they have changed.

I have three years of experience with the product. 

I've done a performance review in the past and have found it to be stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It is reliable. I'd rate it seven out of ten. 

In my company, there are 200 to 300 people using Micro Focus. 

The scalability is fine. I'd rate it six out of ten.

I have worked with the support team in the past.

I try to troubleshoot as I do have knowledge of the solution. However, if I can't fix it, I will reach out to them, and they can help or suggest a hotfix or patch.

That said, I do have knowledge of L1 through L3 issues and really do try to solve things myself first.

Positive

I also have knowledge of ServiceNow as well. While I have worked with this product for three years, I've only worked with ServiceNow for one. 

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. We can set it up within a week. There's an easy guide that Micro Focus provides. They make it very simple. 

We handle the implementation part - not some third-party. 

Micro Focus provides support for the product if any fixes are needed on a release or if any fix is required in general.

From a cost perspective, I'm not sure how expensive the product is. I'm more involved on the implementation and support side. 

We're customers and end-users. 

Our company chose to use Micro Focus as it is on-premises, which makes it quite secure and therefore quite good for finance companies or those concerned about security.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

I use Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB for two main tasks: first, to discover what is happening in our IT system, like finding out what devices and software we have. Then, we use Universal CMDB to check if this matches what we should have, based on our plans and asset management. This helps us find and fix any differences, making sure our IT setup matches our intentions.

The most valuable feature is its accuracy in finding things, so I trust the results. Also, it is great at combining data from different places and making it match up. Plus, the way it shows the information to users is really helpful. So, precision, trustworthiness, reconciliation, and user-friendly presentation are the key features I value most.

Based on my experience and what I have heard from clients, there are two main areas where Universal CMDB could get better. First, the way it shows results to users could be more user-friendly. Second, it can be really complex because there are so many different types of things you can track, and they are organized in a complicated way. This complexity can make it take a long time to learn how to use it effectively. Making it simpler to set up and understand would be a big improvement. I have shared some suggestions with OpenText through their platform. One thing I would like to see in the next Universal CMDB is more consistency and simplification. The results it provides are really good, especially compared to other systems, but the way it shows those results could be more user-friendly. Improving the presentation and making it easier to understand would be a great step forward.

I have been using OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB for seven years.

The stability of Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB is good, with no major issues. It doesn't freeze or have frequent unstable situations. I would give the stability an eight out of ten.

The solution is highly scalable. You can run it on a single server or expand it across multiple servers to distribute the workload. This flexibility is one of its strong points. Based on my experience, Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB are best suited for larger enterprises and may not be the best fit for small or medium-sized businesses.

I have been in regular contact with OpenText's technical support, and I would recommend them. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate their support around six to seven.

Neutral

Setting up Universal CMDB for the first time is not as easy as some simple Microsoft installations where you just click a few times and it is ready. It is a bit more involved. You need to define a lot of things, especially for the Discovery part, like configuring access to different parts of your IT system. Because it is often used in complex IT environments, you can't expect it to work right away with just a few clicks. It takes some effort to set up, but it is doable if you put in the work. I am a consultant, and I assist customers by handling tasks such as installing, setting up, and configuring the solution. My goal is to make sure everything works seamlessly for my clients.

OpenText's pricing is fine. It is not too expensive. I would rate it a six out of ten in terms of costliness.

I looked into Maximo Asset Management and BMC Discovery, and also considered ServiceNow. I chose OpenText because in Central Europe, products like IBM and Maximo weren't very common, and OpenText had a stronger presence. When it came to evaluating options, it often boiled down to a customer's legacy systems. If they were already using Azure or had a history with Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard, they tended to go with OpenText's CMDB. Otherwise, if they were starting fresh or had different preferences, they leaned towards using ServiceNow. The cost was also a factor, as ServiceNow could be more expensive than OpenText.

I would give OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB a rating of eight overall. It is a strong product, and its strengths can vary compared to ServiceNow CMDB, which might be better in some areas like user interface. They are both good, and the choice depends on what you prioritize and need.

We are currently using it for discovery, to inform our event management system. 

We are not using it for configuration management at this point. We are only using it to inform our event management suite, so we know what asset had the issue.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the discovery. Knowing what assets are on the network and the configuration of items for it.

There is a lot of manual configuration that has to happen, especially with more and more of doing the typology linking to business services. 

It's been a year of trying to map assets and the configuration of items to business services, which has been a very long effort.

The implementation could be simplified. 

It is not implemented correctly and it's most likely us and the way that we had implemented it. The issue is with integration.

We have multiple different operating systems and enclaves between on-premises and the cloud services that we are trying to monitor and the integration with the different products has been difficult.

It is very complex. 

The complexity is very high. The maturity of the organization needs to be high for this product, and that is where we are missing because we are not mature yet. It's very complex and should be for a mature organization.

Our company has been using Universal CMDB for approximately four years.

We are not using the most up-to-date version.

I don't think there are any issues with stability. Once it's implemented, I think it will be fine. We don't have any worries about the integrity of what we've set up.

It's a scalable solution with a license. It's not technical. We have not encountered any technical issues. We just make sure that we have the license as we scale up.

There are four or five people using this solution, maybe a couple more running reports, but for the most part it is running on the backend of the infrastructure component.

Technical support is great. We have not had any issues with technical support. 

Even if we've had a high visibility issue, they escalated it pretty rapidly.

The initial setup is complex. We have been working with professional services.

We have two people who are integrators and administrators to deploy and maintain this solution.

We brought on professional services to help us implement this solution and four years later, we still have a contract with them to help us continue with the implementation.

The vendor that we are using has rebranded three or four times. We no longer refer to them by the brand name and just refer to them as help management.

Compared with other solutions, I would say that it's more expensive especially since we have an on-premise version and an older implementation. 

I believe that our new solutions in the cloud are more competitive.

For a solution that is this complex, I would suggest getting help from an external vendor.

Because of the complexity, I would rate Universal CMDB a seven out of ten.

It may be because we haven't implemented it correctly.

Central CMDB as a single source of information for processes like Asset & Service Management (incident, problem, change, release, etc.) in keeping total cost of ownership, SLA tracking, and impact analysis.

Business service mapping (application and IT infrastructure) from an event management perspective, giving visibility into the health and performance of the CI supporting a given business.

Any organization can take advantage of the Automated Service Modelling (ASM) feature to discovery the dynamic changing environment and keep the business service view (dependency mapping) up-to-date, hence missing out the newly added CI for a given business service.

Discovery is possible for Workstation connecting over public IP.

Micro Focus UCMDB has an auto learning capability and groups all unidentified software, which the administrator can check and decide if it needs to be added to the repository for future discovery.

One of the unique feature is the Automated Service Modeling (ASM), which allows for modeling a business service starting from any Running Software CI and does not necessarily require having a URL.

It is AI inbuilt into the solution, by which the tools identifies non-standard software with the CI. Enable identified the same can be added in the DB.

It can also detects the software usage & metering then helps organization to comply with licensing removing unused software

Mobile/iPad Apps version of the UCMDB Browser would be a step ahead, which should have features, like viewing CI information, ownership, etc.

No. Micro Focus UCMDB is built for stability and is the only solution which can support up to 60 million CIs.

No issues. Micro Focus UCMDB is highly scalable. It supports horizontal and vertical scaling.

Good.

Not applicable.

Installation is straightforward. It seamlessly integrates to other vendor solutions to pull the CI into Micro focus UCMDB.

I have implemented the solution with the help of my team members.

It can save a lot of effort in capturing unplanned changes.

UCMDB can detect changes and auto open an unplanned change request in Service Manager, hence controlling unauthorized changes. At the same time, it can be complaint from licensing perspective, which can save up to 50% of the cost which arises from non-compliance due to vendor licensing.

Setting up the framework with integration can take from one week to one month and will depend on the requirements and the integration.

Not applicable.

Before implementing, you must finalize the output requirement, i.e., CI grouping/category, attribute, relationship types, etc. This will help in defining the information collection process.

UCMDB is one of best discovery softwares available in the market. 

• It can discover almost everything and creates relationship among discovered CIs, along with creating topology modeling. 
• You can set up a UCMDB server with multiple probes and it can be distributed across all regions to collect information locally, then be shipped to a central node. 
• It scales easily with future expansion. 
• It can discover various pieces from hardware, software, custom applications, and tie them together to create a map using ASM (Automated Service Modelling).
• It works with agentless and agent solutions. 
• It can be integrated easily with other Micro Focus tools, like NNMi, OMi, and OBR and third-party products like ServiceNow. 

UCMDB data is helpful with correlating events, which helps to reduce the number of events to the end user. It also help with business-level mapping to provide high level visibility related to the health of business applications. 

In a large heterogeneous environment, you can have multiple distributed probe servers which can collect data into each region and send it over the central nodes to avoid firewall and DMZ issues. This make the discovery process more dynamic and real-time.

The latest version of UCMDB 10.33 has an autodiscovering capability. 

The Automated Service Modeling (ASM) is the new feature in 10.33, which allows out-of-the-box automatic modeling that can be used for business service level mapping. 

Improve the GUI and documentation.  

No.

No.

No.

Not applicable.

It is competitive.

Yes, ServiceNow.

Mainly, it is used as a central repository to store our CMS data from various sources. We use it to store data from collection points as well as upload them into tools, such as Service Manager.

The ability to use it as our single source of truth. It can feed in from multiple sources and upload into various Service Management toolsets, not just Micro Focus ones.

It has allowed us to centralise the feeds and sources. Previously, like many companies, we stored CMS data in various places and various systems, and they did not always match.

Some of the UI could always be improved, but that is personal taste. I am a big fan of removing thick clients and thick servers and making everything Web UI.

Perhaps, we used various Service Management toolsets to store data.

It's a governance oriented tool with a very good data model. It supports all the governance, ticketing, service desk, change management, and all the ITIL processes. It supports what we need. In terms of IT governance and IT operation management, it's as good as any centralized management database.

In terms of data quality and process ticketing, it is helpful. For instance, if you have a number of service desk tickets coming in and you have to refer to a system, a product, or an application interface, it is backed up by information from this database for reference. Everyone references the same thing. It terms of financial management, you can pile up the costs and the value because you have “service trees”. All these configuration items (CIs) are in there and that's the advantage. Everyone is looking at the same platform.

I would like to see better reporting and better support of integrations with the other systems. There is an additional tool that they give to you for the end users so that it's easier. It’s called the UCMDB browser, which is like an internet browser so you can browse the data easier. This should be in each and every tool in the suite so that you are referencing the same database. They are doing this step by step, and they are quite far right in the process.

In the reporting, it should be more flexible in terms of data drill downs and dimensional data excerpts, enrichment of data so that you can really use it as a data mart into your service trees.

I would like to see a centralized configuration and administration tool because right now the administration for the tool and the sub-tool, UCMDB browser, is done through different interfaces. For example, on the GUI, you do it on the JMX management interface, and you can sometimes add it from the database directly.

There's always room for improvement in this area. If you want to run a company based on a good referential and integrity, then you want your data to improve all the time.

The stability is quite good. It has some deficiencies in lower level functionality. In terms of what it should deliver, such as reporting and performance, it's the main feature and it is fine. Where it's a little bit lagging is integration. If you have big masses of data going back and forth, it's going to perform better. They promised this with the next version. We are not on the latest version right now. We are expecting additional improvements to be made.

I think the scalability is okay. As we are running in a cluster environment and having lots of different "probes" that are collecting data from systems. We have between 50-100 probes.

They have three levels of support. The third level is close to R&D. You are lucky to get over the first level, then you are happy with the support. At the first level, they sometimes ask you the same things that you have told them before. It could also be because of the high level way that they are now deploying. They should brush up the skills of the first level.

Years ago, it was very complex setup because there was close to no knowledge in this area. Even professional services were learning by doing. But today, setup is easier. Just this year, they announced that they have a containerized version of all these tools that we're using and you can configure it from the start. This should be easier moving forward.

They have an ear for the customer; they listen to you. I'm personally very active with them, they have conference calls where you can give feedback or ask them for advice, in addition to the normal support. They have lots of knowledgeable guys now moving to Micro Focus which I hope continues. I'm looking forward to that as they are more of a software company. The problem with support is they have a process, or an organizational structure, that is not leaning to software support.

There is a very steep learning curve. Once you are at the summit, you have a very good oversight and the tool is leaning toward workflows you should be adopting. It's hard to learn all of this, in the beginning.

It is good to you have an expert at the site, somebody in the company already, or someone to train you on the job. I don't think that the training courses have much value. We had training for the tools but we learn more from experiencing it on our own, than from the courses themselves.

- extensive GUI with many features allowing:
o broad control over inventory/discovery of standard systems, but also custom built equipment
o easy modeling of systems and applications
o easy addition of integrations with various data sources with various connection protocols
- fast (internal) "time to market" using special applications built "on top" like UCMDB Browser and Configuration Manager
- numerous and knowledgable support staff; fast turnaround on support cases
- extensive online support system, software communities and solutions resources

- can be rather expensive to implement (for smaller companies)
- can be support intensive
- requires a lot of project resources to push toward implementation
- requires a number of people to operate
- as game changing technology requires a mature IT service organization, numerous resources for project management, design, implementation, evangelization
- requires serious upper echelon management backing (sponsorship)

6 years

HP releases CUPS and Content Packs on a regular basis. Implementing these requires careful planning and analysis, but helps keeping the product in good working shape.

HP customer service is usually very personal, reachable and effective.

HP Software Support is a very large and skilled organization, with experience dating back decades.

Setup is straightforward, but it does require planning and design.

In-house.

Large telcos with a history of mergers and acquisitions will benefit from this technology by discovering exactly which components are located where in their data centers, how they're connected and what their status is, facilitating consolidation/transformation of DC infrastructures as well as reducing mean time to resolution in case of incidents. Evaluation is a speedy process because results are visible quickly (imagine a simple scan of a couple hundred Windows servers and presenting the resulting map to a Windows SDM). Usually leads to "oh nice, can we do x or y as well?". Which is what you're doing it for initially.