OpenText Network Node Manager Reviews

We are a service provider and deploy in multiple locations such as banks and commercial organizations which have larger networks with 200 and sometimes 2,000 or 3,000 devices. Some of our customers have network teams of 25 to 30 but most have less than that, usually anywhere between five to 20 people. Most are IT admins, IT managers and workers in IT departments. 

The network phase in the product could be improved. Other tools such as SolarWinds have real-time bandwidth, and they can calculate bandwidth in MBs, which means something. But Micro Focus Network Node Manager always watches bandwidth. With Micro Focus, bandwidth utilization networks always show in bytes. It makes it difficult for the end-user to calculate. Micro Focus needs to offer customized dashboards. The reporting is very complex. It's not simple.

As a network person, I want to see the top end network devices, who is using maximum bandwidth or who is using maximum MB. It only requires a very simple graphic, a simple dashboard that I have customized myself. I would prefer to deploy SolarWinds or PRTG.
Unfortunately, our company only deploys Micro Focus. 

Additional features that could be included would be customizing some simple features like dashboard support. They also need to upgrade their level of support and focus on their customers. That's what's important.

We've been using the product for seven or eight years. 

The solution is very stable. Once it's configured properly, stability and maintenance are stable and there are no issues with performance. 

I'm very satisfied with the scalability because for scalability purposes we don't need to buy multiple hardware. If you install one node on Network Node Manager and want to scale it up, it's pretty easy to create more nodes. 

We are very dissatisfied with the technical support. We have multiple demands and even the engineers are not satisfied. It used to be better but recently it's been a problem. I think they focus mainly on network calls. They're not always available due to the different time zones of different customers. It can take a few hours to resolve issues. As a result, I assume that in the coming years, Micro Focus will have less share of the market. Technical support should be improved. 

Initial setup is complex so it's better to install with the help of integrators or consultants. We are working on Microsoft Windows and also in Linux. On Windows, it's very simple, you just press control P and you can print out your devices. But on the Linux, it's quite tough.

Micro Focus is a very mature product but some basic requirements are missing and there are services that they don't offer. For example, I'm an end-user. The way the solution currently works means I'm not able to customize my own reports.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

Our primary use case is for network monitoring, switches, routers, firewalls, all kinds of network equipment you can utilize for monitoring. It allows for multiple integrations for SNP purposes. There are many different use cases for the utilization of the product. 

I'm an IT architect and technical consultant and we partner with Micro Focus. I've dealt with over 1,000 customers who use the product and each organization has multiple customers and multiple users across multiple regions, in the Middle East, India, and other countries. The product is used mainly by IT managers and IT admins. 

It's quite a robust tool for network monitoring solutions. It has gradually evolved over time from a long initial stage to now where it's a very high scale product. It's good for the small tier enterprise role of infrastructure and handling, it's capable of handling multiple nodes and has global architecture - it's quite a good product.

The most valuable feature is that you can utilize the main file from various vendors for integration. In addition, you can carry out customized polling for certain parameters, so that is an add-on to enable a customer to utilize it efficiently.

In terms of improvement, I would say that the resources utilized could be a bit higher, and that is one of the challenges that isn't optimized to my expectations.

For additional features that could be included, I have nothing to suggest for now. Things are going well. It's really a classic model. If it's moved over to cloud then it could definitely become a living giant in the market. 

I've been working on this platform for more than nine years. 

The product is quite stable. There were some initial issues with that aspect. It was taken care of by the respective OAM which took some time but is now much better.

The product is scalable and can be pre-defined during deployment. It can also be scaled and enhanced later. If you take precautions and take into consideration what your needs will be in two or three years, the setups can be predefined and save you time. It could be done later but there would be an additional cost.  

I have a lot of experience with technical support, both directly and indirectly. I have premium support with the company so I've been in touch with everyone and know them. Premium support is quite good. You get all the support you need immediately, but if you rely on standard support it's not as efficient and it can take time. It can be a cumbersome process. It's worthwhile to take the premium support. 

I've previously used other in-house tools as well as some managing engines, but none of them are as efficient as the Micro Focus products. The company was formerly owned by HP and it now has a network with Micro Focus. Of course, HP is a very well-known brand across the globe and that increases the trust factor for the customer.

The initial setup is not straightforward. Deployment demands a certain amount of expertise and requires a consultant or someone with hands-on experience to deploy the product. It can be deployed as a stand-alone, or as part of a global network management setup. Assistance from consultants or integrators is needed.

It's important for the customer to understand his own requirements so that he can make the right decision because this network node manager has multiple components. Whether it's network monitoring, reporting, IP telephoning, or MPLS VPN. There are a lot of extensive packs available. The customer also needs to think about their requirements based on the product extension packs and how they would be deployed. These are things that need to be taken into consideration. 

I would rate this product a nine out of 10. 

Our NOC is heavily using and dependent on the product for quick action and troubleshooting network issues.

Most valuable function would have to the internal causal engine and its root cause analyzer which keep us updated on critical errors and incidents in our network environment. Secondly, the multi-vendor capability (we have approx 150 different device types from some 10 vendors).

Reporting. Even though this is available in separate software (iSPI) there is potential in making the reporting more SLA-aware and more intuitive.

No.

No.

First line of support can be time consuming to collaborate with. Sadly, this got worse when HPE outsourced their support. When cases are elevated, the support and problem solving is usually sped up and excellently handled and resolved.

No.

Easy install, but configuration of various aspects demands continuous focus and knowledge of the product.

No, it was already chosen when I started at my current employer.

Initially, keeping the default settings is wise. Get familiar with and become knowledgeable in the product before getting into advanced tweaking.

Real time network monitoring application: It is very stable, which provides quick root cause analysis (RCA) for any network faults.

Only to improve the GUI.

Only HPE/IBM/BMC and SolarWinds tools are very stable.

No issues in tools.

Not good compared to IBM or Zenoss support.

It is fully depends on costing, customer, and architect.

It was straightforward.

I evaluated this product this product before I chose it.

Before implementing, clear all the customer requirements, then choose products accordingly.

It gives us a good overview of what's happening in our networks and the devices in the networks. And it allows us to act very quickly when some problem is detected.

When some metric device has some issue, for example there is some server connected that hosts some application, and that application might be a web portal or internet banking customer we are providing services for, when this device is down service is not available to the customers of our customers.

As the technologies evolve, also these solutions or the monitoring tools should evolve to cover the progress in technology, including capabilities related to monitoring of virtualized devices today, as the DNS is on the table in this way.

I have been working with it for nine years.

In my experience it's very stable. We haven’t had any problems so far, such as unexpected breaks or a server going down. So, in this sense, I would say that it is very, very stable.

Scalability is actually one of the reasons why we picked Node Manager. With one instance you can monitor from a couple of hundreds up to several thousands of devices. So it's very good.

We have Premier support from HPE. We are very, very satisfied with support because we have one dedicated resource in support, so he knows our environment. Every time we have some minor issue we don't need to explain what version of the software are we running, how our environment looks like and so on, because he knows this already.

When I started to work for the company, it was already implemented. But nine years ago when we started, we had 3 Network Node Manager servers and right now we have 19. So, over time, I have definitely been involved in implementing the solution. It is very very straightforward. You just deploy the installation package; it's not an issue.

We evaluate other solutions on do it in regular basis. Basically, we check the markets to see what’s there. We have HPE now and we use test cases to check the market; is any new solution available and, based on those test cases, HPE wins or HPE does not. So far it's winning.

Last year we evaluated SevOne. It wasn't so bad and it provided similar features like Network Node Manager. But that additional value was not high enough. So we are eager to implement it because implementation is a big job and it can take month to do. If we saw that it was really, in some way, much better than Network Node Manager and it was worthy to implement it, we would have done so.

It gives us an overview of the network. How is it performing? Are there some problems? It allows us to see what happened in the past.

It helps us to solve our network problems and it helps us to solve customer problems to whom we are providing IT services. I would say that it self-tested, the time it took us to repair those problems.

I have been using this solution for twenty-four years.

I has been stable for 24 years.

It provides very good scalability from 200 nodes to 30,000 nodes and from 2,500 interfaces to 60,000 interfaces.

We have excellent support. We have a nominated a person from HPE who always takes our cases. He knows our environment so we don't have time to explain every time what kind of environment we have. What software versions and patch levels we use. We can skip that and go right to the case.

When selecting a vendor, I look for reliability and support.

Upgrades are straightforward. The are instructions on how to install it and there is notes tell what is new and what has been fixed. It is quite easy to work with it.

We mainly use it for monitoring notes, and if you've got outages and stuff like that.

So actually it makes our life a lot easier in identifying if you've got problematic areas.

That is a little bit difficult for me because I haven't been personally dealing with the software directly, so the subcontractor has been the face in informing us what the product is capable of. Hence we came to the sessions now in order for us to have first-hand information on what all these products are capable of.

I've been using it, let's say for four years.

So far it has been stable for us, although we might be using an old product. So we haven't really been upgrading and getting to the latest and greatest versions.

I can't really comment about scalability. Our company is a little bit stable, in the sense that the company hasn't grown much. We don't necessarily have too much control over what we can do because most things are regulated from outside the company. So getting to do new things is a little bit of a challenge for us.

We fortunately work with a subcontractor that is dealing with HP. So there's a middle-man to talk to in case we run into problems.

I wouldn't say I know about the setup because most of the work was done by the subcontractors.

We base our decision of vendor really around the support issue. It's really about stability of the product you have, and your escalation levels should also be playing a role, because if you run into problems, you need to know who your friend is.

Topology creation is the most valuable feature.

We are using it for network discovery and troubleshooting enforced management. We are expanding it to cover the performance and the traffic part as well.

The deployment architecture and installation part needs improvement. In regards to the voice monitoring piece, there is a lot of scope for improvement. Voice monitoring/end-to-end voice monitoring, whether in a voice over IP(VoIP) or a voice over PSTN, if I'm making a call, it should be monitored irrespective of the path/carrier that I am passing through.

As of now, we are running on a single machine that is a VM Windows-based VM, so that is not quite stable. It frequently goes down and we have a lot of issues with that. However, we are now upgrading it to a distributed environment based on the Linux operating system. I'm hoping that it should be stable.

We are a quite large organization. we have more than 120,000 employees. In terms of the scalability, we have experienced no issues. As an organization, we consist of more than 120,000 people. The end users of NNMi are less, i.e., probably around 50 – 60 end users. The network operations team is the end-user for the NNMi and we still have had no issues with the scalability.

I was not part of the previous installation, but for the current one that we are deploying, I was involved in the setup process.

The setup was complex and needs a medium kind of knowledge. The documentation is also not very good, i.e., a lot of things that are not written in the document are surprises. The installation is definitely not easy. It is a complex one and it would be much easier if the product was redesigned in that way.

We are considering both NetBrain and Nectar Services, for a couple of the features that NNMi does not have.

You should interact more with the customers and listen to your voice.

Try to make the product better from the usability perspective.

The most important benefit is to have one controller and to get all information to a single point. This is easier than looking at different points to see where messages and tickets are coming from.

It makes our work easier.

I think the technical support should be improved.

There is not a lot of downtime. It's OK.

We have had no problems with scalability for our infrastructure and our dimensions.

Sometimes technical support is not so amazing. We need to wait a long time to get a solution for a ticket. And often they repeat the same questions. You open the ticket, and you get questions back that you already answered in the ticket. So it's often a long wait and not so easy to get the right people. Offices tend to get inferior support.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We have used HPE software since about 1995. Sometimes it has been good, but at times it was very terrible. In the last year or so, there has been improvement and I think it's come a long way, but it’s not on the mark yet.

I think you should take a look at it. If it fits your needs, then it's OK. But it's not the only solution. There are other alternatives.

When choosing a vendor, the solution has to be a benefit to our companies. It must be a complete package. The best software turns out to be not the best thing if technical support is not good or there are other issues; then go with something else.

It is a good network monitoring, enterprise solution. It is a meta-monitoring solution with good visualization.

The benefit is that we are able to use some features and we can provide external customers with the ability to monitor their devices.

It has improved our workflow, which is now easier with the solution. However, it's not an enterprise scalable solution. We are serving over 500 managed customers and 10 to 50 customers are being added every month. There are limitations to the number of tenants and groups we can add.

The network monitoring side is pretty good, but the performance side is poor. I would like to see this improved in the next version. HPE has Vertica now. I am expecting to see in Vertica what I didn't see in Version 10.0 of this solution. I now have to wait until version 11. It's hindering us so much because we cannot give it directly to customer because after a number of connections, the systems goes down within one minute. After 10 people log on at the same time, the system stops. Generating a report can take from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Due to scalability issues, we have implemented another solution to take the data out from one database and put it in another one This is a big limitation.

We have been using this solution since 2002. We had Versions 6, 7.5 and upgraded to 8 and 9. We are now planning to upgrade to Version 10.

From the network management side, scalability is good. From a performance side, it is very bad. It doesn't support the building of a Sybase database. It has limitations on the number of connections. It is limiting because it slows down after only 30 connections. Even the HPE lab personnel came to our site and they agreed that the solution cannot support all of these connections. We have implemented another solution to take the data out from that database and put it in another one. This is a big limitation.

We have to give a lot of feedback to level 1 support so they can understand what the problem is. Our requests then go to the lab. Getting to the lab is very difficult. As enterprise customers, our requests should go directly to the lab.

The managed services side is moving to IBM and the IT side will remain with HPE. This was a management decision. There are limitations on the number of connections and on device support. New devices have to be released by HPE. You cannot connect to it directly because it doesn't integrate with all of the applications. That cancels performance.

I have no advice unless HPE comes up with the new version of Vertica. They are moving to HPE Vertica 8, I think, for the next release. I'm expecting some improvements with Vertica, but I'm not expecting it anytime soon.