OpenText Operations Orchestration Reviews

The automation, hands down. That's the future of our company and the direction we're going in. We are trying to automate as many of the processes as possible, so instead of taking two weeks to deploy a server it takes 15 minutes.

We started with our VM systems, and now we're looking at physical systems. Also, in my area of expertise is monitoring, so within that flow, we also deploy monitoring as well as part of the automated service. Based on a matter of minutes, rather than a matter of days. Huge benefit.

It's cost effective. The time you get the applications up and running generates more revenue for the company sooner. Also personnel, it doesn't require as many people to be involved. Of course, money is number one within the company. But yet, just the pure time and the time it takes to get infrastructure up, going and ready.

We have such a huge environment. When we're standing up new applications, new systems or existing applications, we've got to find ways to make things faster to keep up with demand, keep up with the competitors, and to be the leading institution in our industry. Definitely always finding new ways to make things faster and better. Of course, that eliminates human error. When we automate, everyone knows exactly what to expect, from the process, rather than introducing a point of failure - human error.

I'm not quite sure, because the toolsets that are introduced out of the box are very helpful. Once you get that learning curve, when it clicks, it's kind of like a game to me. Once you have the personnel who can really get into it and really enjoy it and make things better, I really cannot find any specific examples for you to say that I wish this was better, because it offers you so many options. You're developing something so it's kind of how you want to do it. There's so many different ways that you can develop your flow, so they have a ton of options for you.

I'm not a developer by trade. I actually come from an operations background. I have a little bit of scripting experience, and when I took this on, we actually had a contractor come in and guide the work. Once he did that, and then once they left, I took over those flows and just thrown out there in the water. Sink or swim. When you have to do it, it was something I picked up in a really quick. Once it clicked, we were off. We just kept going.

You have to have a subject matter expert. You have to have that SME to have that mindset of a developer. You need to have someone with some development experience. Not saying you have to, because it can be learned, but it is easier to have someone to have that experience and to have that mindset. But you do have to have that dedicated resource, I guess you could say to stay on top of it, because if you don't stay into it, once you create these flows, and if they're very customized, some of them in my experience can get quite large. You have to keep up with what's being added, what's being updated and know exactly what's going on, because over time you can kind of forget things that are happening within the automations.

We have had some issues with memory usage, but that's something that we beefed up and made the system more robust. We added new servers, and actually helped tremendously. We created guidelines around how the flow should be created to sustain stability, because if you have folks who introduce to many bugs to their flows, it can actually bring the system down. We have a team that monitors it.

It's exploding as more and more departments start using the application, we add more servers. I think of you need that directive from senior management. As long as it's something that the company wants, and they want to move forward with, you'll get the resources for it.

Usually what I do is I contact the team that oversees the product, and if there's any issues, then they would contact HP, which I think they have done a few times. I've never heard any complaints from them about it.

I didn't have any involvement with the deployment of the application, so I'm not sure.

I'm not at the level to know why they chose Orchestration. But since they've chosen it, it's been a great tool. Very powerful tool. Introduced a lot of flexibility within the company. Something we've been very pleased with. It's really exploded within the company.

Have someone create guidelines. Make sure you have the folks who have that development mindset. Just have those guidelines to keep the stability, because once you start it, you really need someone to have the experience to guide the folks into it. But once they see what the features are out of the box, how to create those flows, and once they get started, then I think it's pretty easy.

Time savings with automation. We've gone from weeks to deploy systems to minutes. From the research that we did pre-purchase, it looks like it's going to fulfill all of our needs.

We get to market faster with our servers that we need to deploy. We see the benefit to our customers in being able to provide them better service.

It takes a lot of resources to implement and support it, which is expensive.

Stability is not really an issue. It doesn't apply to cloud automation specifically.

The products that we use are scalable to the extent that we need them to be. We're huge already, and so we deploy thousands of systems, and it responds the way that we need it to. It really doesn't need to scale any bigger for us.

Tech support, we're a one vendor solution. We use HPE, and so all of their support is always excellent.

We're big enough to have our own HPE account team and we had a lot of meetings, and research with them to make those decisions as partners.

We're currently in the progress of implementation, and so far, it's been great. Looking forward to having it fully implemented.

There are two solutions that we'd consider. VMware vRealize Automation and HPE Operations Orchestration, and we use both of those.

Because of the relationship and partnership that we have with HPE, we know what to expect, and so if we do come up against any problems, we know that we can solve them, so it's the relationship that we have with them that would make me say that's a good direction to go.

The ability to basically create any type of flow I want to, go and get the root cause, and to control workflow without people having to know everything that needs to be done. People make too many mistakes. Then I can also use it to find the root cause when an event actually occurs. It allows me to do repetitive tasks consistently.

It actually really comes down to a quicker mean time to recover. More consistent data being captured to identify what the issues are and also a tighter control over work process flows.

It annoys me because you have to create everything in one development environment and then push it out to the run-time engines, but anything that has the power or capabilities of what OO does, it almost has to be two separate entities. It's easy for people who don't know what they're doing from a logical perspective to really screw things up.

You can build some safety features and everything into it where that doesn't happen, but really primarily what you do is you limit the amount of people who develop the flows. That way you stay consistent.

If you're running it in a Windows environment, you're tied to the inefficiency and quirkiness of Windows. No system that the first answer from support is reboot It, should be a production server.

I've been dealing with Operations Orchestration ever since HP bought it and in my opinion, there's really not a whole lot of competition that works well with inside the HP software environment. Like I said, we are an HP software and hardware site for the most part. Also, we have the expertise there.

Once you understand what you have to do to do it and you have the proper mechanisms and security restrictions removed to do it, then no. If you go and have somebody new try to deploy it, it is a fairly complex deployment structure. Like I said, that's where it comes back to if you know what you're doing and know how to do it and if you have the proper securities, it's fine. If you don't, it's a nightmare.

Have someone who understands the environment not only from a data perspective and tactical perspective, but also from the security and from operations, because really it is an operational tool that helps you and if you don't know how operations works, you'll never create a flow that's right.

Although we've just started using it, the automation feature, of course, is the most valuable feature for us. We also use the server exchange a bit and I use it for many routines, including rebooting systems.

We haven't really implemented it much into our processes, but it's already a time saver for us. We're able to automate various situations. For example, for three years, I've had to reboot my HP Service Manager system every week manually, taking about 30-40 minutes each time. Now, I can just press a button, wait five minutes, press the button again, and the system is upgraded.

It's not a perfect solution, such as with the customization prompts. They're a little awkward and not very intuitive.

We've had no issues with deployment.

I'd say that the stability is good. Again, the customization prompts aren't so intuitive and we made mistakes. However, we were able to fix those ourselves, but they could have been prevented.

We haven't scaled, but we have looked at it and it's quite scalable and usable for other parts of our organization. We could easily allow other people to use Orchestration.

We are planning to do it within Knowledge Management, for example, to have automated fixes in it and in Service Manager so that they can just click A or L and then run the Orchestration scenario to fix the problem.

I don't think we've ever had to contact technical support.

The initial setup was straightforward. We haven't implemented it that much yet because we have a standalone server with the system, so we opened a couple of firewalls. To get the routines correct, though, it's quite complex.

I've seen ROI almost right away. There's maybe eight or ten hours of setup to get a good scenario and then that's saved up in ten weeks for me at least.

We're an HP shop and it's management's choice to use HP software.

As an integrator of Operations Orchestration, we find that the most valuable feature is really the support that HP provides. It also simplifies the process of creating IT assets that are essential to our customers' IT operations.

Our customers are mainly mid- to small-sized companies. Operations Orchestration, I think, is most useful there because they don't have huge IT departments. It's easy to use in creating IT assets that ultimately help business growth.

It's also something that allows you to secure cloud assets from start to finish and to have complete security control over it.

In order for our customers to have a deeper integration of Operations Orchestration, it needs to be offered with more cloud options, whether that's public or private or hybrid. I think this would be a great direction for HP to go in.

I'd also like HP to be more proactive in telling us what their roadmap is for this product. It's a market-leading solution so there are a lot of users, but, as with all solutions, greater visibility of what's coming would be a good improvement.

We haven't had any problems deploying it.

It's highly stable.

It's scaled for our projects.

Technical seems to be just fine. There's no data that says otherwise.

It's usually an implementation done by the HP folks.

The main driver for us using this is for its event remediation function. We can get alerts in Operations Manager, extract the relevant information, and either send an email to our customers or use it for escalation. 

It's also easy to use and we don't have to go through a lot of extensive training. Even other teams within our organization have started to leverage it because it's easy to use.

We've reduced the amount of time it would take to resolve an incident or to send an escalation to a customer. It's saved us many man hours.

I'd like to see it in an active-active infrastructure so that if one goes down, the other picks up automatically. Only an active-passive application exists currently.

Also, there are automation tools out there that are more unified -- network, database, servers. Operations Orchestration doesn't do everything and you need to buy other components for other tasks.

It's deployed well for us.

It's been stable for the most part. We had issues during event remediation when a lot of alerts were going through it and we had to increase RAM and CPU to handle the load.

We haven't yet tested its limits or maxed it out yet.

We have a mix of products and it's not the only automation product we have. We're a big HP shop and it's good that it can integrate with other HP solutions that we use.

I would advise you to list all your use cases first, and really figure out what their trying to do. It's easy, is an easy orchestration tool. It's very visual. If you're not looking to code a lot, it's pretty cool. And it just depends on the level of skillset you have in the organization.

From a coding perspective, if there are open search tools out there that require more expertise than actually scripting, in this, you don't do that. You go to the studio and you drag and drop things and you make things work. So from that perspective it's easy. It's more UI driven.

The centralization of the administration is what's most valuable for us. We have a larger estate, with a number of servers and different data centers. Because administration for all this is centralized, we can manage everything with a pretty user-friendly system.

We use it for building provisioning servers, installing software, maintaining software, patching, and maintenance. We hope to also use it for deploying apps in our environment.

It's hard to tell what might be some areas of improvement because some of the constraints might be access-based or have role-based access, so I don't necessarily have access to them. Obviously, we have administrators who narrow down the privileges of our use.

But what I would like are more functionalities around code release. We have a lot of people who spend a lot of time manually deploying code into our thousands of environments. So to make all that more efficient and easier, there should be more functionalities.

I'd also like to see more enterprise-level improvements with concurrency and scalability. It should be big enough to work with the state that we have, but I think there are some concurrency issues such that we can only do 10 or 20 things at a time.

It has deployed without issues for us.

We haven't had any stability issues.

For the servers I'm involved with, we have probably 8,000 of them. In total, there's probably thirty to forty thousand servers in our company.

When you get to speak to the right people, they're helpful. But sometimes it's difficult to get to speak to them. The problem is, I think, is that the way we use the products is not that widely used across the globe, so there's not many subject matter experts within HP who can help us. We struggle to find the right person to talk to, though we eventually get who we need.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup.

We considered both Oracle and Microsoft solutions. However, we wanted to have a single, unified system within our architecture, so we stuck with HP.

I'd suggest that you start small and learn the tool set. Once you've put everything into place, then you can grow.

It makes it possible to orchestrate a key structure, to generate benefits such as money and time savings, and to increase the quality of our processes.

Four years ago, we created a new department for automation. Today, the organization has a lot of trust in us and we're placed in each strategic architecture. Everybody knows us, trusts us, and are happy to work with us. We are problem solvers and the innovation robo team.

It allows us to create our logs in a way so that we can read security issues without really having to do customization. Everything that we need comes with a default functionality.

The one feature that would be useful for us would be integration of more automation with other solutions. I think this should be possible with newer versions.

HP recognizes the need to integrate each product into one big suite. They are going to offer a new suite for flow orchestration and other processes, but the current way they bundle the products makes it really difficult for the customer to identify which products they need.

We've had no issues with deployment.

HP releases a new version every year, which is currently up to 10.54. We will integrate that version next year, but the current version we have is very stable. We have almost no problems with it.

As far as scalability goes, it has a great architecture and we're able to scale as necessary.

We have premium support in Romania and this works fine. We are completely happy with it.

Just do it. Don't think too long about it.

1. Ability to integrate with with other tools like ServiceNow, HPSA, HPOM, SiteScope.

2. Gives solid platform to write flows for maintaining DevOps environments.

3. Supports multiple IT domains such as Cloud, Virtualization, SAP Orchestration, Security Ops, and DevOps.

4. Well-categorized.

It turned mundane tasks automated.

Flow that we have created does Account creation and termination when and where required.

Flow monitors the health of agents and pushes mail on daily basis.

It also self-heals and does basic remedy.

Multiple users can work on the same automation peace as it supports SCM which internally supports version-ing.

Training.

Skilled Professionals

over 4 years

We have no issues with product deployments, where sometimes we used to have few issues like every other software product. We get hot fix, patches and remedy instructions from HP. which mostly resolves issues occurred.

No. Stability is good.

With new version scalability is highly achieved. You can add additional components to existing architecture WITHOUT downtime, which is amazing.

Customer service is one of those areas that definitely needs to be improved.

3.5 out of 10

Needs improvement. HP itself needs to improve skill on this product as this is mostly sought automation tool which offers wide range of automation.

We had used HPSA and found OO can be really handy in terms of automation and started using it.

If you understand architecture, it's quite easy and you can can customize based on your need.

There is never a complexity in OO.

In my previous financial/banking firm we had HP team implementing it. Here in current accounts, I have my hand in implementing.

In my next role with different organization, I'm going to start implementation of OO. I'm excited about this and waiting for the role.

We have saved few million dollars with OO.

Big surprise is we have special GUI based screen where you ROI on every flow.

• Compliance scans
• Adhoc automation scripts that can be deployed on wide variety of OS flavors

It has made the implementation of our IT software policies faster.

• Product installation
• Audits
• Monitoring section

I've been using it for four years.

Lots of issues due to a lack of details, and huge documentation.

We had issued, specifically with the compliance scans component. This part of the product needs improvement as it tends to impact the overall stability of the solution.

Not much, it does a somewhat better job on scalability.

Below average, 2/10. A lot is needed to be improved upon in their customer service.

On a few things it is excellent, but mostly I would rate it as average, 3/10.

I have worked on solutions offered by different OS vendors like RedHat Satellite but HP consolidates all OS based solutions into one single solution.

The application is very complex thus making initial setup also very complex

We had to involve HP to setup and their expertise is great.

• Bladelogic
• IBM

Initial setup is very crucial and before implementing you should have a clear vision on how to use it for the following two years. Setup processes on the usage, at the initial stages, as it is hard to change that at later stages considering the complexity involved.