OpenText SiteScope Reviews

It's used for monitoring all of our internal URLs, certificate expiration dates, as well as database connectivity, database queries, and internal URL availability.

Being able to do your queries from a single location and being able to nest all your monitors within folders is valuable. It makes it easy to reference or store your monitors in a library, and then you can use that for having a single dashboard that shows you your URLs for a specific product. We have hundreds of products. So, it makes it much easier to track them.

Being able to create your monitors for monitoring your internal URLs and databases and other things like that is valuable.

It's easy. It's simple to use and straightforward. I've played with some other tools that are not quite as straightforward, but it's straightforward for me. It's easy for me to be able to come in and add in a monitor. For everything I need, it's pretty straightforward.

We have four or five data centers around North America where we have it deployed into a single or a two-server primary backup type of deployment. All those are made available under a single GUI provided by Micro Focus that allows you to put them all together. A room for improvement would be an appliance or a server that would manage all of our other servers so that I don't have to remember to log on to all different servers and data centers. I could manage them from a single location.

We've had it for quite a while, and I've never done an upgrade on it, but from what I understand, the upgrades are not as straightforward as you would think. I know that we've run into some issues related to porting the database through different versions. So, it's a slow slog. The process has been longer than expected.

I don't like its licensing because you have to license it by individual licenses.

I have been using this solution off and on for about five years. I was using it more a couple of years ago. Now, every couple of weeks, I get into it to enable or disable a monitor or set up something, but I don't spend a whole lot of time on it.

It's good. It's stable.

Because you can group your monitors in collections and you can group collections in folders, it's pretty scalable. I've seen worse products, that's for sure.

We probably have a hundred people using it off and on, and they include DBAs, application owners, NOC people, subject matter experts, and on-call staff to support it.

I don't know about the plans to increase its usage. I'm just a consumer of the product. I don't manage it. There is another person who manages it. I just use it.

I've never used their support. If there are issues, somebody else takes care of them. I've never had issues on my watch with the new version. In the older version, I had lots of problems. I had to constantly restart the servers or services because the web service or something else would crash, and we'd have to try to get it restarted, but the new version has been stable.

I'm not aware of any other solution at this company. I've been with the company for just over five years, and this has been the product that we've used.

SolarWinds has a product that you can use for URL monitoring. I used it at home at some point, and it was relatively easy. It was pretty easy to use. It wasn't as big and as bulky as this. Micro Focus SiteScope is a little slow to load when I go to load it up, and it's not as intuitive as some of the other programs, such as SolarWinds.

It was done in-house. There is only one guy for deploying and managing it.

It is expensive. I don't like its licensing. I don't like anything where you have to license it by individual licenses. I'm not a fan of that, but that's just me.

I would advise mapping out the strategy of how you want to manage or what you're going to use it for. I don't know all the functionality of the tool. We use it for three things. We use it for monitoring internal URLs. We also monitor certificate expiration dates, and we monitor some of our database queries with it. These are the three major things for which it's used, and it does them very well. It probably can be used for other things, but I have no idea what those could be. So, map out what you want to do thoroughly and when you deploy or when you're building out your collections in your folders and groups, make sure you do them as accurately as you can. That’s because it's difficult to go back and change them all.

I'd rate it a seven out of ten. It's a pretty big product, and I don't know everything that it does, but it does really well on what I need it for.

We use the solution for agentless monitoring of network and systems infrastructure including Linux and Windows, multiple versions, and multiple "flavors".

The primary use case is for meeting the needs of basic level monitoring of multiple devices across a single-site network. 

When accompanied by APM tools from the Micro Focus stable, Sitescope provides a useful "bottom-up" (technology --> Application) view of performance and availability. Other APM tools provide a "top-down" (i.e. a user-centric view) of performance and availability. 

Sitescope is a very useful solution for agentless monitoring. I must emphasize 'agentless' as this is its biggest advantage as well as disadvantage. Sitescope makes it easy to monitor key aspects of performance, availability, and capacity by collecting metrics.

The aim of Sitescope is to help reduce downtime and provide information to help maintain performance. It does this reasonably well.

Sitescope though is better thought of as a component within a wider Micro Focus-based ITOM/AIOPS solution rather than as a solution in itself.

VM monitoring is pretty good showing good visualizations of how VMs are operating within the context of all the VMs running on the same hypervisor.

The ease of configuration is an advantage as Sitescope simply requires entering a host's credentials and a connection protocol (e.g. SSH, FTP, script, WMI, etc) in order to begin collecting and graphing raw data.

Alerting is basic but functional as a standalone product but provides an additional dimension when used alongside Operations Bridge (which is expensive).

Most modern-day solutions in this area include both agentless and agent-based monitoring in the same package. The lack of an agent makes for a simple installation and relatively simple configuration, however, in these days of highly-distributed computing resources Sitescope is missing a number of critical features.

1. The lack of an agent means that remote monitoring requires multiple firewall ports to be opened. This is often a problem when connecting multiple sites. It also makes cloud implementations less attractive too.

2. As data must be "pulled" from the system being monitored, there is a reliance on a performant network and a well-specified Sitescope server.

Sitescope scores well for basic simplicity and it integrates well into other products within the Micro Focus software family - e.g. Operations Bridge.

I've used the solution for five to ten years.

If you already have other Micro Focus products, especially the testing tools, then you may already have licenses for Sitescope. Licensing is (typically for Micro Focus) very complex, so speak to your account manager to check.

The setup cost is minimal if you already have the hardware and that's reflected in the functionality.

There are some great pre-packaged monitoring templates known as "solution templates". These are excellent kickstart ways to accelerate implementation - however, be aware that some of them are licensed separately.

If you're considering Sitescope as your sole or primary monitoring tool, I suggest you take a look around - there are better options for you.

Sitescope has been around for many years - since 1996 in fact. Over the years, it has become a highly stable solution. Now though, as Micro Focus now owns HPE Software (who in turn bought Mercury Interactive from where Sitescope came), Sitescope is but a small cog in a very large AIOPS engine.

Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope could improve by adding more features, such as cloud, APM, and DevOps monitoring.

I have used Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope within the last 12 months.

The stability of the Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope is good.

Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope is a scalable solution. 

We have approximately 35 people using it.

The initial implementation of Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope is easy. The process can take approximately 30 minutes with one person.

I have found the solution simple to maintain, it can be done with some person.

When Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope has introduced approximately eight years ago and there was not very much competition making the price high. However, when comparing the price of Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope now to other tools, they should reduce the price. It is similar to a legacy tool at this point.

I rate Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope five out of ten.

Our organization is focused on performance testing and we use a variety of tools for this purpose, both open-source and enterprise. We are consultants and we use these tools for our customers.

This solution is being used for infrastructure monitoring. It lets us know what might be going wrong when we subject the application to a higher load. It gives us a fair view.

It is a dockerized application where we use SiteScope to give the application performance management.

Infrastructure monitoring is the most valuable feature. There may be other features but we are focused on the performance testing execution that happens.

The setup should be simplified.

It would be helpful to have documentation on how to use this tool correctly from the beginning.

I would be very interested in having transaction traceability included in the product, to give us a better view of what is really going wrong in a particular method and action.

This would essentially mean that the tool comes packaged with complete EPM capabilities. You would not have to purchase any other product such as Dynatrace, App Dynamics, or New Relic. 

If some of those capabilities could be integrated into SiteScope, it would have a very compelling value proposition.

I have been using Micro Focus Voltage SiteScope for approximately two years and we are using the latest version.

It's a stable solution. I don't have any issues with the stability of it.

Scalability is good. 

We had a ticket open with Micro Focus who helped us through the entire journey, but we could use more documentation on using this tool.

They have been very accommodating to our requests.

We use a variety of tools and the choice of which to use depends on what our customer requires. If they are looking for a mature tool that fits their budget, we choose products by Micro Focus.

We have also used Gatling, JMeter, Tsung, and Neotys for the performance testing.

The installation was a bit of a challenge. It took us almost two weeks to get it up and running.

The pricing is the biggest challenge that we face.

There are open-source tools that do 90% of what LoadRunner and Micro Focus tools are able to do.

We work on multiple models such as on-premises, and multiple deployments for our customers. More insight that could be shared would be very helpful. 

We have a great partnership with Micro Focus.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our company manages four different city hospital environments and all of them have SiteScope but each uses a different version depending on how long ago the product was implemented. We're a government organization. 

We use and manage SiteScope monitoring tools in our different projects. Each project has different kinds and numbers of users. For example, one has 2,300 users, but normally we use SiteScope for the servers. Physical and virtual. SiteScope monitors 200 virtual servers in one of our projects. I'm a managed services manager and we're a customer of SiteScope.

I can say for the system environment, SiteScope can be useful.It is easy to monitor using WMI protocol to get CPU,Ram and disk status. Also, you can monitor URL. Managing site scope is not as difficult as its reveal. 

The tool dashboards are not good and don't meet our customers' needs. Because of this we generally use open source tools like Grafana and we also use Nagios for monitoring as a free tool. We're able to gather gather information from SiteScope or the other network tools like NMI to create a dashboard in Grafana.

When we use the OMI tool as an umbrella, and SiteScope attempts to allow that, the problem is that a technician can only do one alert from OMI. The integration doesn't work properly. We need to see it in both tools and we're unable to do that. Finally, SiteScope isn't productive if you want to monitor RAM or if you want to monitor some URL.

For additional features, I return to the dashboards. Normally Micro Focus has an integration tool, OPR, for the dashboards. It's not useful and it also needs a high source, at least 24 CPU, and at least 96 gigabyte of RAM. I doubt Micro Focus will develop SiteScope dashboards and other tool dashboards because they'll say they have another tool for it, but it's not a useful tool.

I've been using this solution for three years. 

We've just had one serious integration problem between two tools, OMI and SiteScope. Other than that, it's been a very stable solution. 

We've only carried out minimal scaling over the last two years. We started with 180 servers and are now up to 200. It's not much so it's difficult to judge scalability.

Maybe we were unlucky, but I don't like Micro Focus support very much. Sometimes they are good, sometimes they are bad. It depends on the products and depends on the problem. 

Initial setup is reasonably simple. We've installed four times for the four different projects. It takes a short time to install one tool without any configuration. The configuration takes about a day. 

We do the implementaton ourselves and then our customers deal with maintenance which is done on site. 

People should know that if they only use SiteScope, it won't be enough. They will need to get support from other tools. For example, without HM tools, without network manager tools, it will not work. They won't get the old alerts from their environment and they will be unhappy. SiteScope alone is not enough.

I would rate this product a seven out of 10. 

We use SiteScope for monitoring of our production systems, system resources, and also some application monitoring.  

I think that the product's ability to monitor the systems and applications are the most valuable features. We get alerts over email if there is an issue. We can also use it for our customer support incident and problem management. SiteScope can be integrated to have tickets created automatically when the alert thresholds are breached.  

We are evaluating AppDynamics as a potential solution. We want to understand how that compares to and may be better than SiteScope. So I don't know exactly at this time what can be improved, but that is why we are evaluating AppDynamics. We are taking the opportunity to compare the features in both of these products to see if SiteScope measures up to other products in the category.  

At this point in the comparison, I think what I would say AppDynamics does provide one capability that I think SiteScope does not. This is the ability to track a business transaction from the client through all the layers spanning the architecture. So there is more continuity in tracking from the user to the webserver to the database. This might be something that they could consider adding to SiteScope.  

So what I would like to see included most in the next release of SiteScope is the ability to do better transaction tracking. The other thing I would like to see is SiteScope should provide capabilities to display some graphs of information summaries. For example, say if I want to look at the resource utilization of a system or part of a system over a period of time, it would be nice to be able to get a quick preview of that provided in a graph to get a quick idea without a lot of other evaluation.  

We have been using it for five years at least, probably more.  

SiteScope is stable. We have absolutely no issues with that.  

It is easy to scale. We have about one hundred users in our company who are using SiteScope. Most of them are support engineers. I have no idea about the resources needed for maintenance because that is a separate team. The demand and usage are pretty high on a daily basis, but this does not seem to adversely affect performance.  

So far our experience with the product has been good enough that we have not had to contact technical support.  

We did not have a different solution previously, and at the time we adopted the product we thought that SiteScope was a complete solution. It is not bad, but in the last five years, we learned more about what we might want to see in the product and what is possible with this type of product. As this is the case we are evaluating AppDynamics currently.  

The main reason we are evaluating AppDynamics is because of the capabilities of business transaction tracking through the system. We think that AppDynamics will do this in a more satisfactory way for us and we do not have this feature with SiteScope.  

My advice to other people considering SiteScope as a solution in this category of tools is that I think SiteScope is a good product. It is definitely useful and provides a lot of value. I do not have any other advice in terms of being an end-user because all those things are not a perspective I have on the product.  

In general, I would recommend SiteScope. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SiteScope as an eight-out-of-ten.  

We are using the solution for many things.

There's no agent you need installed on the servers. In our environment, we have some servers out of our control so we cannot manage them. We use SiteScope to monitor the availability, the resources on the servers, etc. This allows us to do this job without installing agents so there's no need to take care of anything on the server.

The interface is good. It's great for our technical team.

Sometimes in a huge environment, I think the documentation does not provide the required calculations so you can't know what the required set up should be. You need to test. We have some cases where we need to monitor the vCenters and the whole ESXi, available under this, and VMs. It may impact the server if you don't have the required experience.

The solution is normally stable, but in some environments, it's a bit more complex. For example, in our environment, we have more than 80 services published to the customers. Every day we have new items and new technologies. We have tests to retest, so sometimes when they move to new release, SiteScope itself will not work on it. You need to go to another release or wait for the R&D to provide you with a fix.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is good, but not perfect.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's really simple.

I would recommend the product. I would suggest that those considering implementation of the solution need to study their environment first. You need to know what you're going to do before installing SiteScope. Everything needs to be prepared. Communication metrics should be ready. If your communication metrics are not ready, then SiteScope will not work with you. Once you do, however, it will be a piece of cake. Just install it and install the mutation.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I have used SiteScope for over 10 years as a synthetic monitor for everything under the sun. 

The Monitor Templates functionality allowed us to spin up monitoring with .csv files pretty easily.  

We ended up using the "script" monitor the most, because the canned monitors didn't always do what we needed. It was easy enough to use, and the ability to use regex to monitor output in alerts and thresholds made the product very configurable.

For host monitoring, agentless monitoring requires no installs or special permissions, just a regular user account on the host and firewall access to SSH, WMI, NetBIOS, etc.  

DBQuery, URL, and Web Service monitoring were also valuable until we started using another tool for real transaction monitoring. Now, we rarely need to setup synthetic monitoring for applications, because we have actual user performance data.

It was a great tool for a long time. My go-to tool for everything. However, something happened at HPE years ago and investment in the development of the tool seems to have tanked.  

They have not kept up with browser security requirements or advances in GUIs, they switched to a corruptible database architecture instead of text config files, and the licensing is way more expensive than other tools that do the same thing (like LogicMonitor). Monitors have bugs that sit unfixed for multiple versions (file age and SOAP/XML Web Service monitors). The GUI is cumbersome, and it requires a Java client!  

Yes, some conditions trigger false alerts which is pretty difficult to recover from. The worst thing you can hear is that every monitor is opening a ticket from one server. Another admin built flood limits on the alert receiver side to prevent this issue from creating too many tickets to handle.

I did not see many issues with scalability which did not involve host infrastructure limits.

There are some very capable HPE/Micro Focus engineers on the forums, but overall opening a ticket was usually a waste of time for us. Most of the time we would have to figure out the problem ourselves through debug logging. Often, we would have to restore from a backup, in the event the monitor database would get corrupted.

Easy to setup and teach other teammates how to create monitors, templates, etc.

We implemented using an in-house team.

Easy to setup, but I’m not able to recommend this product any longer because there hasn’t been any real investment in enhancements that allow for cloud or container monitoring.   Apparently they no longer charge for solution templates and I’m not sure how they price the tool.  They’ve changed it over the years from “points”, metrics, and monitor count.  Not sure how they are selling this tool these days unless it’s to customers looking for an agentless onprem tool with no need to monitor new technologies.