[BMC Helix Remedyforce] is probably best suited for an MSP who needs to keep multiple clients separated. If you were an internal IT department I think the additional features it has would be lost. When dealing with an MSP who needs to know what software and what issues have effected specific clients it is very well suited to do that.
Manage Engine OpManager is better suited to serve server and network admins at organization to monitor their servers and network devices. It helps us with compliance with the reports available like utilization reports and capacity planning reports. It helps you to keep track of what all process are consuming the resources. It helps you in monitoring what is happening in your switches, routers and firewall
An admin user is able to quickly create a request definition with all of its components from one screen. We use to have to go to the 7 or 8 different screens to create each piece of the request definition.
Ability to update multiple Incidents/Service Requests at once with the update button. This allows essentially an inline edit functionality within Remedyforce.
Change management schedule is a great feature as well to be able to see how changes align and what there expected start dates/times are.
It measures the CPU utilization of hosts, the network bandwidth utilization of links, and other aspects of the operation
It often sends messages—sometimes called watchdog messages—over the network to each host to verify if it is responsive to requests.
Set Up Notifications And Reports.
OpManager offers a set of advantages that allow it to adapt to the needs of the company, guaranteeing effective monitoring of the application networks used in our organization.
The ability to monitor/regulate the volume of tickets when you integrate with your monitoring software. We have so many items that trigger alerts, creating a ticket for each is somewhat overwhelming. Would like to be able to better control when an incident should be created.
Being able to report on Service requests and tasks together would be nice. Right now I have to do it separately as they are in different buckets, so to speak.
Remedy console is an improvement from where it started but can still be a cleaner interface for a tech to be able to work out of for their day to day work.
Alerts has to be configured correctly otherwise unnecessary bombarding of alerts can cause inconvenience.
The server on which ManageEngine OpManager is to be deployed should have higher resources as monitoring a large number of devices may slow down the performance of the system.
Configuring the advanced features may require a learning curve.
The total amount of time spent from installation to configuration for a minimal ticketing system was 2 hours. Maintenance and customization for the application can be completed with a great amount of ease. In addition having a customer portal is an added benefit that pays for itself
The rating I provided is based on the product quality, experience (I have been using OpManager for almost the last 4 years), and relevance of the information/response I generated through Manage Engine OpManager. I have also received good support from OpManager.
At first, we were not able to add our Avaya switches to the configuration backup module, our partner tried to help, but they did not find the solution, we had one remote session with tech support of ME and they solve the problem.
Learning industry best practices or gaining insight on them from either BMC or an implementation partner would have saved some headaches we faced after roll-out.
I previously worked with tools like Service Manager which were difficult to configure, administer and maintain. The support options were very limited. Remedyforce has local US support, dedicated reps, and a more developed infrastructure to work from to support an organization. This runs on the Salesforce platform so worrying about server failures and unscheduled outages was no longer going to be an issue for us. Self service, knowledge base, and change control were just a few highly utilized features that helped employees support themselves and automate very manual processes.
During our competitive analysis, we found ManageEngine OpManager was not expensive compared to other vendors. At the same time, there was no compromise on the features such as customized reporting or configuring alerts per our clientele's unique requirements. These are our client words "Other vendors ask us to pay more $$$ for enabling additional email alerts".
Remedyforce has allowed us to eliminate other solutions that provided similar features. By now using one true ITSM we have been able to save money which in higher education is always a concern.
The reports and dashboards allow for a birds-eye view of our daily operations and provide managers and executives the information they need to make important cost saving decisions.
I don't know if you can calculate ROI with a monitoring solution, there are more factors to calculate.
We found a really big problem with a network switch (faulty transceiver) in a trunk configuration with OPManager. this caused us serial troubles with the overall network stability.
We are loosing around € 3.000 to 5.000 per hour if our network is not working so this was a great help to fix this issue
Our label printers are really important to monitoring in our warehouse system, this makes OPManager a great solution for that
