HP Autonomy Intelligent Universal Search (discontinued) vs. OpenText SiteScope

It does a decent job at its core functions (that other free software does just as well or better).

SiteScope is definitely well suited in an HP server environment. It is also well suited for virtual server environments. It is also well suited for those who are happy with email and text based message alerting. It may not be appropriate in other environments where monitoring physical components is critical. Because HP SiteScope does not monitor certain physical components, it does fall short of being able to be a "one stop shop solution" in regard to monitoring. It is not well suited for those looking for logic in how alerts are sent and cascade to other people or groups.

Incentivized

• It adheres to traditional Microsoft standards such as: fact-dump documentation with no coherent story or 'best practices' information, inability to automate common tasks, intentional obfuscation of its basic operations.
• It provides OK search results. Not great, but OK.

• Alerts can be configured as per business requirement.
• It can take remedial action, when defined for a particular situation.
• Severity, priority of tickets which are created upon a trigger can be well defined.
• The teams which need to be alerted can be configured in the tool itself, in case of any event.

Incentivized

• There are about a dozen different config files to maintain, and the most important one is dynamically modified by Autonomy itself while it runs. Which means that it is impossible to automate the configuration or keep the configs in versioned source control. Even `cp *.cfg ~/cfgbak/` won't help you roll back a change, because it is never safe to restore a previous config. You'll be using `diff new.cfg old.cfg` a lot.
• The Linux port is poorly thought out. The binaries are named *.exe. The StartService.sh scripts contain both `echo 'Are you sure you want to start the service? Hit ctrl-C to cancel''; read dummy` and, I kid you not, a `chmod a+x /path/to/my/binary.exe`.
• Many features are poorly documented, leading to lots of back and forth with the support department just to answer basic questions like "what does this error code in my logs signify?"
• It seems to reinvent the wheel, poorly, everywhere. E.g. the scheduled backup feature rolls through a user-defined finite list of directories in which to store backups. On day 0 it uses directory 0, on day 1 it uses directory 1, and after day N it rolls back and overwrites directory 0. Why would this be preferable to using a single directory and naming zip files based on the current timestamp?

• Sitescope is particularly used for infrastructure monitoring. Other kinds of monitors cannot be set using HP sitescope.
• Sitescope cannot have graphs like splunk which is why we have splunk as well which is an additional cost for the company.
• We can't have a direct regex operations on data inside HP sitescope. We need to have the logs placed as a single log and then do that.

Incentivized

Management wants to see ROI on the (hefty) cost of purchasing this software, and has mandated that we continue using it. We would prefer to switch immediately.

Very straightforward and easy to use once you get past the short learning curve.

Incentivized

Can't really answer this. Setup was easy and no support has really been used at this point.

Incentivized

SiteScope unified console is a powerful tool for operators to easily detect warnings and alerts grouped by its hierarchical organization with real-time status displaying continuously the whole health map.

Incentivized

• I have learned to tack a zero onto the end of any estimate I make for how long an Autonomy change will take in both planning and implementation.

• Sitescope does exactly what it was purchased for. It may take some time to set it up but once its set up it is a rock solid product.

Incentivized