Micro Focus has recently announced the Operations Bridge – SaaS release that offers the rich capabilities of the Operations Bridge Premium Edition, with embedded OPTIC platform and enhanced with Automatic Event Correlation (AEC). Operations Bridge – SaaS helps you reduce operational complexity of your environment and enables you to enjoy flexibility, scalability, and rapid deployment that SaaS solutions offer. You will take advantage of the SaaS benefits, such as:

• Reduced operational expenses due to offloading of maintenance and operations​
• Improved time to value by seamless adoption of the new features ​
• Elastic scale, where you can grow or shrink your environment on demand ​
• Access anywhere without spatial restrictions​
• Business continuity and high availability levels​
• Flexible consumption and licensing models ​

Once you start using Operations Bridge – SaaS, these high-level benefits are translated into actual value – both immediate and long-term:

• Installation and configuration: You do not need to worry about installing and setting up the components in your SaaS environment. With regard to the required onsite components, note that you have a choice to install and configure them by yourself or, if desired, get assistance from our professional consultants or partners at an extra cost.
  As part of optional services, we provide:
  • Installing and configuring all onsite components necessary for a fully operational SaaS (including Monitoring Service Edge) from scratch so you don’t need to invest time and training involved in getting the environment up and running
  • Updating the existing onsite components to minimal Operations Bridge SaaS-supported versions
  • Setting up the integrations with service management tools (Micro Focus Service Management Automation X (SMAX) and ServiceNow; the Operations Bridge side of the connection)

• Patches and upgrades: The SaaS model allows you to stay current at all times. Software updates will be installed on a regular basis so that you do not need to invest any effort to adopt innovations or install patches.

Note: One upgrade and up to two patches per year for your onsite components are included with the SaaS subscription.

For full onsite administration and ongoing management, you can choose to use our Solution Managed Services (SMS). For more details, contact your Micro Focus representative.

• Service monitoring: Micro Focus monitors the availability of the hosted Operations Bridge – SaaS components 24x7. We use a centralized notification system to deliver proactive communication about application changes, outages and scheduled maintenance. As part of the Micro Focus Operations Bridge – SaaS offering, we also provide a Service Health portal for SaaS-deployed components, which will allow you to see:
  • The availability of the Operations Bridge – SaaS environment
  • Details of any upcoming planned maintenance
  • Outage reports for any incidents that have been identified by our support teams
  • The historical service-level objective (SLO) data

The URL to the Service Health portal for your tenant will be provided as part of your SaaS onboarding.

Figure 1. Service Health portal for the SaaS components

We also monitor the underlying Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Kubernetes infrastructure for smooth operations.

• Security: Micro Focus is responsible for standard technical and organizational measures, controls and procedures, which are intended to help protect the customer-provided SaaS data (secured operations are based on ISO 27001 certified hosting).

Note: With the Operations Bridge – SaaS subscription, you are entitled to one Operations Bridge – SaaS Premium production tenant and one non-production tenant for development and testing purposes.

Operations Bridge capabilities available on SaaS

• Discovery. The onsite Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) with its Management Packs discovers your IT applications across physical, virtualized, public and private Cloud environments and forwards these discovery results to OBM on SaaS.
• Infrastructure monitoring​. Possible with Operations Agent (OA), SiteScope and Business Process Monitor (BPM) integrating corresponding metrics into the OPTIC Data Lake (DL) and events into OBM. Note: Management Pack metric collection and 3^rd-party integrations are possible with onsite OBM, but the data cannot be integrated into the OPTIC DL yet.
• Metric and event consolidation​. Achieved through the OPTIC DL consolidation (of infrastructure and BPM metrics) and OBM consolidation of all events​.
• Centralized event management​. OBM consolidates events from multiple sources into a centralized console. The OBM Event Browser allows you to view and filter events, manage the event lifecycle (resolve, assign to operators or operator groups, escalate events to ticketing systems, etc.).Note that you will still require to keep your event collection onsite (while the rest moves to our SaaS Cloud infrastructure) meaning that an OBM Server must be hosted onsite (in addition to OBM on SaaS). The need for this will be eliminated in future Operations Bridge – SaaS releases.
• Event reduction/correlation​. Correlation methods applied to reduce the number of events include stream-based event correlation, time-based event automation and Automated Event Correlation (AEC) powered by machine learning.​
• Closed-loop incident process (CLIP). This functionality is supported with SMAX and ServiceNow integrations (available via the Integration Hub).
• Reporting and dashboarding. Reporting is possible via out-of-the-box reports displayed in OPTIC Reporting (BVD) or using your own BI tool (we currently support Power BI and Tableau). You can also use Monitoring and Performance Dashboards to visualize your data.

Figure 2. Operations Bridge – SaaS setup diagram

Accessing Operations Bridge – SaaS

To access the Operations Bridge – SaaS instance, we will provide you with a URL and credentials accessible from any web browser on any device with an Internet connection (once your subscription is activated).

SaaS subscription and services

Your Operations Bridge – SaaS subscription fee includes all updates and upgrades of your SaaS environment, as well as ongoing updates of Operations Bridge components onsite (the initial update of the onsite components to make them SaaS-ready is an extra service). It also includes hosting costs and additional SaaS benefits, such as 24x7 support, ​assigned Customer Success Manager, flexibility to scale your environment based on your needs, and others. You also have the flexibility to choose a range of additional services available at an extra charge. For detailed information, please take a look at our Service Description.

Configuring Operations Bridge onsite

Data sources in your Operations Bridge onsite deployment collect metrics, events, and topology from your monitored environments. To monitor and analyze the collected data, you must configure these data sources to send data to Operations Bridge – SaaS. Detailed procedures on how to establish communication between the Operations Bridge onsite and SaaS deployments are described in the Integrate section of the Operations Bridge – SaaS documentation.

You can integrate any of the components listed below with your Operations Bridge – SaaS but note that these must be kept onsite:

• OBM
• SiteScope
• Operations Agent
• APM
• BPM
• Management Packs
• Integration Hub
• The new component Monitoring Service Edge

Note that we recommend that you leverage Micro Focus onboarding services to configure these integrations.

How an Operator works in a SaaS environment

OBM operators will be able to perform their daily activities (managing events and analyzing performance problems with Performance Dashboard, which now allows them to not only look at current metric values but also at historical data stored in the OPTIC DL). Operators can also view out-of-the-box reports or use BYOBI – Power BI and Tableau for reporting.

Note that for the following tasks, the onsite systems will need to be used:

• For remediation tasks, you need to use OBM for tools and actions
• Performance Dashboard graphing of SiteScope, APM, Connectors, Cloud Optimizer
• Real-time graphing from OA​

More details are provided in the Use section of the Operations Bridge – SaaS documentation.

How an Administrator works in a SaaS environment

Users with administrative rights will be able to access selected administration pages to configure Operations Bridge – SaaS capabilities and integrate data sources into SaaS. Micro Focus reserves the right to determine which administrative features will be made available in the Operations Bridge – SaaS instance. Note that for executing certain tasks, such as unlocking user accounts, setting up CLIP integrations and customer-provided BI tools integrations, attribute customizations, and some others, you will need to open a ticket with the Micro Focus SaaS Operations team.

For information on what is available, see the Administer section of the Operations Bridge – SaaS documentation.

Note: For onsite components, you will have full administration capabilities and can maintain your daily administration as you did in the past, for example, configure monitoring on the onsite Operations Bridge deployment using monitoring tools.

What’s next?

Contact your Micro Focus representative to get a demonstration or a trial of our SaaS offering. Also, check out the Operations Bridge - SaaS documentation for further details on Operations Bridge – SaaS, supported deployment options, procedures on how to integrate your onsite components with Operations Bridge – SaaS and a lot of other useful information.

We encourage you to try out our new features and enhancements! For further information on our offerings, visit the Operations Bridge product page, explore our documentation resources and check out our videos and blogs.

If you have feedback or suggestions, don’t hesitate to comment on this article.

Explore the full capabilities of Operations Bridge by taking a look at these pages on our Practitioner Portal: Operations Bridge Manager, SiteScope, Operations Agent, Operations Connector (OpsCx), Operations Bridge Analytics, Application Performance Management (APM) and Operations Orchestration (OO).

Events

Please mark your calendars and join us for informative sessions and technical demos from Micro Focus experts, customers, and partners. Register for Universe now! 

EMEA and Americas March 22-23 | APJ April 5-7

Recent and upcoming events

To get more information on this release and how customers are using Operations Bridge, we are happy to announce the following recent and upcoming events:

• On-demand Operations Bridge – SaaS
• On-demand Cloud Monitoring Virtual Customer Forum
• On-demand Map Your Route to AIOps: A 5-Step Guide

See all the Micro Focus events worldwide.

Read all our news at the Operations Bridge blog.

Related items

• Gartner: Rethink Cloud Monitoring across Tooling and Staffing
• Operations Bridge – Automated discovery, monitoring and automation
• Operations Bridge Technology Integrations eBook
• What is AIOps

Have technical questions about Operations Bridge? Visit the OpsBridge User Discussion Forum.

Keep up with the latest Tips & Info about Operations Bridge.

Do you have an idea or Product Enhancement Request about Operations Bridge? Submit it in the Ops Bridge Idea Exchange.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this blog. Comment below.