HP OpenView

networkingvendors & productsops culture

Stands for: Hewlett-Packard's network and systems management family, Network Node Manager at its base

The former name of Hewlett-Packard's network and systems management family, built on Network Node Manager, an SNMP network monitor; rebranded HP BTO Software in 2007 and sold with HP Software to Micro Focus in 2017.

For twenty years HP OpenView was what a large enterprise meant by network management. Its foundational product was Network Node Manager, network monitoring software based on SNMP that discovered a network and drew its map, used on its own or with other management software such as CiscoWorks; around it HP assembled a family of modules and third-party products in a common framework. The family grew by acquisition, Novadigm and its Radia suite in April 2004, Peregrine Systems' IT asset and service management in December 2005, Mercury Interactive in November 2006, Opsware, and in early 2007 HP rebranded the whole line HP BTO (Business Technology Optimization) Software under its HP Software Division; the OpenView and Mercury names were phased out. HP Software passed to Hewlett Packard Enterprise at the 2015 split and was sold to Micro Focus in a merger completed on 1 September 2017. The name survives in the vocabulary of everyone who ran a network operations centre before 2007.

What the name covered. HP OpenView was the former name for a Hewlett-Packard product family that consisted of network and systems management products. It provided large-scale system and network management of an organisation's IT infrastructure, with optional modules from HP and third-party management software connecting within a common framework. The product at the base was Network Node Manager, NNM, which polled devices over SNMP, the Simple Network Management Protocol, discovered how they were connected and presented the result as a map with status colours. Everything the operations centre did, alarms, trend graphs, escalation, hung off that map.

The acquisitions that made it a suite. In April 2004 HP bought Novadigm and its Radia suite; in December 2005 it acquired Peregrine Systems, whose IT asset and service management software was integrated into OpenView; in November 2006 it completed the purchase of Mercury Interactive and integrated its applications; Opsware followed. Each purchase widened the family from the network towards the service desk, the application and the data centre, which is the same path every management vendor walked in those years.

The end of the name. In early 2007, alongside the integration of the Mercury, Peregrine and Opsware products, the OpenView products were rebranded under the HP Software Division as HP BTO Software, and the OpenView and Mercury names were phased out; HP OpenCall kept its name. HP Software became part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise after the 2015 split of Hewlett-Packard, and HPE Software was sold to Micro Focus, the merger completing on 1 September 2017. The article this entry rests on does not give a launch year for OpenView, so none is stated here.

Why it still matters. The division of labour OpenView taught, discovery, polling, event correlation, trend collection, a map as the operator's primary instrument, is the division of labour the open source monitors on this glossary (Nagios, Zabbix, OpenNMS) and the commercial ones (PRTG, SolarWinds Orion) inherited, usually at a fraction of the price and without the framework. When an engineer who learned on NNM says the new tool has no map, this is what they mean.

Also known as: openview, ov nnm, network node manager, hp nnm, hp bto software

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