Port 2389: OpenView Session Manager — A Port from Enterprise IT's Past

What Port 2389 Is

Port 2389 is assigned by IANA to ovsessionmgr — the OpenView Session Manager, a component of HP OpenView's network management suite. It operates on both TCP and UDP.¹

If you see this port active on a system today, you are almost certainly looking at an old HP OpenView installation, or a descendant product now maintained by OpenText.

What HP OpenView Was

HP OpenView was a family of enterprise network management software that HP launched in the late 1980s. At its peak in the 1990s and 2000s, it ran in data centers everywhere — monitoring routers, switches, and servers across global enterprise networks. Network Node Manager (NNMi) was its most well-known component: a tool that discovered network topology, drew maps of your infrastructure, and alerted you when things failed.

OpenView was not a single application. It was a platform — a collection of agents, servers, and management processes that had to talk to each other. The Session Manager was the daemon that coordinated those internal communications. When OpenView components needed to establish and maintain sessions across the management infrastructure, ovsessionmgr handled it on port 2389.²

HP eventually sold the OpenView product line to Micro Focus. Micro Focus was then acquired by OpenText in 2023. The product still exists under the OpenText brand, but the era when HP OpenView was the default choice for enterprise network management is over.

The port remains.

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 2389 is a registered port — in the range 1024 to 49151. These ports are not reserved for system services the way well-known ports (0–1023) are, but IANA does maintain a registry of assignments. Any application or vendor can request a registered port for their software, and if IANA approves, it gets recorded.¹

Registered ports carry no enforcement. Nothing stops another application from using port 2389 on any given machine. The registry is a coordination tool, not a lock. If HP OpenView isn't installed, port 2389 is available to whoever wants it.

If You See Port 2389 Active

On a system that runs HP OpenView, Network Node Manager, or any OpenText NOM product, this port is expected. ovsessionmgr will be listening and you can leave it alone.

On a system that has never run OpenView — or anywhere you don't expect it — it's worth investigating.

To check what's listening on port 2389:

# Linux/macOS
sudo ss -tlnp | grep 2389
sudo lsof -i :2389

# Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :2389
# Then check the PID in Task Manager, or:
tasklist /fi "PID eq <PID>"

Why Unassigned (and Assigned-but-Dormant) Ports Matter

The 65,535 ports on every networked device are a shared address space. Well-known ports are tightly controlled. Registered ports are coordinated but not enforced. Dynamic/ephemeral ports (49152–65535) are used freely for transient connections.

Port 2389 occupies a curious middle ground: formally assigned, rarely active, but still on the books. Its assignment tells you something real — that a major piece of enterprise software once ran here, and that the IANA registry outlasts the software it documents.

A port number is not just a number. It's a historical record.