We performed a comparison between BMC TrueSight Server Automation and Chef based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ability to push applications on devices is valuable. You do not have to manually install applications one by one. If you like to use ten different applications, you do not have to manually go and download them one by one. Intune can compile a package for you, and then you can just push them from the admin center."
"Its security is most valuable. It gives us a way to secure devices, not only those that are steady. We do have a few tablets and other devices, and it is a way for us to secure these devices and manage them. We know they're out there and what's their status. We can manage their life cycle and verify that they're updated properly."
"Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"The most valuable feature of Intune is the central dashboard for compliance and policy management."
"The solution is easy to use, simple to understand for those new to using it, and combined with the other Microsoft products it makes for an overall good package."
"We already use a lot of Microsoft products in our company, and therefore, it made sense to also use this product."
"The security-related tools are excellent; these features allow us to secure devices, lock them down, and ensure compliance."
"There is a single pane of glass for user access and a single sign-on facility for the user. If you have already logged in to Microsoft Azure or on-premises, you can redirect directly to Microsoft Endpoint Manager, monitor all your security threats, and analyze the data associated with the application in a single, unified way."
"Server Automation's best feature is automated patching. It also helps us automate compliance and report generation. We can even integrate TrueSight Server Automation with a vulnerability management solution to remedy vulnerabilities by applying patches, deploying scripts, or changing registry entries."
"Scalability is good."
"Compliance is also huge... By tying it to Atrium Orchestrator, our workflow tool, we'll be able to have a closed loop where we identify a compliance issue, cut CRs, get them approved, and then be able to execute these CRs and more seamlessly fix these issues on the fly."
"Can standardize patching and deployments across affiliates."
"With BMC, we even configured applications, like IE or things that were Java-related. When we scheduled the jobs, it worked fine. It saved us time and there was no need for resources to monitor them."
"It makes deployment easier and allows us to put restrictions on the server using role-based authorization."
"The best feature of the solution is patch automation."
"The solution is stable."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."
"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."
"You set it and forget it. You don't have to worry about the reliability or the deviations from any of the other configurations."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."
"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."
"Reporting needs improvement."
"Lacking in features such as Wi-Fi and network security."
"They should make it easier to order it, however, that's generally true for everything from Microsoft."
"Some enrollment features could be improved."
"Deploying an app can be a complex process due to dependencies."
"Enhancements for managing MacOS more comprehensively would be beneficial."
"There are items that require improvements. One is the controls from iOS."
"The biggest problem we ever have is when something goes out of date after 30 days when nobody has logged into it. We do have a problem trying to get those back online. We've been working with Microsoft to resolve that problem, but that's been the only issue that we've had in the last few years."
"TrueSight falls short when we are trying to gather large amounts of data from multiple servers. We need to do these tasks manually because there is no option to populate the data and export it to Excel, which is required. For example, let's say I'm trying to find out how many patches are missing on the servers and which ones have been installed. It's hard to automatically pull each server's data in an Excel format."
"Resource management on the base servers is sluggish and could be improved."
"We would like to see this solution handle more multitasking."
"I would like to see more container integration in the next release of this solution."
"Provisioning needs to be more user-friendly. We were using BladeLogic for provisioning, but due to a lot of issues and complications, we had to stop using provisioning with this tool."
"There is no option to see all the servers we patch and we cannot find what the server status is. Of course, we can what has been completed and what is pending and which servers have failed, but we cannot find server status from the BMC tool. For example, is the RDP up or not. We are using separate scripts for that."
"A better CLI Database cleanup tool would help us with our regular maintenance of BladeLogic Server Automation."
"Without any knowledge of the product, we used the KB articles to start working. As a result, we definitely did not have full knowledge of BMC BladeLogic... They need to provide a minimum of knowledge with training on YouTube or somewhere else."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
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BMC TrueSight Server Automation is ranked 12th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. BMC TrueSight Server Automation is rated 8.2, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BMC TrueSight Server Automation writes "Helps to automate and configure the endpoints of servers ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". BMC TrueSight Server Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, BigFix, Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager and HashiCorp Terraform, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Microsoft Configuration Manager and SaltStack. See our BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs. Chef report.
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