We performed a comparison between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager 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."One of the main features of the solution is it allows the management of many devices in different ways."
"At the moment, Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"The ability to (somewhat) manage full Windows 10 computers including EXE-based or MSI-based application deployments using Azure Active Directory as Identity."
"It works pretty well for us."
"The security-related tools are excellent; these features allow us to secure devices, lock them down, and ensure compliance."
"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"This product offers an alternative solution to other UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) solutions."
"We can automate a few host configurations using the product."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"There are new modules available, which help to simplify the workflow. That is what we like about it."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"I like the fact that Ansible is agentless."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"I like the inventory management. It's a very nice, simple, concise way to keep all that data together. And the API allows us to use it even for things that are not Ansible."
"The most valuable features the solution offers are compliance, reliability, and information about reliability."
"This solution has helped our organization by allowing us to store all the device configurations for the various network devices in NCM and making it easy for us to retrieve and look them over."
"Configuration refers to the specific settings and options that determine how a device or system behaves. It can include things, such as network settings, security settings, and other options that are specific to the device or system in question. One of the most valuable features of the solution was its ability to track and monitor changes to the configuration of devices on a network. This can be useful for troubleshooting and identifying potential issues. By keeping track of who made changes to the configuration and when it can be easier to determine the cause of any problems that may arise."
"The solution's view is very nice, and they have a great customized dashboard."
"The feature that I really enjoy is the ability to script changes across all of your devices."
"It is pretty straightforward to set up."
"It allows us to manage backups in big companies. It is also useful in managing the configuration changes."
"It's perfect for network configuration management. It's easy to use."
"In terms of what can be improved, I am looking for better enhancements regarding Apple management, not only on the mobile device, but also on the laptop."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"The solution requires Mac support."
"The configuration and pricing can be improved."
"The add-ons must be integrated into the solution."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible."
"There could be more stuff in the workflows. I hope that if I have ten templates with different services on it, workflow could auto-populate all the template-based services."
"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"Accessibility. Ansible uses a CLI by default. Those accustomed to it can find their way and adopt the YAML files easily over time. But, some users are more comfortable using UIs..."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is not the best at server provisioning. Terraform is better."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
"The network flow is a problem for this solution."
"Releasing a product compatible with operating systems other than Windows would be advantageous."
"The Network Configuration Manager needs to improve the access control list compliance."
"We want to be able to store it in a data warehouse format and integrate it with Google single sign-on."
"The network logs could be improved. When the error logs come across with those false positive alarms in the error logs."
"The solution could have better integration."
"The third-party plugins available in the solution could improve. I have received some issues with the templates."
"The only thing that requires some experience, and training doesn't fix, is how to set up your custom policy-based reports to check compliance."
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews while SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is ranked 11th in Configuration Management with 22 reviews. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6, while SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager writes "Network configuration is done well; great pricing". Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation, whereas SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is most compared with Cisco DNA Center, Cisco Prime, OpenText Network Node Manager i, VMware NSX and IBM Tivoli NetCool. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors and best Network Automation vendors.
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