We performed a comparison between AWS Systems Manager and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 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 solution is scalable. We currently have tens of thousands of users within our organization using the solution."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"It works well if you have a Microsoft environment."
"...Intune itself integrates with that entire Microsoft ecosystem. As an individual product itself, it's okay. It holds up. But when you start saying "I've bought this as part of a wider solution, as a company we are going Microsoft throughout," then it makes more sense to have Microsoft Intune... so you have that single dashboard."
"The most valuable features are the ones that make sure that the deployment is of a standard operating system and the Zero Touch deployment, which is very useful. This allows users to have an out of box experience."
"I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"We have found the solution is capable of scaling."
"The ability to switch between Affinity and non-Affinity enrollment is great."
"The solution is user-friendly"
"When we do the automation in the cloud, we use the SSM agent. This helps us to test our automation and documents, and monitor the cloud."
"With AWS Systems Manager, our company can patch our systems directly from it, so we don't need to patch our systems manually."
"AWS provides Auto Scaling groups."
"Systems Manager has a feature where it analyzes the logs and gives us a performance overview in the form of a graph. We know when it's taking up more resources and when there are spikes, so we can predict the usability."
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"Has a variety of automation options."
"It is very extensible. There are many plugins and modules out there that everybody helps create to interact with different cloud providers as well."
"The biggest thing I liked about Ansible is the check mode so that we can verify, after we've pushed, that the config there is actually what we intended."
"Ansible Galaxy is helpful for roles and Git Submodules: No dependency in managing playbooks. Also, fact caching in redis for host/role grp information speeds up execution. Finally, variable management is easy."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"There are new modules available, which help to simplify the workflow. That is what we like about it."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"Intune's third-party patch management could be better. It should be easier for the average system admin to keep non-Microsoft applications updated."
"Areas for improvement in Intune include expanding support beyond Samsung devices to accommodate other Android manufacturers like Redmi and Motorola."
"Integrating certain group policies can be challenging and may necessitate using on-premises systems to integrate them with Microsoft Intune."
"They should improve its compatibility with other operating systems such as iOS and Linux. It supports Linux but they still need to work on the iOS part."
"The most important thing is reporting. They should improve their reporting. They should give a free hand to users. In SCCM, I can create my own reports. For example, in SCCM, I can create an inventory report for my PC or for all PCs, but in Intune, we don't have an option to create any report. Microsoft claims that Intune is a successor of SCCM, but SCCM is more powerful than Intune. So, they should develop Intune more and make it equivalent to SCCM. Then, their product will be great in the market."
"Reporting and troubleshooting for the application deployment could be better. It's very difficult to understand."
"I would like to see easier pushdowns. Currently, we have to package our own software and then push it. Intune can make that way easier and integrate applications, such as Zoom and Adobe Acrobat, that are used by a lot of enterprise or corporate organizations."
"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."
"We formerly used third-party products to analyze the log, give us information, and find bottlenecks. Systems Manager could provide more tools that conduct this analysis, so we don't have to do it ourselves."
"Lacks sufficient integrations."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"Additional features can be added as per customer requirements."
"The AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"AWS does not have EKS cluster backup."
"The fact that AWS Systems Manager takes time to complete the patching process, makes it an area where improvements are required."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"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."
"Performance has been an issue on larger environments, but it has gotten a lot better over the past two years."
"It needs better documentation."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really there."
"We would like support for the post-integration of this product before cloud frameworks because right now their approach is to avoid using on-premises activities and move everything to the cloud."
"There are some options not available in the community edition of the solution."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
AWS Systems Manager is ranked 6th in Configuration Management with 7 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. AWS Systems Manager is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AWS Systems Manager writes "Offers a variety of automation options; simplifies governance and administration ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". AWS Systems Manager is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Satellite, AWS CloudFormation, BigFix and Chef, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Control-M. See our AWS Systems Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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