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 solution has reduced the risk of security breaches by 30%."
"The biggest thing for us is enforcing logins only from devices that are managed by Intune."
"The Asset Management and Auto Pilot are valuable features."
"We can manage and standardize security across your environment, identify problems, receive alerts, and so on. That's its purpose, and that's also why it's so good."
"Application deployment and keeping the devices secure no matter where they are, by having this cloud solution — that has been great."
"While I don't think you can ever have full visibility and control, Intune certainly allows us to see the applications being used and tells us if things like Windows patches aren't applied to machines. It does a good job. That visibility makes life a little easier."
"The most valuable feature is the policy CSPs."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"BMC support is great. They usually can answer any of our questions in a short amount of time and solve our most complex issues."
"It gives us more speed to deliver services and applications, and we rely on security."
"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."
"BMC Bladelogic Automation can be used across many OS platforms, providing us flexibility for deployments."
"The solution is stable."
"The product's valuable feature is its ability to conduct patching for multiple servers simultaneously."
"Scalability is good."
"The best feature of the solution is patch automation."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"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."
"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."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"One big problem with Microsoft is that they're changing the names of the products quite often, or they're quite consistently doing so. Intune is now Endpoint administration. Constantly switching the user interface or the administrative interface makes it quite hard to keep pace. If you are on a two-week holiday and you come back and look at the same screen you have looked at for the last couple of months, it looks different, which is annoying. Changing things around all the time doesn't make it easy."
"It would be helpful if there was proactive remediation."
"It would be nice to have a location tracker for the mobile device management tool. I'm not sure if it exists but hasn't been configured or if it's missing, but we've been unable to utilize the location features."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"There can be some added features, such as an improved dashboard. Any new feature that could be a benefit to our customers would be good."
"Microsoft Intune's support for Mac devices is lacking and could be improved."
"Additional application deployment options e.g. MSI deployment with more complex parameters or additional side-by-side files, and non-MSI deployment options."
"Due to the abundance of features, there's a lot to organize, which makes managing and setting up the solution challenging. The setup is immense, and it would be good to see improvement in this area."
"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."
"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."
"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 number of APIs available within the tool needs improvement. At the moment, we have a couple of different scanning tools used within the organization, but only one of those is integrated back into Server Automation. There is another tool that they use in another part of the business where it doesn't have an out-of-the-box adaptor for it. We would have to go and create or develop something bespoke to be able to integrate it with that scanning tool. Whereas, with the other scanning tool, there was an API available. To make it easier, I would like to have more APIs available for different scanning tools within that line of business."
"Another area for improvement is group scheduling if I'm trying to do all the servers. For example, if I want to do all the 2012 Servers - since the patches are the same for all of them - I can't do so."
"We've had to increase RAM and CPU processing in order to alleviate some of the sluggishness during patching."
"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."
"We would like to see this solution handle more multitasking."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"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."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
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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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