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BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 16, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Intune
Sponsored
Ranking in Configuration Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
244
Ranking in other categories
Remote Access (1st), Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) (1st), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (1st), Microsoft Security Suite (1st)
BMC TrueSight Server Automa...
Ranking in Configuration Management
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Red Hat Ansible Automation ...
Ranking in Configuration Management
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
Release Automation (3rd), Network Automation (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Configuration Management category, the mindshare of Microsoft Intune is 10.1%, up from 9.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC TrueSight Server Automation is 2.9%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is 18.3%, up from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Configuration Management
 

Featured Reviews

Joseph Merusi - PeerSpot reviewer
Everything has worked better since we started using it
Sometimes the syncing is inconsistent. I'm confident that the devices are checking in every eight hours, but sometimes the devices aren't picking up the settings as quickly as I would expect. Some features haven't been updated in a while, and Microsoft doesn't seem interested in developing them. Unless you talk to an engineer, you don't know whether there will be an update. There are communication issues, so you might start working with a feature without knowing if it will be deprecated six months from now. Some reporting areas still need development. For example, I noticed that the reporting for driver updates is still confusing.
JonathanShilling - PeerSpot reviewer
Able to access server info and file systems directly through TSSA but system can be sluggish
Resource management on the base servers could be improved. We're using a site that's supposed to cover all of our affiliates. I don't know what is causing the problem but we've had to increase RAM and CPU processing in order to alleviate some of the sluggishness during patching. I find the solution to be rather cumbersome. It's supposed to be able to support 50,000 or 100,000 servers. We only have 5,000 servers and during our patch processes, it gets very sluggish. We wanted to automate our patching, and not be stuck monitoring patches for three-quarters of every month. We have a main site and then multiple repeaters at each of the affiliate locations. Theoretically, patches are supposed to be delivered to the repeaters and your affiliates are supposed to pull the patches from those repeaters. We've noticed that doesn't always work and it pulls transfer patches from the main site rather than going to the repeater. TrueSight brought some standardization across the affiliates, however, it has also increased workloads and has made some things more complex. The requirement to have a local account with no password (password is random in TSSA, but not able to be changed through Windows) has caused some grief with our security team, and many complaints across affiliates. There are several features that appear to be very good but they don't always work as expected.
Surya Chapagain - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to manage and simple to learn
We use Red Hat a lot. I open tickets for the Red Hat cases, however, with Ansible, I haven't opened any cases. My manager worked with them a bit. If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The best feature is that we don't need to worry about downtime. We don't need to worry about the network connections of our office or the virtual private network. Everything is being done through the internet. Using Intune Autopilot, we can configure and deploy everything to the devices."
"Microsoft Intune has helped us by improving our security posture, leading to fewer security problems, and helping us understand where we have issues."
"It's easy to manage."
"Within Intune, managing policies and having a consistent way to manage devices is valuable."
"We work completely in a Microsoft environment. Its interface is similar to other Microsoft solutions that we are using such as Microsoft Defender. So far, for our administrators, it is easy to use."
"We already use a lot of Microsoft products in our company, and therefore, it made sense to also use this product."
"The most valuable feature is the policy CSPs."
"Technical support, in general, has been quite helpful."
"It makes deployment easier and allows us to put restrictions on the server using role-based authorization."
"Among the most valuable features is its flexibility and ability to work across multiple operating systems. Being able to execute some form of data collection and not have to worry about whether I'm working on a Linux box, or a Windows box, or the underlying OS, I can do these collections, get these results, and put them together in a uniform format which makes it easier to present back to management."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to remediate quickly and efficiently across a number of IT assets at the same time. It takes away manual efforts from the team to go out and fix those vulnerabilities through patching, conflict updates, etc."
"The ability to script and create BL packages to perform various functions. This makes automating our environment relatively easy to do."
"BMC support is great. They usually can answer any of our questions in a short amount of time and solve our most complex issues."
"You can easily get the patching link. Patches can be deployed easily with a single click, making deployment straightforward. This eliminates the need for constant monitoring. You can deploy the necessary patches with one click, ensuring everything is signed correctly, and all issues are resolved."
"The best feature of the solution is patch automation."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."
"On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions."
"It is quick to production. It has an API in the back which allows for integrations."
"It does not require staff for deployment and maintenance. It just works."
"We can automate a few host configurations using the product."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is valuable due to the simplicity of the YAML language."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
 

Cons

"Intune endpoint analytics can be challenging."
"Improvements can be made by allowing server integrations since it is an area where the product currently has shortcomings."
"The security aspect could be more effective. We are using other applications to manage network devices and groups, so if Microsoft Intune could improve in this area, especially on a network level, it would be a real advantage."
"The reporting part needs improvement, and it would be beneficial if it could integrate with third-party tools instead of just Power BI."
"There are challenges with Intune, specifically in reporting. Many third-party companies offer single-pane-of-glass reporting that shows you what your update environment looks like, how your patch is doing, application status, etc., but Intune's reporting is not intuitive."
"Manually syncing devices to enforce policies is cumbersome."
"In an upcoming release, I would like to see some kind of analytics report."
"Onboarding of endpoint devices is not straightforward. The onboarding process was a little heavier than I thought it would be. That's the key improvement area. Obviously, the more control you have over the devices, the better it is."
"BMC TrueSight Server Automation's scripting needs improvement."
"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."
"The architecture is big, so the initial setup is not a straightforward task."
"Resource management on the base servers is sluggish and could be improved."
"More use cases can be automated. The user interface of BMC TrueSight Server Automation could benefit from enhancements, as it currently lacks refinement."
"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."
"Needs more use cases into compliance management and the remediation process."
"We would like to see this solution handle more multitasking."
"The governance features could be improved."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"The communication on it is not probably where it could be. We could use some real life examples where we could point customers to them and say, "This is what you are trying to do. If you follow these steps, it would at least get you started a bit quicker.""
"There should be consistency. I know that it is always changing, but when we are trying to get some users to do something in basic Ansible that they are not really interested in doing but their job requires them to do it, they start finding inconsistencies."
"For Ansible Tower, there are three tiers with ten nodes. I would like them to expand those ten nodes to 20, because ten nodes is not enough to test on."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's monthly for us, but it's built into the license cost that we pay our IT each month. It's maybe 129 Kroner per head, which translates to £10. There are some additional costs. Our IT had to set up and configure their own server, so there is an extra cost for that, but I'm not sure what that costs."
"Intune is linked with Microsoft. We can deploy the Microsoft E365 license to users by Intune. There are different types of licenses, such as device administrator licenses, E5 licenses for device enrollment manually, and P1 and p2 licenses for device enrollment automatically. These are the licenses required for the administration."
"There is a cost benefit of using Microsoft Intune because of the packaging with other Microsoft products."
"Microsoft Intune's costliness stems from licensing fees and the overhead associated with its management, user experience, and device remediation."
"Microsoft Intune is available for individual purchase at a low per-device cost."
"The Intune license model is costly."
"I am not that aware of the pricing, but as compared to other MDM solutions, Microsoft is providing a lot of things at the organizational level. So, it is quite reasonable as compared to other MDM solutions."
"The licensing is on a yearly basis."
"The solution is quite expensive compared to other vendors."
"We're looking at less than $100,000 USD for this solution."
"The product's pricing depends on the number of servers."
"The product is expensive."
"Licensing is a bit pricey. Be mindful about the components that you need and buy as appropriate."
"I am using the community edition of the solution which is free."
"We have to be mindful of how we use Ansible because of the licensing model. I am not saying that it is unfair or we do not find value in it. Because we are trying to automate so many different things, we have to be mindful of what we are doing and how we are doing it because we are trying to stay in compliance with it."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is an affordable solution."
"We went with product because we have a subscription for Red Hat."
"You don't need to buy agents on servers or deploy expense management when using the solution, which affected our decision to go with it."
"The cost is high, but it still works well."
"Ansible Tower is free. Until they lower the cost, we are holding off on purchasing the product."
"We're charged between $8 to $13 a month per license."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
34%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
32%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Microsoft Intune compare with VMware Workspace One?
Microsoft Intune is a great tool for managing a mobile device fleet while keeping access control. The solution makes ...
What are the pros and cons of Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune is a great configuration management tool and has a lot of good things going for it. Here are some of...
How does Google Cloud Identity compare with Microsoft Intune?
Microsoft Intune offers not only an easy-to-deploy data protection and productivity management solution, but also ...
What do you like most about BMC TrueSight Server Automation?
The product's valuable feature is its ability to conduct patching for multiple servers simultaneously.
What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Server Automation?
More use cases can be automated. The user interface of BMC TrueSight Server Automation could benefit from enhancement...
What is the difference between Red Hat Satellite and Ansible?
Red Hat Satellite has proven to be a worthwhile investment for me. Both its patch management and license management h...
How does Ansible compare to Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (SCCM)?
Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager takes knowledge and research to properly configure. The length of time that ...
What do you like most about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform?
The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching.
 

Also Known As

Intune, MS Intune, Microsoft Endpoint Manager
TrueSight Server Automation, BladeLogic Server Automation, BladeLogic Automation Suite
Ansible
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Mitchells and Buzzers, Callaway
State of Michigan, Fujitsu FSAS, Transamerica Life Insurance Company, SAP
HootSuite Media, Inc., Cloud Physics, Narrative, BinckBank
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC TrueSight Server Automation vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,296 professionals have used our research since 2012.