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."...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 feature is probably mobile device management. Small businesses are coming under greater scrutiny and requirements for compliance as time goes on. We don't have to worry about a VPN because we can manage these devices, control company data, and lock users out. If needed, we can remotely wipe devices and deadman-switch them."
"I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"The reporting and analytics features in Microsoft Intune have been a lifesaver."
"For the price, the features included with Microsoft are appealing."
"The ability to switch between Affinity and non-Affinity enrollment is great."
"The ability to manage devices with different sets of policies is most valuable."
"A valuable feature is user enrollment, where users can enroll their devices in their organizations themselves."
"Feature-wise, the solution is a good open-source software offering broad support. Also, it's reliable."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"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."
"Having the Dashboard from an admin point of view, and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out, is helpful."
"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."
"This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"There are so many models that I don't have to create one."
"The configuration compliance aspect of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager allows for easy comparison of configuration settings across branches, ensuring adherence to security guidelines and best practices. Automation capabilities have greatly impacted workflows, enabling tasks such as configuration backups, template deployment, and firmware upgrades to be automated, thereby streamlining processes and saving time. Compliance reporting features provide valuable insights into network compliance, offering pre-built security audit reports and customizable options to meet specific requirements."
"The scanning features have proven to be highly valuable, particularly due to the comprehensive information they provide."
"It is a stable solution."
"Compared to other vendors, like NetBrain, managing the solution is easy. They made it very user-friendly."
"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."
"I use it for monitoring the entire network for the company. We oversee nodes down, we oversee devices heading up to crossing the threshold for CPU usage. We oversee power so power backups on the switches, we oversee if they're down or if they're failing. We oversee any node down or any router from any vendor."
"It's perfect for network configuration management. It's easy to use."
"What's nice with NCM is you can set up policies that you can then check against the configs to ensure that your device configs adhere to a baseline or standard that you've set in place."
"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."
"I'm still playing around with it and haven't had any issues with the product yet, but support can definitely be improved."
"Areas for improvement in Intune include expanding support beyond Samsung devices to accommodate other Android manufacturers like Redmi and Motorola."
"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 installation is very easy. However, to be able to configure it you will need special knowledge, such as training or self-studies to have a proper level of security. There are many settings one has to understand before being able to implement Microsoft Intune."
"I would like some integration with the Microsoft reporting platform Power BI."
"The solution could improve its flexibility."
"Intune's third-party patch management could be better. It should be easier for the average system admin to keep non-Microsoft applications updated."
"It is a little slow on the network side because every time you call a module, it's initiating an SSH or an API call to a network device, and it just slows things down."
"The SSM connection access needs improvement"
"The governance features could be improved."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"For a couple of the API integrations, there has been a lack of documentation."
"Improvements should be made in terms of execution speed, which is, I believe, the most lacking feature. Aside from that, re-triggering a failed task is another useful feature."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"The network flow is a problem for this solution."
"Its look and feel can be improved. They can also put in more effort into building the THWACK community and use the information about various customer issues and requests to build the new releases."
"It would be great if they include a network service manager, network performance manager, or a privileged assessment in the next release."
"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."
"Our experience has shown that most of the problems we've had with SolarWinds NCM are related to software issues."
"I would like to see more integration tools. Something like dialysis, for example."
"On NCM, reporting could be a bit better. It's completely become just one report. When I try to create a custom report, the solution just commits old server data."
"The solution could have better integration."
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 62 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 "Makes it easy to build playbooks and saves time and resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager writes "Streamlines network configuration and compliance processes through its centralized dashboard, although its compatibility with multi-vendor devices may present limitations". 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 DataMiner. See our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager report.
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