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."Agile and easy to deploy MDM solution that covers the maximum number of policies. Stable, scalable, and with knowledgeable technical support."
"The most valuable includes managing everything from a single console."
"One of the most valuable aspects of Microsoft Intune is its seamless integration with Azure Active Directory, offering capabilities akin to Group Policy Objects."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Intune can wipe devices. For example, if a disgruntled employee wants to leak the data on their company phone, Intune can terminate their access and wipe the entire device with a click."
"The ability to (somewhat) manage full Windows 10 computers including EXE-based or MSI-based application deployments using Azure Active Directory as Identity."
"Its security is most valuable. It gives us a way to secure devices, not only those that are steady. We do have a few tablets and other devices, and it is a way for us to secure these devices and manage them. We know they're out there and what's their status. We can manage their life cycle and verify that they're updated properly."
"If the product works, remote access will be a benefit. To this point we have not had reason to have confidence in achieving that access."
"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 solution is stable."
"Technical support is good."
"BMC support is great. They usually can answer any of our questions in a short amount of time and solve our most complex issues."
"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."
"With BMC, we even configured applications, like IE or things that were Java-related. When we scheduled the jobs, it worked fine. It saved us time and there was no need for resources to monitor them."
"Server Automation's best feature is automated patching. It also helps us automate compliance and report generation. We can even integrate TrueSight Server Automation with a vulnerability management solution to remedy vulnerabilities by applying patches, deploying scripts, or changing registry entries."
"BladeLogic lets users view the filesystem with minimal authorization to the server."
"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."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"I wanted to monitor a hybrid cloud environment, one using AWS and Azure. If I have to provision/orchestrate between multiple cloud platforms, I can use Chef as a one-stop solution, to broker between those cloud platforms and orchestrate around them, rather than going directly into each of the cloud-vendors' consoles."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"There can be more logs. I do not have any other requirements."
"Microsoft Intune could improve by being more user-friendly and having it geared toward device management. The graphic interface is not very good."
"I expect Microsoft Intune to have more features in the cloud because there are two major functionalities that we need to be added. This is software metering and license management. These functionalities, for now, must be on-premise. For this purpose, we have set up a SQL Server and I hope that in near future this option will be in the cloud in Microsoft Intune."
"The technical support could be improved."
"In future releases, I would like to see better integration with Apple products."
"Sometimes, customers compare it with AirWatch, but the concept of Intune is different from other solutions. It's an application management app. It gets a bit difficult to explain it to customers, but it's not a product limitation. It takes a presale document or presentation to explain it to customers."
"The difficulty of the the roll out is surprisingly difficult considering this product is supposed to be an integrated part of the 365 suite."
"I think there should be a better tracking of the cell phones used on the Intune."
"Resource management on the base servers is sluggish and could be improved."
"We encountered some reporting issues. Also, we needed to gather information from the backend before the product execution. The output's format is not good."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We would like to see this solution handle more multitasking."
"The setup of this suite is very complicated. It needs to be simplified."
"Needs more use cases into compliance management and the remediation process."
"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."
"In the future, Chef could develop a docker container or docker images."
"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."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
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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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