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."It is a comprehensive security solution that not only controls access to enterprise resources but also tracks and prevents unauthorized access, ensuring the protection of sensitive data and preventing potential data loss scenarios."
"We already use a lot of Microsoft products in our company, and therefore, it made sense to also use this product."
"This product offers an alternative solution to other UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) solutions."
"The conditional access policies that we set up are very useful."
"Compliance and the policies that can be set are the most valuable features."
"Internet-based access with security is what I have found to be most valuable. It is also a stable and scalable solution."
"...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."
"It has helped with compliance. It has helped to ensure that devices comply with the organization's policy. If they are not compliant and secure, they cannot access the resources."
"The easy-to-read syntax for YAML files and the interoperability between modules are valuable."
"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 most valuable feature of the solution is that we don’t need an agent for it to work."
"It's nice to have the Dashboard where people can see it, have it report to our ELK stack. It's far more convenient, and we can trigger it with API and schedules, which is better than doing it with a whole bunch of scripts."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"It is agentless. I don't have to think about which client system my unit has understanding in or not, because I can execute from my system. It will go and configure it, and any module that it is looking for will be shipped out."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"The most valuable Real-time fault detection is beneficial as it enables the identification of changes made to a device's configuration through the SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. This makes it easy to pinpoint which configurations were added or removed, potentially causing network issues. Such changes are saved in logs for future reference."
"Configuration refers to the specific settings and options that determine how a device or system behaves. It can include things, such as network settings, security settings, and other options that are specific to the device or system in question. One of the most valuable features of the solution was its ability to track and monitor changes to the configuration of devices on a network. This can be useful for troubleshooting and identifying potential issues. By keeping track of who made changes to the configuration and when it can be easier to determine the cause of any problems that may arise."
"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."
"Compared to other vendors, like NetBrain, managing the solution is easy. They made it very user-friendly."
"The feature that I really enjoy is the ability to script changes across all of your devices."
"The installation is straightforward."
"We push all our configurations to the servers with ease and the logs capture almost all the transactions needed for an internal audit."
"The most valuable features the solution offers are compliance, reliability, and information about reliability."
"Intune's third-party patch management could be better. It should be easier for the average system admin to keep non-Microsoft applications updated."
"There needs to be more support for Mac operating systems."
"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."
"The main disadvantage seen today is regarding Linux clients. We have a lot of development resources that have Linux on their clients, and we can't manage them on the same platform, as we do with other clients such as macOS and Windows. So, it should have support for Linux clients. It should also have better support for macOS."
"The pricing could be improved."
"Microsoft Intune is not user-friendly to manage and has room for improvement."
"I wanted to check if there is any provision at the Intune level to restrict certain things, such as a website, but unfortunately, that feature is available only in Microsoft Defender. Intune has web filtering capabilities, but they are only useful for protection from malicious websites, whereas we would like to be able to restrict a website. For example, YouTube is a clean website. No one would identify it as a malicious website, but if we want to stop the end-users from going to that website, we have to go for another product, such as Microsoft Defender or another third-party proxy solution. It would be great if this capability is included in Intune."
"Data leak prevention can be integrated into it. Currently, it does not have data leak prevention."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"Documentation could be improved. Many times, if I'm looking for something, I have to Google it in a lot of places, then figure out what the best approach will be. There are some best practices documents, but they don't give you the information."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"For a couple of the API integrations, there has been a lack of documentation."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
"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."
"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."
"At this time, I do not have anything to improve. What we struggle with is the knowledge base, but that is more about us having to go and find it and learn the platform on our own rather than an actual Ansible issue."
"The solution could have better integration."
"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."
"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."
"We want to be able to store it in a data warehouse format and integrate it with Google single sign-on."
"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."
"When we run the SolarWinds NCM jobs at the cellular line, it runs in the morning. They're just not finishing. We're getting false processing."
"I would like to see more integration tools. Something like dialysis, for example."
"The network logs could be improved. When the error logs come across with those false positive alarms in the error logs."
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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.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors and best Network Automation vendors.
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