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.
"Agile and easy to deploy MDM solution that covers the maximum number of policies. Stable, scalable, and with knowledgeable technical support."
"The initial setup is not overly complex or difficult."
"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."
"I can reach devices or computers over the internet. I don't need to worry about the network connectivity between the offices. I can manage any device. That is the most important part."
"It is a very helpful solution."
"It works pretty well for us."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"I can reach devices or computers over the internet. I don't need to worry about the network connectivity between the offices. I can manage any device. That is the most important part."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"RBAC is great around Organizations and I can use that backend as our lab. Ingesting stuff into the JSON logs, into any sort of logging collector; it works with Splunk and there are other collectors as well. It supports Sumo and that helps, I can go create reports in Sumo Logic. Workflows are an interesting feature. I can collect a lot of templates and create a workflow out of them."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"It is very easy to use, and there is less room for error."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"The initial setup is easy and takes a few hours to complete."
"I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver."
"SolarWinds NCM provides updates on the status of your network infrastructure. If any issues arise, such as a link failure or a device going offline, you will receive notifications and alerts. Additionally, if someone unplugs a cable, SolarWinds NCM will detect it. It also features a Topology Mapper that displays the connectivity of your network devices, giving you a visual representation of the network's structure. With SolarWinds NCM, you have a clear understanding of what's happening within your network and can generate comprehensive reports."
"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."
"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."
"It's perfect for network configuration management. It's easy to use."
"The solution's view is very nice, and they have a great customized dashboard."
"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."
"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"Intune does not provide real-time visibility."
"An issue we have run into with Microsoft Endpoint Manager is that we cannot patch third-party products like Adobe and Chrome with it."
"I would like to see the ability to deploy custom packages as a Windows 64-bit package, as opposed to the Windows 32-bit, which is the only one available now."
"They need to add more group policies. Intune currently does not have many group policies that you can deploy. Its reporting, which is very limited at the moment, also needs improvement. It will be great if they can add report customization. Its stability needs to be improved. Sometimes, when you register a device in Intune, it doesn't show up instantly on the engine portal on the admin side. They need to provide better support for complicated issues. They also have a long turnaround time."
"The scalability could be improved, and like most other MDM products, Intune is good but not 100% there yet."
"China blocks Google and Google Play Store, which makes installation challenging. Microsoft Intune is a company software, which has to be installed to the app portal or Microsoft Software Center."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with Apple."
"Lacks the ability to deploy more ways of management, managing devices and processing the policies."
"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.""
"The solution is slightly expensive, and its pricing could be improved."
"We would like support for the post-integration of this product before cloud frameworks because right now their approach is to avoid using on-premises activities and move everything to the cloud."
"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."
"The scalability of the solution has some shortcomings."
"The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
"The user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional."
"The third-party plugins available in the solution could improve. I have received some issues with the templates."
"The solution could have better integration."
"For each device, when you open the network performance monitor, it will give you all of the information about the device, but many of the natural configuration management features are not on that page."
"Improvements are needed in the automatic network mapping function."
"Releasing a product compatible with operating systems other than Windows would be advantageous."
"The interface of solar winds could be improved."
"I'd like to see additional features like support for devices that don't use CLI for configuration backups, expanded inventory support for other vendors beyond Cisco, and compatibility with newer SD WAN devices. These enhancements would further improve the product's versatility and utility for users. we hope for future enhancements, especially in supporting security devices that lack CLI backup options."
"When it comes to the way of managing the network devices, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager should provide the simplest way that devices can relate to the server. For example, when we want to get the devices on board, we go by SSH to make the SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager create the connectivity with the device. After that, we pull the configuration. It would be helpful if they could combine both so that everything will be done in one step."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 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 "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager writes "Network configuration is done well; great pricing". 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 IBM Tivoli NetCool. 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.
We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
