We performed a comparison between SaltStack and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Red Hat, Microsoft, HCLTech and others in Configuration Management."It is a very stable and scalable cloud-only solution."
"Its direct integration with all the other products that we have from Microsoft is valuable. We're using the E5 license, and we have a whole wealth of different products available. It just makes it easier to have everything from one provider."
"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."
"This product works very well for companies already using the full Microsoft suite."
"It's really easy to access."
"Its protection policies are most valuable. It protects mobile devices as well as individual apps. It is pretty scalable, and its documentation is also pretty good. It is also pretty straightforward to deploy."
"We have a BYOD policy, and this solution helps us manage our devices."
"It is a helpful tool to manage BYOD policies."
"The product’s most valuable feature is its ability to provide environmental security."
"The ability to programmatically describe the desired state of a single, or an entire fleet of servers, on-premises, and in a cloud environment."
"I want to build automation that is intelligent, part of the fabric of our environment, and is somewhat self-sustaining. I think SaltStack can help me do this."
"The automation functionality has been most valuable. With a click of a button, we are able to automate provisioning, the build of new hardware and apply patches. These are all extremely important and differentiated tasks that can be automated in SaltStack."
"It is a highly stable solution."
"We monitor the configurations against CIS standards. We run CIS benchmarks and maintain configurations with higher CIS values for each server."
"SaltStack has given us the ability to deal with systems at scale and rectify issues at scale."
"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"The solution is intuitive and user-friendly. E.g., you have less number of logins."
"I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products."
"The setup is getting better with each version."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It's not that difficult."
"Scalability is perfect. We haven't had any issues."
"Having an enterprise service catalog and being able to automate various parts of our infrastructure are among the most important components."
"Upgrades have been extremely simple with their Lifecycle Manager product."
"The policies we had in SCCM and AD offered features that are missing from Microsoft Intune."
"Microsoft Intune's support for Mac devices is lacking and could be improved."
"The closest Microsoft Intune can be to GPOs, the better. There needs to be more granularity on application deployments. However, they have done better recently with the application deployments."
"There can be more logs. I do not have any other requirements."
"Microsoft Intune needs to improve the initial login process."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"The most important thing is reporting. They should improve their reporting. They should give a free hand to users. In SCCM, I can create my own reports. For example, in SCCM, I can create an inventory report for my PC or for all PCs, but in Intune, we don't have an option to create any report. Microsoft claims that Intune is a successor of SCCM, but SCCM is more powerful than Intune. So, they should develop Intune more and make it equivalent to SCCM. Then, their product will be great in the market."
"Data leak prevention can be integrated into it. Currently, it does not have data leak prevention."
"It is difficult to set up."
"This solution could be integrated with more hardware for an improved offering."
"Web UI."
"There is a little bit of pain when it comes to libraries and what is needed to run the product."
"Its configuration process could be better."
"SaltStack's features are minimal."
"A hardened set of tests would be much appreciated."
"I would like to see more integration to do things like DR, from a court perspective. Today, for us, SRM doesn't scale because each of our customers has a local vCenter environment as well as the vCenter in our environment. So we can't get SRM to scale to the point to which we need. From an integration perspective, DR inside of that would be good."
"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."
"Our current use cases aren't very complex, but as our environment grows, we're seeing a greater need for automation. We're considering expanding our automation efforts, especially since other competitive products are starting to offer similar features."
"The stability needs a lot of work. The troubleshooting component of vRealize is a pain. The administration and the upgrades are not up to the mark. If they were able to improve on that, that would be the best thing and would make it much easier to run it in the enterprise."
"With the workflow aspect, which has manual intervention, a policy needs to be approved by somebody. There could be better management of that piece with better templates. It is like a workflow engine, but does not have enough example templates to do certain things. A lot of people waste a lot of time trying to figure out the same thing, and everybody is trying to figure out the same thing, e.g., how to make a MySQL cluster in a Windows environment?"
"There is an area of improvement. For example, you are migrating from a customer's existing data center to a new target data center. To facilitate this transition, you'll initially need to evaluate the customer's aging hardware hosting VMware, which is nearing the end of its operational life. The customer expresses the intention to upgrade to a newer version, necessitating an overhaul of everything in the new data center. As a Systems Integrator (SI), consultant, or architect, your recommendation would be to acquire the latest hardware with a specified configuration and then install VMware on top of it. However, there's a crucial aspect related to the infrastructure requirements for VMware to run seamlessly on that hardware. If there's an opportunity to potentially reduce these infrastructure prerequisites, it would be highly beneficial."
"Technical support could be improved. I definitely feel that the product is accelerating faster than the support engineers are able to keep up with the knowledge needed to know what's going on. The developers maintaining vRealize Automation are doing a great job improving it, but VMware is not doing a great job of training the people who we call to get support for it."
"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build. Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help."
SaltStack is ranked 14th in Configuration Management with 33 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 132 reviews. SaltStack is rated 8.2, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of SaltStack writes "Orchestration tool that powers automation of processes with the click of a button". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". SaltStack is most compared with HashiCorp Terraform, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite and BMC TrueSight Server Automation, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and OpenShift.
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