"It's helped us solve problems surrounding patching, installing, and reporting different patches, etc., on the virtual machines."
"We have found the scalability to be quite good."
"Microsoft is being very competitive right now, and they are really investing in a lot of new features to be more competitive in the marketplace."
"Patching is the main feature because SCCM is made to control the entire environment without manually interpreting. So it is good to use for patching."
"The main, clear valuable feature is updating the latest, patches and updates from Windows. This is the main feature we really utilize a lot."
"Technical support is very helpful and very responsive."
"SCCM is a stable solution."
"We're a Microsoft-centric organization, so we are happy with the integration between products."
"Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps providing predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production."
"It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour."
"Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything."
"They need to improve the support for the Mac operating system."
"It is a bit of an old and outdated product."
"Based on my experience with SCCM 2016, the main, big issue is not having a good user-friendly environment. It needs much better GUI."
"It would be better if reporting were more user-friendly. I would like to see an upgrade in the reporting structure in the next release. At the moment, you have to use an SQL query or configure it to pull reports through the graphical user interface. Their updates could be more regular. I think Mircosoft updates it every six months. They are also moving many things to Intune, and Microsoft decided to move the deployment solution there. I think SCCM is getting old, and Intune is new."
"In terms of the monitoring, the timeframe it takes to actually report back on the compliance of a device after it has been patched is a bit too long."
"With Microsoft Premier Support, you get what you pay for. There's Third Tier Support that you pay for. If you pay for that, you get excellent support, and if you don't pay for that, then you get the less experienced staff."
"I currently need to increase my compliance level in the patching processes which this solution could improve on."
"The solution is a bit heavy on the sources such as RAM or CPU and the software needs to be a bit lighter."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"Accessibility. Ansible uses a CLI by default. Those accustomed to it can find their way and adopt the YAML files easily over time. But, some users are more comfortable using UIs..."
"Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible."
"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."
"Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules."
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Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 33 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management with 5 reviews. Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is rated 8.0, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager writes "A stable systems management software product with useful package deployment and application deployment features". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Enables us to efficiently manage an almost unlimited number of nodes". Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager is most compared with BigFix, ManageEngine Desktop Central, Ivanti Patch for Windows, Quest KACE Systems Management and Tanium, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), BigFix, Microsoft Azure DevOps and UrbanCode Deploy. See our Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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