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."One of the best features is Windows Autopilot because if you change any of your devices, whatever security policies and compliance policies that applied can be easily migrated to the new devices. Windows Autopilot gives you that flexibility."
"Intune is effective because of the configuration management and endpoint security it provides. The graphical interface makes it easier to configure and deploy devices."
"I like the fact that it's integrated with the rest of the Microsoft products, so customers can manage it from their Office 365 portal or Azure portal."
"...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."
"The most valuable includes managing everything from a single console."
"Stable solution at a good price."
"The stability is good."
"Conditional access helps me control uncontrolled access."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"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 enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went."
"One of the most valuable features is automation. We are doing automation infrastructure, which allows us to automate regular tasks. This solution provides us with a service catalog, like building new services and automating daily tasks."
"Ansible Galaxy is helpful for roles and Git Submodules: No dependency in managing playbooks. Also, fact caching in redis for host/role grp information speeds up execution. Finally, variable management is easy."
"The biggest thing I liked about Ansible is the check mode so that we can verify, after we've pushed, that the config there is actually what we intended."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is that Ansible is agentless."
"It's perfect for network configuration management. It's easy to use."
"What's nice with NCM is you can set up policies that you can then check against the configs to ensure that your device configs adhere to a baseline or standard that you've set in place."
"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."
"The most valuable features the solution offers are compliance, reliability, and information about reliability."
"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."
"The installation is straightforward."
"The feature that I really enjoy is the ability to script changes across all of your devices."
"Compared to other vendors, like NetBrain, managing the solution is easy. They made it very user-friendly."
"Cost is the biggest factor for us right now. Microsoft Intune and AD P1 together in a bundle is a good thing to have, but it is very costly compared to other products in the market. Otherwise, Microsoft Intune is the best."
"The backend of Microsoft Intune needs to be improved. We have seen a little bit of delay as compared to other MDM solutions. That needs to be improved. A little bit more granularity should also be added"
"Intune has limited integration with non-Microsoft solutions."
"It should be simplified. I've worked with many different mobile device management solutions, and Intune is one of the more complex ones. It could be more simplified, and some of it is related to the wording that is being used, such as a configuration profile versus a policy. They really should have had different names to make it less confusing."
"Microsoft Intune needs to improve the initial login process."
"The technical support could be improved."
"It would be better if I could integrate it with my core group policy. I would like to have a group policy in my current environment, which has strict control, but those things are still missing. Although it has maximum compliance and security, it's not available on-premise."
"The initial setup is a little bit complex."
"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."
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
"It needs better documentation."
"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..."
"What I'm trying to figure out, personally, is, when doing mass updates, how I can parallelize that a little bit better. It seems right now - and maybe, it's a shortcoming on my end - that I run through one set of servers, and then another set of servers, ad then another set of servers, but it seems like I could throw a lot of these checks out. Different types of servers, like web servers and DB servers, if I could parallelize that a little bit to make everything run a little bit more efficiently, that would help."
"The user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional."
"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding."
"Ansible could use more public relations and marketing."
"Improvements are needed in the automatic network mapping function."
"I would like to see more integration tools. Something like dialysis, for example."
"Releasing a product compatible with operating systems other than Windows would be advantageous."
"Its customer service response could be faster."
"The network flow is a problem for this solution."
"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."
"It would be great if they include a network service manager, network performance manager, or a privileged assessment in the next release."
"The interface of solar winds could be improved."
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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.
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