Red Hat Satellite ties in with the Ansible Tower (software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment). Ansible Tower is part of the Red Hat automation suite. Ansible is a pre-solution open-source product that allows you to automate the building and deployment of something similar to what you get with Amazon when you go to order a server. Basically it is like cloud technology. It allows the developer to order a custom server using a playbook. It could be Windows or Red Hat or a couple of other different platform distributions. The Red Hat Satellite stores all of the packages — or it is mainly Satellite which stores the packages. It is a deployment tool. It can deploy updates and various other solutions. It is scriptable using Python scripting, and Perl scripting, those being the base languages.  

Satellite can automate most of your update solutions. It also gives the administrators the ability to target deployments and only send out the updates or provision updates to certain groups. Microsoft puts out brand new patches every month and that sort of frequency needs to be managed. With Satellite, you can say you want to deploy these brand new patches to your development boxes and see if it breaks anything before you do any damage in production. If it does not break anything, then the patches or updates can go on to QA for testing. If everything works fine there, then you can group promote it and automate it out to production. Satellite helps manage these deployment processes in a logical fashion.  

The patch management and insights connector are great. Patch management has enabled us to patch every month, keeping abreast of critical and important patches, view where things are lacking, and generate plans to mitigate issues. Due to the work being done in a tool, reporting allows us to see what has been done to what servers.

Insights (there is a connecter that uploads inventory to the web) greatly helps to highlight configuration issues in our environment. The 'remote execution' feature further helps manage systems on a consistent basis.

The integration with Ansible and the orchestration itself is a highly valuable aspect of the solution. It's basically the core function of the product, the way to handle orchestration and management patching in our Linux environment is great.

Technical support has been good.

The solution can scale. 

The stability is good.

We've found the pricing to be fair.

I like the integration with other tools. For example, WeWork. With the automation, I can describe the process to the facility, the people, to reduce the manipulation of the code and make automated jobs easy. We get all the results exactly the same, which is great for us.

It's an easy solution to set up.

I find the product to be stable.

The scalability is great.

Technical support has been very helpful and responsive.

Patch management is, for sure, most valuable. For license management and patch management, I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Fixing is the most valuable. When you deal with a lot of hardware and software and you have a lot of packages, fixing is a bit difficult. You need to track and pull up all such things, but Satellite makes this task easy.

We have branches in other locations, and I can manage other branches by using Satellite Capsule, which is a great feature.

It's really integrated with agencies that have core systems and other core management platform products or IBM products. You don't need to depend on any third party. It's a complete solution for patch and configuration management when integrated with the existing system.

The most valuable features are patch management and the reporting tool.