Micro Focus Asset Management X (formerly HP Asset Manager) is enterprise-class IT asset management (ITAM) solution acquired by Micro Focus from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, supporting change and configuration management and license management.
$79
per month per agent
Ansible
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
Asset Manager is great for people who understand the Software Development Lifecycle and are familiar with the terminology, however for a new assistant, or a new novice user, the software can seem over-whelming with the rather confusing terminology and a multitude of tabs that open up. It's definitely great software to use for a professional PM, however an assistant would be lost in the tools being offered.
It has helped save us so much time, as it was designed to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that we were using other tools to perform and that required so much manual intervention. It does not work very well within Windows environments, understandably, but I would love to see more integration. I want it to be sexy and attractive to more than just geeky sysadmins.
Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
Need more video tutorials - Although HP has great FAQs and has included the keyword search for topics, but some video tutorials would be great to help a new user.
Overwhelming at times. I remember when I first started using the software, just the magnitude of tools were too much. However even though I don't use half the tools even now, just the possibility of more functions available to me, makes it a great software.
Secure Log-in - I would like HP to invest into single sign-on where you don't need to put in your user ID & password constantly. A push notification to a personal device would a great added feature.
YAML is hard for many to adopt. Moving to a system that is not as white space sensitive would likely increase uptake.
AAP and EDA should be more closely aligned. There are differences that can trip users of the integration up. An example would be the way that variables are used.
Event-driven Ansible output is not as informative as AAP.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
HP Asset Manager is definitely enterprise grade, whereas the other asset Management programs I have are specific to either one industry or a smaller locations that might not need the deep analysis & reporting functionalities & tools that are provided by HP. The cost is indeed higher than other programs like Fox Graphic Tracker (Internal Software) and Samange that I have used in the past, but for a large enterprise with multiple ongoing projects, HP Asset Manager is the way to go !
I haven't thought of any right now other than just doing our own home-brewed shell scripts. Command line scripts. And how does this compare? It's light years ahead, especially with the ability to share credentials without giving the person the actual credentials. You can delegate that within, I guess what used to be called Ansible Tower, which is now the Ansible Automation platform. It lets you share, I can give you the keys without you being able to see the keys. It's great
HP Asset Manager is great for compliance purposes. We know we have all the licenses in place when needed for upgrades or yearly reviews. Saves us times.
Ability to track & print reports saves PMs time in quartely reviews.
Great way to prepare for any presentations by the use of analytical tools which saves us money in investing in other software for presentation purposes.
