Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels Uses a lite version of Salt to run commands or scripts on any numbers of servers at once. Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome. More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have. Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review I am expanding the use of SUSE Manager throughout our organization and can't imagine going back to the "wild wild west" we had before.
Read full review Usability the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.
Arthur Hamm Senior Systems Administrator / Analyst Infrastructure III
Read full review Implementation Rating I spoke on this topic today!
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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
Read full review The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.
Read full review Return on Investment Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers automation and ML tools that allow me to automate complex IT tasks. Through automation analytics, it is seamless to gain full visibility into automation performance allowing me to make informed decisions. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows me to move rapidly from insights to action. Creating and sharing automation content in one place unify a team in one place hence enhancing real-time collaboration. Read full review Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure. Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped. 24/7 support team. Automatic deployment. Read full review ScreenShots