Action1 is an autonomous endpoint management platform that is cloud-native, scalable, and configurable in 5 minutes. It is free for the first 200 endpoints, with no functional limits. By pioneering autonomous OS and third-party patching - AEM’s foundational use case - through peer-to-peer patch distribution and real-time vulnerability assessment without needing a VPN, it eliminates costly, time-consuming routine labor, preempts ransomware and security risks, and protects the digital…
N/A
GoCD
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
GoCD, from ThoughtWorks in Chicago, is an application lifecycle management and development tool.
If your organization is like mine (nonprofit and tight budget) this product is for you. The first 200 endpoints are free and being we are a small organization, this product is perfect for us. I was able to use Action1 to upgrade all my endpoints from Windows 10 to 11 pretty much effortlessly. If you are not a nonprofit and have more endpoints over 200, this is still a great product to use as I don't find it very expensive to incorporate into your infrastructure.
Previously, our team used Jenkins. However, since it's a shared deployment resource we don't have admin access. We tried GoCD as it's open source and we really like. We set up our deployment pipeline to run whenever codes are merged to master, run the unit test and revert back if it doesn't pass. Once it's deployed to the staging environment, we can simply do 1-click to deploy the appropriate version to production. We use this to deploy to an on-prem server and also AWS. Some deployment pipelines use custom Powershell script for.Net application, some others use Bash script to execute the docker push and cloud formation template to build elastic beanstalk.
Easy remote access to devices. That simple. We have some very unskilled users in the field where asking them to access their PC via conventional remote tools like TeamViewer, Anydesk, etc. was always a pain. Now, all they have to do is ensure their PC is online, and we can connect to them.
Remote software deploy. Before Action1, we did have some GPOs and scripts, but again - being able to deploy to PCs outside of our office/LAN, is just beautiful. On top of the standard repository, being able to create new packages is very useful for our scenario.
Inventory Reporting. Recently we had to identify PCs running old versions of Windows. Can't highlight enough how easy it is.
Pipeline-as-Code works really well. All our pipelines are defined in yml files, which are checked into SCM.
The ability to link multiple pipelines together is really cool. Later pipelines can declare a dependency to pick up the build artifacts of earlier ones.
Agents definition is really great. We can define multiple different kinds of environments to best suit our diverse build systems.
The deployment screens for update deferrals can be hard to understand at first and easy to skip since it carries some default info when you create a new automation rather than a more conspicuous prompt to update.
Action1 has taken many of the tasks that are time consuming and made them simple automated tasks that can be run on a schedule. I can schedule tasks to run off-hours and know that they will be done and I no longer have worry about it. As someone who does IT support for a living, it just makes my job so much simpler with less stress.
After looking at different solutions, Action1 [Cloud Remote Monitoring and Management Solution] was the perfect fit for us that delivered all of the features we wanted without being as costly as some of the others alternatives we've looked at. There was no minimum endpoint count and they even offer up to 50 endpoints for free, which is really great for a small organization like us to help us lower our starting costs and still allows us to grow at our pace without having to commit to a defined amount of endpoints to start.
GoCD is easier to setup, but harder to customize at runtime. There's no way to trigger a pipeline with custom parameters.
Jenkins is more flexible at runtime. You can define multiple user-provided parameters so when user needs to trigger a build, there's a form for him/her to input the parameters.
Saved hours per week on patching and able to ensure a 100% patching success rate.
Able to create custom alerting on potential problems as well as able to create some automation to automatically address problems.
Improved support to our remote locations and users.
Custom deployments allow us to have a mechanism to deploy custom applications we build as well as other third party applications we need to distribute.
Settings.xml need to be backed up periodically. It contains all the settings for your pipelines! We accidentally deleted before and we have to restore and re-create several missing pipelines
More straight forward use of API and allows filtering e.g., pull all pipelines triggered after this date
