AppDynamics is an APM and Mobile APM program, with application mapping and predictive capabilities. These capacities enable automated remediation and code-level diagnostics in real time. It can be deployed on-premise or as a SaaS.
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Ansible
Score 8.7 out of 10
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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.
We compared CA APM and the ease of use was day and night compared to AppDynamics. Just the presentation of information is very modularized and appears very clean in terms of data captured and the console has a flow to its presentation. CA APM uses the concept of buckets with …
AppDynamics is well suited to large IT organizations ie telcos where there is legacy combined with modern systems ie containerized environments and cloud deployments, mobile, web as well as onprem. AppDynamics can follow the transactions into all of these areas and provide a single view on the health of the systems.
For IT shops that do not have much developer experience and/or need to have a robust service catalog, AAP is pretty weak. The hybrid cloud story is muddy at best and could stand to have a CI/CD pipeline-like tool that allows non-developers to create complex workflows using smaller low-code piece parts.
Agentless. For our implementation, this is the single biggest factor. If we have to touch the machine and install an agent before we can start managing it, that's already too much effort and slows us down.
Re-entrant. This is not unique to Ansible, but certainly a huge improvement over custom scripts and such. Because it's such a huge effort to make scripts re-entrant, most of our scripts did not allow an elegant way to recover on failure. Manually cleaning up the half-attempt and re-trying is still too cumbersome, and being able to just re-run Ansible is a great improvement!
Infrastructure as code. This is new to Ansible, and there are still a few minor bugs with their AWS modules, but it's been a huge help being able to define our infrastructure in an Ansible playbook, commit it to source control, and use one tool for all our DevOps tasks.
Ansible Tower is a paid service, which can be annoying at times. But that is understandable, as it requires an additional level of support from the Ansible team to develop.
There is a decently large learning curve for someone not familiar with setting up Unix environments. However, there is a very large support community with tons of documentation, so it's not a dealbreaker.
Ansible is very friendly to start with. With just a few configurations, you have full management to your servers. You can configure it and implement it in seconds. You can also set up a cron job to make sure it gets implemented. It suits our need perfectly. Support can be a bit hard.
AppDynamics has its own community site that includes forums and a knowledge base. On the forums, you can converse with other members of the community and ask technical questions as you have them. Though this forum isn’t filled with people there are active members for you to gain some valuable insights.
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.
AppDynamics is easy to use when compared with Datadog and provide rich user interface. We prefer AppDynamics as it gives more data insight. We can easily install the AppDynamics agent and integrate with application. Also AppDynamics subscription cost was in budget with our organization that result in overall business growth.
Ansible is much easier than Puppet, more enterprises are switching from Puppet to Ansible due to ease of use. Ansible has integration modules which allow you to transition from Puppet or Chef to Ansible. IT Automation space has a CAGR of 200%+ what are you doing to not get left behind?
Ansible has definitely helped our security team keep our servers up to date on the latest vulnerabilities through their continuous team of patch deployments.
The time to market for our code deployments have sped up 3 fold at least and is expected to continue improving as more teams are comfortable with DevOps framework.
Ansible is open source and free, which is great. But for an enterprise deployment, we had to budget for extra nodes as Tower only comes with licenses for 10.
