AWS Config vs. Cisco Intersight

To keep track of changes and to answer many compliance issues this is a life-saver. AWS does a good job providing tools like this. Any AWS workload should be monitored with AWS Config. It even is great for troubleshooting and seeing who changed what at what time.

Incentivized

Cisco Intersight is very well suited for doing firmware upgrades across all of your cisco hardware. So far we have had no problems pushing out new firmware. It's also well suited for hardware management. Cisco TAC has the ability to pull logs for the IMC for themselves, which saves you from having to pull the logs yourself and then uploading them to the case. It may or may not be appropriate for upgrading operating systems. I have not been able to test it.

Incentivized

• It can help you define rules for provisioning and configuring of your AWS. We use it for this purpose.
• It maintains configuration history. So you can use the AWS Management Console, API, or CLI to obtain details of past configurations
• It gives you a configuration snapshot of all of your AWS resources and you can store it in AWS S3.
• You can integrate it with AWS CloudTrail to correlate configuration changes to particular events in your account.

Incentivized

• Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
• Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
• Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
• Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).

Incentivized

• Vendor lock-in, no easy migration path for example if you want to move some workloads to Azure, you'd not be able to lift and shift.
• Only at an AWS resource perspective - cannot do desired state configuration at an OS level (which makes sense but be good if you could even as a separate feature within AWS Config).

Incentivized

• It would be great to not having to create EVERY profile within a deployment. since some items can be done be default, the defaults should be set and the deployment can be much faster.
• When adding Rack servers, indicating that the CIMC interface should not being connected before powering on the system and they it will be managed by Cisco Intersight can reduce down times. We had to manually reset our CIMC after disconnecting from our OOBM switches.

Incentivized

Been using Cisco Software as a service (SaaS) platform in a production environment for a large medical and health professionals that has critical healthcare and patients care dependency.

Support team is very helpful getting system updated as needed, and vendor support is fantastic. Also get a dedicated Cisco networking engine to review and advise system health and recommendations.

Incentivized

Usability of Cisco Intersight is highly dependent on the licensing purchased. The default (free) license level provides a lot of value for the minimal amount of effort to implement. The paid license levels provide additional features (detailed inventory, configuration management and deployment, etc.)

Incentivized

So far over the past 4 years we have not experienced any issues with the servers being available.

Incentivized

The performance has never been an issue for us, the dashboard gives us real-time monitoring and the alert sends us the notification within less than a minute of it happening, this applies to all of the monitored resources on AWS. However we can't (or probably haven't figured out how to) integrate with any other third party services, so we can't really evaluate how it integrates with other services

Incentivized

Could need some more refinement. It takes some time getting used to where different settings are being defined.

Incentivized

Every time we need Cisco Intersight support it takes weeks until we get a solution. We have to change the tac 2 to 3 times every time because none of the engineers have any idea about Intersight. Cisco has not trained their engineers. one has the impression that they are often seeing Intersight for the first time.

Incentivized

You really need a lab to get hands on but it was useful

Incentivized

Very smooth process and we did it for 2 data centers

Incentivized

Despite the comparison it is not really apples to apples, the main purpose of the service is quite similar which is to monitor your application or services. In terms of AWS services, AWS Config provides more options to monitor and log your service on the infrastructure level which is very useful on that level and overall will give you more information about what is currently happening. Meanwhile PaperTrail is more suited to monitor and log your service and could only give you information on the application level.

Incentivized

Our organisation has some experience with Dell OME (the centralised management plane for Dell PowerEdge server, equivalent to Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and UCS Manager, but not enough to contrast the two or say why one is better than the other.

Incentivized

Easy to add new services into it. Having everything policy driven makes it a lot easier to add new hardware into the solution and get setup.

Incentivized

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized

• It has positively impacted our business by having a validated architecture that is repeating, redeploy able that scales.
• Some of the TAC tickets could have been solved with more detailed KB's. (ie. CIMC is managed by Cisco Intersight and not be our OOBM with rack servers)

Incentivized