BetterCloud vs. Cisco Intersight vs. Enstratius (Discontinued)

BetterCloud is well suited for small to medium sized companies where a small technology support team can exponentially improve their capacity thru the available automation. When a company's data set starts to grow larger than 50-60 million objects and ~30k+ users there is still a good return on the investment but the population that BetterCloud has catered to for so long does not seem to be plentiful and shared experiences and community are just not there. Where a company that size might have a handful of technically capable team members that push for functionality that doesn't seem niche, there isn't much of a crowd to bounce those large scale ideas off of.

Incentivized

It is highly suited for an organisation pushing for a standardised and centralised configuration of settings using policies, profiles and templates. It is highly suited for customers used to legacy UMM that need to refresh their environment, but instead of deploying them in UMM (which is still possible), to take the time and effort to learn Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and IMM as well as familiarise themselves with the differences between UMM and IMM, and the issues in UMM which IMM addresses and improves upon. We deployed in UMM initially then transitioned to IMM with the transition too. I cannot think of a scenario where Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service would not be suited. Even for small-scale deployments, it provides significant benefits. Maybe if you come from another server vendor management environment, the learning curve may feel steep (e.g. many new concepts and constructs that one has to master).

Incentivized

• Allows us to quickly audit and assign delegates to email account, something that's completely missing in Google as an administrative function
• Allows us to automate offboarding of a Google account
• Allows us to perform bulk actions, like assigning email signatures and forwarding to hundreds of accounts at a time
• Allows us to audit Google Drive files. Orphaned files are very common in Google Workspace, and BetterCloud allows us to find them and take ownership of them.

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

• Integration with Google in the App version to allow pushing of email signatures, this feature is available in the legacy version.
• More canned reports, although custom reports are available for you to build yourself.
• More onsite visits with customers if available, to be onsite and see what challenges are available first hand.

Incentivized

• It is difficult to spot an added or removed VLAN in an Ethernet Network Group Policy or VLAN Policy. The comparison widget will show you that something has changed, but if you have 100s of VLANs, the difference does not stand out. Workaround: we copy the data out and compare it in a text editor.
• If you are transitioning from UMM to IMM, you lose some functionality like vNIC redundancy pairs.
• It is not easy to map the UMM version 4.x server firmware version to the equivalent IMM version 5.x firmware version.
• It is not possible to configure out-of-band management IP addresses on a per-domain basis. You have to configure these ranges via an IMC Access policy (which contains the IP address range/pool) on the server profile. This leads to "server profile template sprawl" where we have to maintain multiple server profile templates since our domains sit on different ranges, even though the servers are for the most part configured identically.
• UCS domains in IMM only support one Ethernet Network Group Policy (VLAN group) per vNIC template.

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

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

Incentivized

Support for BetterCloud is excellent. They have fantastic email support who are very responsive and knowledgeable, but more importantly they have chat support that are absolutely top-notch. They have not only the knowledge to answer and help, but the capability to solve without escalations or runarounds. These support folks are the real deal.

Incentivized

I have had servers TAC cases open for issues with Cisco Intersight. Some have yet to be resolved. One case that is still open is where the HCL status ( Hardware Compatibility List ) shows not validated when It should be. We have several servers that have the exact same hardware, OS, and the same firmware. One server will show the HCL is not validated but all others will

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

BetterCloud has a much more friendly UI when it comes to building workflows as I've mentioned before. Our team has visited Okta workflows a number of times but it was incredibly difficult to replicate our current BetterCloud workflows into Okta because the Okta UI for workflow building is hard to follow and create

Incentivized

I personally think that Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service is at the top of its class when it comes to managing data center hardware. The cloud-connected design feels very modern and easy to use. The mobile app is something I wouldn't expect to get in a server management tool. The way it can update, monitor, and manage our servers is very nice. Overall, we are very happy with it.

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

• Data monitoring: previously unavailable insight into our organization’s file-sharing habits and documents.
• Granular roles: ability to set least-access permissions. And really, truly granular unlike some other applications.
• Automation: we’ve already saved dozens of man hours using workflows. Gives us time to focus on things that matter without compromising common tasks.

Incentivized

• The negative thing is that we prefer to use the UCS Manager in our company because this bare metal is integrated into the FI and no extra appliance is required. SaaS is generally not viewed favorably in Germany.
• Telling the user that they have to buy Intersight licenses even if they use UCS Manager annoys our customers.

Incentivized