BMC FootPrints is an IT service management (ITSM) solution featuring workload automation.
N/A
Rundeck
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Rundeck is runbook automation for incident management, business continuity, and self-service operations, with the goal of fewer interruptions. The vendor describes the Rundeck product family as the engine for Ops as Service. With Rundeck deployed in an organization, they state users will improve the capacity of IT operations teams, get rid of bottlenecks, and scale faster.
Pagerduty announced its intent to acquire Rundeck September 2020.
BMC Footprints is so well suited to keep the documentation easy to read and find, as same as typification. You can find specific documentation for an audit so fast and export a report using the specific criteria that you need to comply with your boss or audit needs. As I told before, BMC footprints need to be more friendly to the end users because they get lost many times trying to track some ticket or typing documentation.
Rundeck is a really good solution to formalize , standardize and automate your infrastructure operational run book. It can be also used in combination with your monitoring solution to auto heal your services. As for example when you get a specific alert, instead of triggering your notification channel to first trigger the Rundeck job to try and fix the issues (service restart etc..) and only then if the problem still persist to escalate and notify through an alert. It is also super handy to run all tasks from a central location and making sure there is no other person running the same job on the same servers at the same time, been able to see statistic about how fast or successful a job runs is also a big plus.
Documentation. We try to reduce the amount of paperwork needed for staff to do their job, so by automating certain tasks, we are able to speed up the resolution process for trouble tickets.
Reporting. We'll use the reporting tool to get the number of tickets opened, response times and can go into granular reports.
Surveys. When tickets are closed, we automatically send out surveys to end users to get valuable feedback on how we did and what we can improve.
Purpose based configuration- It would be beneficial to see a more purposed based, out of the box, configuration option. For example, if you need PCI compliance, more intuitive reporting would make managing compliance much easier.
Initial design and implementation- Don't think that your experience as an IT professional will allow you to stand this system up on your own. To properly configure Footprints and set yourself up for success down the road, get Professional Services with this one.
Somewhat behind the times- Service Core is making a huge leap forward with the latest version, 12, but Asset Core is far behind. There are quite a few quirks to how the application works and how it is used.
Sudo privileges, this can be attained but it's not obvious when trying to build a job that needs to sudo up.
Have a human time schedule instead of a linux cron schedule timer when creating jobs
When calling a job from the API, the ability to pass back a result parameter that a job outputs, i.e., a job creates a job ticket reference and returns the reference, the API call will just return if the job fired correctly and not the ticket reference. Getting the ticket reference needs some engineering to attain; for example, you may need to write it to a file, then another job read that file to find out what it is.
It would be very nice to just be able to fire off the job on the API. The API sits and waits for the return and gets back any outputted data in the one call. I know it's an API, but it would be nice to have the option to sit and wait for the result.
It has been the business decision to go with them and that is what we will do. Going back, this would have not been the choice, but nothing can be done about it now. We are stuck with this application for years to come. Wish there were other possibilities that could be done.
It's so simple to use and customize however you want. You can create new workspaces and workflows with ease, set up new users, incoming email rules, customize the layout of the forms, and even change the colors and logos. It's just very easily customizable overall. It's also really straightforward to figure out how to use, you really almost don't have to show somebody how to use it. If you just sit them down in front of it and let them look it over, they could figure it out themselves easily.
I've had no issues with the support for FootPrints. We haven't really had to use them all that much over the years, but when needed they have always been prompt and knowledgeable at dealing with any issue. I've worked with a lot of different support teams over the years, and they have been one of my favorites to work with.
I was not involved in the selection process but in my opinion either SQL or Access databases would have worked just as well without the same amount of cost. These two systems would have been much easier to manage and would have tracked the same information in a less convoluted process and expense.
Ansible Tower (or AWX) is very poor in comparison to Rundeck and only runs well Ansible talks versus Rundeck can support all kind of scripts and tools. Rundeck UI is much more intuitive and robust
