Control-M vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Control-M
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
BMC’s Control‑M is designed to simplify and automate diverse batch application workloads while reducing failure rates, improve SLAs, and accelerate application deployment.N/A
Ansible
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
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.
$5,000
per year
Pricing
Control-MRed Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic Tower
5,000
per year
Enterprise Tower
10,000
per year
Premium Tower
14,000
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Control-MAnsible
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Control-MRed Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Control-MRed Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Workload Automation
Comparison of Workload Automation features of Product A and Product B
Control-M
8.8
51 Ratings
6% above category average
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
-
Ratings
Multi-platform scheduling8.651 Ratings00 Ratings
Central monitoring10.049 Ratings00 Ratings
Logging7.550 Ratings00 Ratings
Alerts and notifications8.451 Ratings00 Ratings
Analysis and visualization8.648 Ratings00 Ratings
Application integration9.448 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Control-MRed Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Small Businesses

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AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
ActiveBatch Workload Automation
ActiveBatch Workload Automation
Score 8.7 out of 10
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Redwood RunMyJobs
Redwood RunMyJobs
Score 9.3 out of 10
SUSE Manager
SUSE Manager
Score 8.8 out of 10
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User Ratings
Control-MRed Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(51 ratings)
8.9
(62 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(6 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.1
(6 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Availability
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.3
(1 ratings)
8.7
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(8 ratings)
7.3
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.3
(5 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Configurability
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.3
(1 ratings)
8.6
(5 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.3
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Control-MRed Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
BMC Software Inc.
Control-M is a reliable and well-developed product with excellent vendor support that updates and expands the software often and offers a cloud-based deployment choice. When there are many Batch processes in IT operations that need to be monitored and controlled to ensure IT services, Control-M is ideally suited for centralized workload automation and task management.
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Red Hat
Ansible and AAP is well suited for orchestrating over many platforms. Its agentless architecture makes it ideal for infrastructure that cannot support an agent. It has a strong module library for the most common products, services, and platforms. It is by far the best language for anyone new to coding or automation to jump in and quickly get to a productive state. While AAP is capable of automating nearly anything, there are still advantages of using other platforms in its place. For example, Chef has been valuable for server automation because of the availability of existing cookbooks. For systems that can run an agent, having the individual nodes perform their own checks can scale a little better than the centralized model of AAP. But running an agent also means the potential risk of resource over utilization.
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Pros
BMC Software Inc.
  • Control-M provides a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes in the organization. Nothing is hidden or left unattended in a timely manner.
  • The proper use of the BIM component has allowed the change of paradigm in the operation, adopting a proactive management instead of the typical reactive management in the event of production failures.
  • The use of Forecast and production simulations allows you to identify bottlenecks and focus first on managing those failures that have the greatest impact on production SLAs.
  • Control-M/Change Manager has arrived to shorten development cycles from requirements gathering to production testing. It has been a utility that monetizes the development of Jobs meshes.
  • The GUI is capable of efficiently handling more than 80,000 jobs per day. This is certainly a challenge in designing a good user experience. I don't know if there is a reasonable limit to this. One of my clients runs more than 80,000 Jobs daily and the GUI remains smooth all the time.
  • Job-As-Code is a DevOps accelerator that has just begun to be adopted. Its implementation will make workload management even more cost-effective.
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Red Hat
  • Makes it easy to create and share automation in one central hub.
  • Ansible content collections give me the ability to reuse code, making it rapid to carry out complex IT processes.
  • Event-driven automation allows me to reduce manual tasks: it is rapid to know which action to take and respond automatically by receiving events from external apps automatically.
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Cons
BMC Software Inc.
  • As with most of the mainframe software products, documentation seems to be the weak link for the products - written by people and for people who already know what they need to do, not for people who are trying to figure how to use the product.
  • We are a large JES3 mainframe shop. As with all vendors who still provide software for mainframe systems, software is generally designed and developed for JES2 and is frequently not fully tested in a JES3 environment before being shipped out.
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Red Hat
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
BMC Software Inc.
It is a great product plain and simple. We've had Control-M for 20+ years and the support that BMC Software provides is really second to none. There is always a situation that someone can think of where I have to say, "No we can't do that", however I'm confident that we've been able to meet and most of the time exceed our end user expectations with what the product can offer them.
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Red Hat
We are deploying Ansible at all levels of the organization
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Usability
BMC Software Inc.
Control-M's overall usability is very good because it is simple to use. Control-M SelfService is an easy tool to give to some of the users who want to use a web interface. The training curve for most users is very short and most of the functions are very simple to figure out.
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Red Hat
the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks
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Reliability and Availability
BMC Software Inc.
We've had issues with a server crashing. The latest issue has the option for high availability which should help with that.
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Performance
BMC Software Inc.
I've never seen a performance issue with Control-M.
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Red Hat
Out of the box, Ansible can be slow over a bad connection, as it's establishing an SSH connection to the target server for each little task. There are some adjustments you can make to the defaults that greatly improve performance. And if you run Ansible on the same network as the target (i.e. by using a jump box or Jenkins server), then it can be crazy fast. I'd give it a 10 for speed except that it does require these adjustments first.
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Support Rating
BMC Software Inc.
Although the product is very stable there have been a few incidents when I needed support. I have worked with technicians from all around the globe because of the rolling support. This gives me the quickest support when I need it most in those early hours of the morning. The technicians I have worked with have been very knowledgeable and if necessary got help when needed.
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Red Hat
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.
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Implementation Rating
BMC Software Inc.
It is a good approach to define a distributed architecture when you have multiple control-m servers.
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Red Hat
I spoke on this topic today!
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Alternatives Considered
BMC Software Inc.
We last reviewed the market in 2001 (schedulers are long-term commitments!) and Control-M edged (by a very narrow margin) the Tivoli alternative, with Dollar Universe (now part of Automic) back in third place. We also tested the Tidal Software scheduler (now part of Cisco) but I cannot see that listed here. Control-M won out through reliability and cross-platform support. Since we made our choice it has become clear that Control-M has moved ahead of the alternatives.
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Red Hat
AAP doesn't truly stack up against any of the products mentioned except for Aria Automation. But, it is extensible and open and has a lower cost to entry.
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Scalability
BMC Software Inc.
Control-M doesn't really use that many resources
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Red Hat
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
BMC Software Inc.
  • I would expect this product to give a positive return on investment. Running jobs in cron for example would require a lot more scripting effort to ensure that the proper notifications are done on failures. With the built in functionality in Control-M the effort would be greatly reduced
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Red Hat
  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers automation and ML tools that allow me to automate complex IT tasks.
  • Through automation analytics, it is seamless to gain full visibility into automation performance allowing me to make informed decisions.
  • Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform allows me to move rapidly from insights to action.
  • Creating and sharing automation content in one place unify a team in one place hence enhancing real-time collaboration.
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