EasyVista Service Manager vs. Salt Project

It is well suited for a service-based department, but it can sometimes offer confusion for non-technical users because of the amount information the form fields require. Most customers don't want to write the equivalent of a book to simply say that " I want to obtain a license of Adobe Acrobat and charge it to the department."

Incentivized

SaltStack is a very well architected toolset and framework for reliably managing distributed systems' complexity at varied scale. If the diversity of kind or number of assets is low, or the dependencies are bounded and simple, it might be overkill. Realization that you need SaltStack might come in the form of other tools, scripts, or jobs whose code has become difficult, unreliable, or unmaintainable. Rather than a native from-scratch SaltStack design, be aware that SaltStack can be added on to tools like Docker or Chef and optionally factor those tools out or other tools into the mix.

Incentivized

• Documentation is very important for any technology department. We can easy attach quotes, screenshots of issues, or invoices so that any one looking at the work order once closed can see that the task was completed quickly or may require more resources if needed again.
• Tracking the progress of your team is also important when considering pay scales or promotions. Reports help you see which employees are going above and beyond and those that are needing extra motivation.
• Universities have to work as cohesive unit to be successive. Our customers tell is us what is needed for them to do their jobs and we are able to divide the work amongst our staff to continue the quest quickly.

Incentivized

• Targeting is easy and yet extremely granular - I can target machines by name, role, operating system, init system, distro, regex, or any combination of the above.
• Abstraction of OS, package manager and package details is far advanced beyond any other CRM I have seen. The ability to set one configuration for a package across multiple distros, and have it apply correctly no matter the distrospecific naming convention or package installation procedure, is amazing.
• Abstraction of environments is similarly valuable - I can set a firewall rule to allow ssh from "management", and have that be defined as a specific IP range per dev, test, and prod.

Incentivized

• Customization without the need for lengthy contacts with tech support. Non-technical team members should be able to resolve malfunctions with the interface and its components.
• A mobile app would make resolving work orders in the field easier. Without the need for a PC-like device to access the program. Many times, weather conditions are not kind to tablets. A cell phone is more reasonable.

Incentivized

• Managing network hardware should be more native and easy
• SaltStack should buffer jobs and, when a client returns, make sure it is executed proberly
• SaltStack should provide basic pillar and states structures to help get newbies started

Incentivized

We haven't had to spend a lot of time talking to support, and we've only had one issue, which, when dealing with other vendors is actually not that bad of an experience.

There has been less downtime due to incompatible upgrade elements in our environment. EasyVista is takes hours not days to troubleshoot and resolve any functionality errors. Tech Support has been more helpful and reachable.

Incentivized

We moved to SaltStack from Puppet about 3 years ago. Puppet just has too much of a learning curve and we inherited it from an old IT regime. We wanted something we could start fresh with. Our team has never looked back. SaltStack is so much easier for us to use and maintain.

Incentivized

• Our turnaround time has decreased steadily use implementing use.
• Our CIO is update on the progress of his team at all times.
• The customers feel better informed about their requests from start to finish.

Incentivized

• We manage two complex highly available self-healing (all infrastructure and systems) environments using SaltStack. Only one person is needed to run SaltStack. That is a HUGE return on investment.
• Building tooling on top of SaltStack has allowed us to share administrative abilities by role - e.g. employee X can deploy software Y. No need to call a sysadmin and etc.
• Recovery from problems, or time to stand-up new systems is now counted in minutes (usually under eight) rather than hours. This is a strategic advantage for rolling out new services.

Incentivized