HashiCorp Consul vs. OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB

Consul can provide a light-weight, lightning-fast and robust solution for the following:

• Network mesh
• Service DNS
• Global key-value store (values can be complex objects as well)
• Utility for blue-green deployments
• Service health checking

Consul can be used in any or a combination of these scenarios. Regardless if you are a network administrator or a regular software engineer, Consul can add value to your work.

Incentivized

Micro Focus Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB is well suited for medium to large IT operations after a careful review and strategy definition of all support tools that will be integrated. When it comes to deciding on a set of tools for IT operation management and its different processes like Incident, event, and change management; a good approach would be to create a roadmap with the integrated suite of tools to create a native ecosystem and reduce complexity on the integration and adoption.

Incentivized

• Key-Value database management.
• Service discovery.
• Centralized configuration database with native high availability.

Incentivized

• Management and organization of Configuration Items
• Ensures a single and uniform source of database to avoid any ambiguity between departments.
• Proper delivery of services

Incentivized

• The GUI: The GUI interface for Consul has gotten a lot better over the years. Since Consul is so easy to interact with via API, this isn't a showstopper, but for those that are less command line inclined it's always nice to be able to refer them to an easy to use and understand web interface
• It's chatty: Consul is extremely chatty. Sometimes it's particularly chatty at 2am with no indication as to why and eats up quite a bit of resources. Just be sure to provision your systems that typically take a heavy load with a little extra for Consul

Incentivized

• When getting started the Cloud deployment may be not that easy.
• To manipulate the system deeply requires a professional operator.
• Working on large data project.

Incentivized

Consul's API is extremely user friendly. While their web interface isn't quite as "mature", it's still pretty easily navigated for the average person. Together they make a pretty easy to pick up and use tool.

Incentivized

Old versions which do not support CMS have a luck of user experience and performance for reports and service modeling.

Incentivized

I've never used paid support from HashiCorp, but I consider its support a good one, since they provide a lot of free resources for the community and there are good user groups supporting you on several sorts of issues. Also, HashiCorp is known as a company with a strong relationship with the community, that is easily noticed by the events HashiCorp promotes over the world.

Incentivized

Some complex issues regarding performance and platform upgrades have been difficult to address and have short time solutions.

Incentivized

Upgrades from old versions were really hard to handle.

Incentivized

Consul was easier to configure out of the box than Serf and gave us more initial options. Its easy to use tools and support were by far superior to Serf in many ways. Support alone was one of those areas that Serf could take an example from Consul to keep its customers happy.

Incentivized

Quite competing products but short learning curve and fitment in our IT Landscape were main differentiators.

Incentivized

• It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
• Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
• For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.

Incentivized

• ensured proper service delivery which helped organizations to grow
• It was a little expensive for the company.
• Mainly had a positive impact especially in the cases of risk assessment and analysis.

Incentivized