Fortra’s Automate vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

It's great for repetitive or regularly scheduled activities like reports or file transfers. However, it's not so good for on-demand activities. It doesn't support task shortcuts to run specific tasks. If it did it would be perfect.

Incentivized

The thing I mentioned earlier where we're constantly dealing with federal regulations or new agents that they want us to install and deploy and just getting those out in a consistent manner in a canned installation via Playbook is ideal

Incentivized

• Very detailed task builder. Easy to read step by step a task's operation even if you don't have much programming knowledge.
• Scheduling for automation jobs is very flexible. Allows us to create all kinds of job schedules as needed.
• Organization of jobs, tasks, conditions is done well. Allows us to easily manage our items.

Incentivized

• 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.

• A reporting capability on tasks: enabled, disabled, by folder, by trigger, etc. Currently there is none.
• An "OR" in their conditional statements - currently there is only "AND".
• Some kind of temporary backup when changing a task - separate from the current back up/restore functionality (which works well).

Incentivized

• Workflows should have more flexible paths than just success or failure.
• The upgrade process can be challenging with differences in security and environment.
• There is an opportunity to add CICD functionality into the tool.
• For development, it would be nice to have the option of editing a repo directly from AAP to allow quick tests/reruns. Then, allow it to push the updates back or create a new branch/PR in GitHub.
• The RBAC is good but could use improvements. One example would be an option that allows admins to assume the access of another user to validate it works as expected.

Incentivized

We are deploying Ansible at all levels of the organization

Incentivized

It's just very easy to use, extremely versatile, and very reliable. It's hard to find use cases where it won't work.

Incentivized

the yaml is easy to write and most people can be taught to write basic playbooks in a few weeks

Incentivized

Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.

Incentivized

Support is very helpful and responsive, although using the tool is very user-friendly, so I hardly use the service.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I spoke on this topic today!

Incentivized

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It's been a net positive as AutoMate requires less eyes on specific tasks so that people can focus attention elsewhere and do more analysis.
• Less manual work also decreases the chances of mistakes and/or missed jobs. Since Automate can schedule everything, send email notifications, etc., there is less time wasted.

Incentivized

• 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.