JAMS is a centralized workload automation and job scheduling solution that runs, monitors, and manages jobs and workflows. Reliably orchestrate the critical IT processes that run your business from a single pane of glass.
$9,996
per year
Ansible
Score 9.2 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
JAMS
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Editions & Modules
Core
9,996.00
per year
Advanced
Customized Pricing
per year
Basic Tower
5,000
per year
Enterprise Tower
10,000
per year
Premium Tower
14,000
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
JAMS
Ansible
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
- Core: For small teams getting started with automation. Core Integrations: PowerShell, SQL, Azure Data Factory, Python, 20+ others.
- Advanced: Comprehensive solution for large-scale operations. Core Integrations: SAP, JDE, Ellucian Banner, Informatica, Mainframe and Power Systems.
We use Kace also because it has an agent on every machine, so tasks that push out installations tend to go there. I'm not sure if Jams can do that, but if it does it's not clear that it does.
While VisualCron provided more guardrails and user centric GUI, JAMS had a better resiliency functions with their clustering and service polling and failovers. We tested this and were able to maintain a large library of jobs and data the seamlessly switches between data …
It's currently one of the best of the lower entry cost options out there, as it currently is a set license cost, not based on the number of jobs executed. In the hands of a good script writer and users with workflow experience, it's a powerful tool to accomplish just about any process that you have a need to complete.
Red Hat Ansible automates server management, configuration updates, and deployments across our server infrastructure, keeping everything consistent, reducing human error, and saving time. Also provides detailed reports on what is done and uses role-based access controls to keep systems secure by controlling who can make changes.
The Activity Monitor clearly shows the Running Jobs, and Jobs that are to run soon. Successful Jobs can be viewed as well. The Refresh of this monitor is completely customizable to your liking.
Job Definitions are very well organized by use of Folders. This simplifies the structure of how to best Implement JAMS Jobs, including the ability to provide specific properties on each folder - whereby Jobs will inherit these properties.
Connectivity to servers is well thought out by having Shortcuts to include Credentials and Connection Store for server information.
JAMS Jobs can be controlled via System Resources. This is very powerful and is a very useful configuration found in JAMS.
It reduces custom scripting efforts because everything can be scripted in simple, human-readable YAML playbooks.
Not only servers, but also network devices, VMs, Containers, Kubernetes clusters, etc., can be automated via Ansible, showcasing its extensive list of supported devices.
It is agentless, which makes it lightweight and allows for easy integration into CI/CD and GitOps pipelines.
Many Tier-1 telcos use Ansible for Day 0/1/2 automation of RAN, transport, and core infrastructure (e.g., network function lifecycle management, NE configuration push, patching VNFs).
I can't think of any right now because I've heard about the Lightspeed and I'm really excited about that. Ansible has been really solid for us. We haven't had any issues. Maybe the upgrade process, but other than that, as coming from a user, it's awesome.
JAMS is a critical resource free up people to do other things and ensuring that processes and tasks are run consistently. We are also confident that procedures are run consistently and on time or as soon as the necessary data is available. With automated job failure notification, we are not required to check that jobs are running correctly.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
JAMS is very user friendly; you hardly need to do coding. The only thing that I would say a challenge is setting it up, but that's because you barely know the product yet and, in every processing, setting up is the difficult part. But once you've set it up and you are going to use it, you will really feel that it is worth to invest in this kind of software solution, it really does it job very well.
It's overall pretty easy to use foe all the applications I've mentioned before: configuring hosts, installing packages through tools like apt, applying yaml, making changes across wide groups of hosts, etc. Its not a 10 because of the inconveinience of the yaml setup, and the time to write is not worth it for something applied one time to only a few hosts
We didnt really encounter any downtime, no issues encountered during 2 years of use of JAMs also our client barely raise an issue with JAMS, mostly the issues is on the batch jobs that jams executes. So I would gave it a perfect 10, very reliable hardly encounters any error and bug
JAMS performance is very great, there are no issues raised with the performance, it just like nothing happens on the job after integration it gives you this monitoring capability, no reports and bugs raised on the performance, we didnt do integration with other software only database and with use of JAMS agent to different servers
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.
I've never had to wait more than a day for a response to any email queries submitted. We had a very positive experience using support hours during out migration process from v6 to v7. We've also recently had a weeklong group training course where all attendees were positive about the learning outcomes, a shoutout to Jose who did both the migration and the weeklong course!
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.
People that were involved in the POC found the training a lot easier to follow. I think most people would have preferred to just get the training material and run through themselves.
I Was not part of the original Implementation, and the persons did that are no longer with the Organization. But I was part of the recent Upgrade process a year ago and I am the JAMS admin and was very pleased
I had evaluated 2 others in 2010/2011, but I do not remember their names. This was the easier one to work with and had a better looking, sometimes more professional looking UI than what I was evaluating. JAMS was more scaleable and had the ability to make custom interfaces to more systems through Execution Methods that could be tailored.
AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.
The product is quite flexible. There are a number of features and functions that we use on a daily basis, and there are many features that are available that we have not yet needed or explored (like setting up jobs with the ability to do FTP or Sftp file transfers).
Using JAMS when working from home (initially COVID, and now permanent) gives me tremendous visibility into the running operations of our business without any loss in productivity for not being in the office.
With JAMS I can more tightly schedule evening batch jobs by running one job after the successful completion of predecessor, as opposed to the CRON like guessing at safe start times.
Central control on a monitored server in a datacenter for all job scheduling tasks has given us 99.9% uptime reliability, instead of herding cats on multiple machines.
POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)
