Jenkins is an open source automation server. Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project. As an extensible automation server, Jenkins can be used as a simple CI server or turned into a continuous delivery hub for any project.
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ManageEngine Endpoint Central
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Desktop Central from ManageEngine is a client desktop management with patching, remote control, and configuration.
Jenkins helps the flow of build from the development team to the QA team. Can be really helpful in doing continuous builds, but when this feature is turned on the development team must have great communication otherwise the risk of broken builds become very high. In the long run, we found it made things easier when we just pushed the build manually and appointed a team member the build master.
This software is suited in any environment where there are more end user than IT staff, which is pretty much everywhere. This becomes especially true in medium to large sized business and organizations. The amount of time saved (from IT Support and Administration but also from the end user's side) is simply incredible.In addition, Junior IT admins will find the automatic suggestions e.g. for optimal server configurations / setup quite useful.
The only scenario where I'm not sure the benefits will outweigh the costs are in very small businesses, where there are few end users and few PC's/Servers. In all other scenarios, this tool is truly invaluable, compared to the it's low financial cost. I would add that purchasing a perpetual license is also an option with this product and does make financial sense after 5 years or so.
Automatic jobs: there are infinite possibilities when it comes to Jenkins. You can run code against any testing suite you can imagine or conjure up. You can deploy applications at any time anywhere, automatically with no human intervention. If a certain stage fails, it will notify the team and your sysadmin of the issue so you can resolve it as quickly as possible
Automatic rollback: because of how Jenkins works, it can hold off publishing code and integrate locally to run QA procedures before pushing to deployment. This means that bugs are caught before your servers are updated and prevents a faulty program from affecting your downtime in the first place. Its a game changer for high availability.
Once we organized a hackathon with our GitHub Storage. Jenkins was integrated at that time. We had a 20GB plan, but it oversized to 50GB. We had to bear a large sum of money which was unpredicted by our company. Being a startup we cannot bear such mistakes.
Jenkins cannot be easily studied and managed. We have to recruit personnel part-time for managing and servicing the server.
Though it is open source, there is no dedicated community driven forum or support. There are 3rd party discussion and support portals. Thus, we use Gitter always for debugging and solutions.
More granular access level controls for technicians (restrictions for juniors) on the Mobile Device Management add-on
Monitoring mobile data usage on mobile devices, this has been in the product pipeline for 5 years, but not yet implemented
Ability to remotely support company-owned mobile devices with no end-user permission. End-user needs to allow the remote session, when sometimes that's what we don't want since we're doing an investigation.
Sometimes I feel like I am using software developed at the '90s. The Jenkins functioning is amazing. It fulfills its role, but when we are talking about the user interface, it is something painful sometimes, and unfortunately, I didn't see investment and/or improvement on this part over the past few years. Another thing I couldn't forget to mention is about the ecosystem around Jenkins, there are a bunch of plugins, but due to this flexibility, we caught ourselves struggling with broken plugins several times.
There is a large development community - but it is shifting as people move towards other tools. A lot of companies still use Jenkins and will build propriety tools, which doesn't help any of the open-source community. Jenkins has a lot of help and support online, but other, more modern, alternatives will have better support for newer tech.
The local distributor of the product is always available, however most support is received within an hour from India. We've had complex requirements and the support team went so far as to customize their mobile application to suit our unique needs. We honestly can't complain about any support we've received and it's always been very quick.
We previously utilized Hudson - which was limited and did not have the extensive plugin abilities of Jenkins. We selected Jenkins for it's ease of use, beautiful interface, and stability. Other software such as Hudson and Bamboo didn't provide these abilities.
We chose ManageEngine Endpoint Central because of the reasonable price and the number of features offered compared to competitors. Many patch management software do not patch Linux machines while ManageEngine Endpoint Central did. Other software did not have the ability to perform pre or post-deploy tasks while ManageEngine Endpoint Central did. For these reasons, we chose this software. In addition, the ease of use, intuitive dashboards, and the ability to also have asset inventory made us decide on this software.
Low investment: As the software is open source, there is no purchase required for on-premises installations, and there is a low barrier to entry for companies offering hosted solutions. This leads to competition on price, and therefore lower prices.
Saves time by automating manual tasks: There are often a lot of repetitive tasks that need to be done to prepare for a release, and Jenkins enables these tasks to be run easily and frequently (for example, running tasks on every pull request)
Near-immediate returns: Spend a day or two and easily automate most common tasks. Reports are visible so that managers and team leads can keep an eye on code quality.
Positive - Endpoint Central does a lot! Which gives it an amazing bang for the buck!!!
Positive - Endpoint Central makes various IT management tasks easy.
Negative - I have already mentioned this, but I can't tell you how important this is. Support - it is not great, when you get a ME tech that knows their area, then it is good to great! But it can take effort to reach that person, front line support does their best, but so many of my cases have involved more advanced support. This can take days for someone to get back to me, via email. Often I have open several cases on the same issue before reaching the correct solution.
Lastly - I spent an amazing amount of time in 2021 basically testing the product. So much so that I used that as a negotiation to bring the price down when we renewed.
I seriously considered other products at renewal time. But the discounted price did not come close to my time dealing with Bugs and low quality support.
We stayed with Desktop Central because it was successful in deploying updates - all the rest we could consider a different product if needed.
2022 - as been much better, few bugs and support has improved, but there are still timely support issues.
