OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB vs. Salt Project

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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

Incentivized

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

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.

Upgrades from old versions were really hard to handle.

Incentivized

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

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

• 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

• 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