Dimensions CM is Software Change and Configuration Management for Agile development, developed by Serena Software and now sold by OpenText.
N/A
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
ServiceNow Now Platform
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
The ServiceNow Now Platform is a digital workflow building and extension tool for ServiceNow featuring a number of low-code / no code tools.
Serena CM is well suited to highly controlled, audited, and process driven environments. It will allow strict segregation of duties, and change traceability. If implemented correctly it will help you quickly build trusts with your auditors. It is also well suited to environments that require constant branching and merging. Due to the complexity of the product and learning curve for your development and operations team it may be overkill in a small shop with loose rules
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.
ITSM is straight forward creation of Incidents and Requests. It can get more confusing as you layer more modules on top of it with event management, risk, project, etc. It also becomes more costly as everything is a different license. Integration between other external applications is very easy to do with their API. You can easily create endpoints for external apps to talk to or create REST messages for the platform to reach out directly.
Code Promotion: Dimensions CM allows supervisors to control changes to code, in that they delegate requests to developers, and act as a gatekeeper prior to promoting to the next environment. This functionality is configurable so you can set up a workflow that best fits the structure and requirements of your own company.
Code Repository for changes and versioning: Code can be checked out by item or by synchronizing folders. Code revisions can be compared against other revisions or work files. Item histories show which developers made which modifications, and which supervisor and operations personnel were involved in assigning the request and promoting the code to each environment. Additionally a pedigree will show a stream diagram which graphically displays branches and merges.
Deployment: Serena Change Management offers help automating deployment including integrations with SVN and Jenkins. Its newer versions also have a powerful graphical deployment automation tool (Serena Deployment Automation- SDA). It comes with a certain amount of licenses built-in. If you have a many nodes to deploy to there will be separate licensing costs for that.
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).
The only major negative that I have encountered with Serena CM product is that the very power and flexibility of the tool means there is a risk that you will make a mess of things. In other words it gives you plenty of rope to tangle yourself with. I recommend careful, well thought out deployments implementing the built in roles and workflows that can be turned on and configured, using a consistent methodology.
My experience with the Serena help desk support has not been impressive. Though reasonably polite and diligent, the technicians were well trained, and often gave bad advise and terrible scripts. On several occasions I had to rewrite scripts they have me; if I had run them as provided they would have caused even more difficulties than the problem I was trying to solve. I speak of the support in the past tense because I conditioned myself not to call them, it was usually just easier to solve nay problems my self. They do have a good account management team though, and for any major issues you can go thru them.
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.
The ServiceNow performance speed has big room for improvement, as it is quite slow in loading Dashboards with more than 5-6 widgets. We are keeping our ServiceNow version up to date with latest releases.
Usually there are issues with having multiple ServiceNow tabs open in the browser and have different dashboards open in those tabs.
The way of showing a history log of all activities on Incident ticket is not optimal and easy to use or search in and have very old design.
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.
While we are very likely to renew, we are also assessing if we should renew all of what we currently subscribe to as we try to reduce costs. Some parts of the business feel there may be a better tool out there to fit their process requirements. We are currently working with them to identify what those requirements are to see if it makes sense while also pointing out a reduced cost of tooling is not always the best fit if we have an increased cost of customization and maintenance between tools.
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
It provides a lot of modification options which is wonderful for certain team usage but becomes too much of a job when it comes to the Service Desk. Also on the app support side, since too much information can be carried, it affects the GUI and makes it complex.
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.
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.
I was not in the team that take care of the installation of ServiceNow but their feedback was very positive. Go live was done by the planned date and their support at the beginning provided always a timely response. Their customer service is friendly and easy to reach. Today we don't use their customer service anymore because we have an internal IT dedicated to maintaining the system.
We went through a re-implementation last year with a partner and were very pleased with the outcome. We looked at several partners and chose one that was able to provide an entire scope and cost upfront of what would be required to complete our requirements. We worked very closely with the dedicated team assigned to our project throughout the process and they fully delivered on all of our requirements that we presented in the initial scope.
Serena CM is superior to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) in overall functionality, but does not have very good native integration with Microsoft. Therefore in a Microsoft centric shop with no audit needs ,TFS would be better. Otherwise I would choose Serena CM
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.
I've used Freshservice which is very similar to ServiceNow. I can definitely say ServiceNow performs better in a larger environment. Freshservice is usually used in smaller organization or less complx environment. Plus the ServiceNow reporting and dashboard features are more accurate than Freshservice. ServiceNow is a bit costly but gives way more features that really helps my organization.
1. It is not great when they can't seperate apps/products from a particular sku, forcing you to make a business case for a larger portion of functionlity than your current business case seeks to address. 2. ServiceNow reps are able to work with you when economies of scale are projected out. They are willing to start at a desired tier and provide pricing at applicable upgraded tiers
Very easy to use. Capture more data from the Incident and problem management. Easier to escalate and following the change management process to resole the issues.
Serena has facilitated our annual completion of various audit and technology control certifications. These certifications make a huge difference to our company's reputation and bottom line.
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..)
Fast implementation of our Sales & Operation/Projects controls and process - tool adapted to our needs, not us to adapt to the tool.
Once we are a consulting/implementation company, our customers are happy to see that we use what we sell, and it is easy to show them how this platform/tool can have an impact on our own business.
