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
SentinelOne Singularity
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
SentinelOne is endpoint security software, from the company of the same name with offices in North America and Israel, presenting a combined antivirus and EDR solution.
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.
It works extremely well for investigating the root cause analysis of events because you can see so much detail into what was happening before, after, and around the detective incident. A weak point would be when the AI gets a little over-aggressive or doesn’t quite understand the use case for specific tools. Our RMM tool was detected as a pup.
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.
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.
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
There are some minor issues with the platform that can be mildly frustrating, but the overall performance, peace of mind, and ROI make it worth using. The management console is intuitive and easy to learn, the endpoint clients are simple but give IT professionals enough data to make management easy and simple
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.
Their support is good and quick to respond. The one issue we faced was when a non-protection issue arose there was a lot of dancing around trying to figure things out. This was frustrating as it took significantly longer to figure out issues. Lots of repetitive log gathers, screen caps, uninstalls that never seemed to resolve issues. Eventually, the product would be updated and the issue seemed to be resolved, but seemed to be the only solution.
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.
SentinelOne had all of the major features that we were looking for. The other products either required too much administrative attention or were lacking key features. For example, one could be uninstalled by the end user. We required that the installation be password protected to protect against end user disabling or uninstalling. One product required manual intervention for all remediation which put to high a burden on limited staff. All products are always being revised so these may no longer be issues but they had a significant impact on our decision.
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..)
SentinelOne has already proved its value by stopping attacks that would have gone otherwise unnoticed until much later in their infection process.
The Vigilance team has provided quick response to threats that were not easily contained via the automated response SentinelOne's agents provide. This has given us a significant piece of mind.
