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 8.8 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.
It has helped save us so much time, as it was designed to automate mundane and repetitive tasks that we were using other tools to perform and that required so much manual intervention. It does not work very well within Windows environments, understandably, but I would love to see more integration. I want it to be sexy and attractive to more than just geeky sysadmins.
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.
Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
YAML is hard for many to adopt. Moving to a system that is not as white space sensitive would likely increase uptake.
AAP and EDA should be more closely aligned. There are differences that can trip users of the integration up. An example would be the way that variables are used.
Event-driven Ansible output is not as informative as AAP.
Providing admins/devs with easier mechanisms for providing businss stakeholders with self-service admin capabilities across the platform
Tutorials on how to be the best at reporting in servicenow
Guided tour functionaltiy is a bit rigid and could use more workflow capabilities
Making it easier to push form variables to the user so there is more context when providing an approval. The out of box approval UI/form is terrible in my opinion.
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 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.
The platform is provided as a SaaS solution and support from the vendor has been good. There are regular software releases with bug fixes, new features and enhancements, and furthermore we are given the opportunity to fully test these before rolling these new releases out into the production environment to minimise the risk of business disruption
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.
I haven't thought of any right now other than just doing our own home-brewed shell scripts. Command line scripts. And how does this compare? It's light years ahead, especially with the ability to share credentials without giving the person the actual credentials. You can delegate that within, I guess what used to be called Ansible Tower, which is now the Ansible Automation platform. It lets you share, I can give you the keys without you being able to see the keys. It's great
ServiceNow is by far a better tool over Remedy. Its ability to integrate so seamlessly to so many tools allows for plenty of opportunity to streamline and improve processes. Servicenow has intuitive flows that allow you to quickly pivot if process change. Its adaptiveness is what makes it far better solution over Remedy
Our base managed service MSA is very clear and focused on our use of ITSM (ITIL role license). Other parts of the platform use some sort of transaction count licensing. This type of pricing does not work for an implementation of our scale.
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.
Ensuring good service support internally and externally has triggered opportunities to sustain good links with everyone and opened the door to more sales and successful business and ServiceNow has been key in all this, so the investment came back to us faster than expected.