Salt Project vs. Tripwire Enterprise

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

Tripwire Enterprise is great for hosting/data center environments and it greatly helps where console screenshots and reporting fill a lot of our client internal audit needs for security and change control.

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

• It allows us to track development changes for engineer accountability.
• Tripwire Enterprise also allows us to monitor changes/updates being done to our systems in our hosting centers.
• We use the software to track user access and critical system changes.

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

• In previous versions the management console was a little hard to navigate in some respects.
• I'm sure this has changed over time but we hope the reporting system has gotten more granular.
• I really don't have to many cons for this product, I recommend it for every company I work for!

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.

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

Honestly, I haven't used other products to do what Tripwire does, it's always my first recommendation.

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

• Tripwire has been a positive business impact for us because of its trusted name. Our customers require software like Tripwire because they know their data and security concerns are in good hands when it's deployed.
• The ROI for Tripwire is also a positive for our business because of the time and man power saved in due diligence and reporting for our clients' internal auditing.

Incentivized