SUSE Manager Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 10 out of 10

Score

10 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SUSE Manager are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

OS updates and patching feature: Reviewers have found the OS updates and patching feature of the software highly beneficial, with several users mentioning that it has made it easy to keep their systems secure and up-to-date.

Automation capabilities: The automation capabilities of the software, particularly the Salt Stack lite automation feature, have been praised by reviewers. This feature allows for quick and efficient deployment of tasks, saving time and effort for users.

24/7 support team: Users appreciate the availability of a 24/7 support team provided by the software. Many reviewers have mentioned that the customer service is responsive and helpful, providing assistance whenever needed.

Reviews

12 Reviews

A one-stop shop for a SUSE system admin

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 7, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have about 170 SUSE linux enterprise virtual machines, we were looking for an easy way to manage them (from bootstrapping to configuring, patching, upgrading to decomissioning). By hand, this would be an enormous task, so we looked for a platform that would help us. We chose SUSE Manager because it's vendor supported and is able to manage our infrastucture effectively.

Pros

update management
lifecycle management
patch management
configuration management
bootstrapping

Cons

upgrade procedure is sometimes a bit complex
api documentation could use more examples
licensing is a bit complex and changes over the years

Likelihood to Recommend

I think anybody managing more than a handful of SUSE products should have a look at SUSE Manager. Once you get everything set up, it helps you from bootstrapping to configuring to licensing, keeping your configuration consistent over your landscape, patching, upgrading,... It's a one stop shop for everything you might want to do as a system admin when you have to manage SUSE products

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Less work, more security

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

When I started in my company, all our SUSE servers had to be installed and managed manually or by scripts. When SUSE Manager introduced, a lot of daily stuff became easier. The management of our AutoYaST-profiles and thus the automatic installation works like charm. Managing our system regarding updates and having an overview of our level of patching became very easy. Auditing systems when new messages about security leaks are coming in is also a great help for us. The possibilities with Salt to manage and distribute (configuration) files on and to our servers is another great feature to have a uniform and stable environment. All in all, our environment became easier and faster to manage. Especially setting up and managing standards for our servers helped a lot increasng our level of security. And not to forget the saving of a lot of time and the decreasing of headaches and pains in our daily business.

Pros

automatic installation using AutoYaST
standard environment
auditing servers reagrding CVE
patching the servers

Cons

making it easier to get individual patches to channels

Likelihood to Recommend

It is great for medium to large environments needing standards. For small companies with only a small number of servers, you can also use the open source components used like cobbler, salt, etc.

Andreas Ollenburg

IT-Sicherheitsexperte in Information Technology at OWL-IT (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

9 years of experience

View profile

SUSE Manager. Centralized console to every patch-day.

Rating: 9 out of 10

February 21, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used mainly to maintain a bunch of SUSE for SAP machines (physical and virtual) along with a few virtual Red Hat systems. Eases the deployment of security patches as soon as they become available and helps with periodical updates.

Pros

Eases keep Patching Cycle up to date.
Manages not only SUSE, but other distros too.
Support for Ansible, besides the SaltStack, provides all the tools needed.

Cons

Some minor issues dealing with underlying postgres updates.
Procedure to add new channels require some care.

Likelihood to Recommend

SUSE Manager allows to manage the update cycle centralizing all information in a convenient way. It's an essential tool when dealing with more than 10 to 20 systems. In environments with less than 20 systems the resources consumed by SUSE Manager maybe are not worth, against setting up a more simple tool. Anyway it gives a good overview of all systems.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

The Smart Choice for Managing S/4HANA landscapes

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 20, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using SUSE Manager as a local database configuration for all of our Linux servers and devices . This helps a ton because we were having issues compiling a list and organizing our Linux environment under one roof. We are able to easily find and manage our Linux environment such us making sure that all critical patches are gradually rolled out over the landscape, auditing our systems using openscap, ensuring that all our systems have exactly the same baseline (regarding software selections AND software versions) it is the central system, it provides us a top-tier support team that is very intuitive and 24/7 proactive. the first go-to when managing our SLES infrastructure whereas before it was pretty messy. It's easy to deploy and manage.

Pros

Content lifecycle management
Workflows automation
Network discovery
Easy for bootstrapping and patching and configuring of our systems

Cons

our Configuration management was simplified
Reduces runtime. And maintenance cost and saving resources
Easy access for troubleshooting

Likelihood to Recommend

It's a very convenient way of tracking, monitoring, and auditing reports on our databases. Reduces runtime, complexity to manage IT operations. Meets all security and compliance standards. Great support.

Younes Lakhdari

Senior Software Engineer in Information Technology at sonatrach (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

SUSE Manager - Great to manage Linux systems

Rating: 9 out of 10

December 15, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a quite large Linux environment with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (for SAP Applications), Red Hat, Centos and other distributions. It is hard to create an update plan in a DTAP environment. SUSE Manager helps us a lot in our Life Cycle management for Linux distributions. It is a product from SUSE, but we can also manage our Red Hat, CentOS and Debian distributions. Currently there are a lot of Security Vulnerabilities which need to be addressed. Notifications come in form of CVE's which can also be checked in SUSE Manager and immediately be patched for the involved Servers.

Pros

LifeCycle Management
Security and Compliance
Patch Management

Cons

Adding Other distributions
Removing channels and products
Servers sometimes disconnect

Likelihood to Recommend

We use a DTAP for our SAP environment. For approving and distributing updates and patches through this DTAP environment, SUSE Manager is well suited. I'm not sue if SUSE Manager is the right product for distributing self made packages.

Marcel Huisman

Linux/Storage Administrator in Information Technology at G-Star Raw C.V. (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

View profile

Well Supported, Mature And Feature Rich!

Rating: 9 out of 10

September 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SUSE Manager to bootstrap new systems, automate the configuration of all Linux OS systems in the environment (SLES, OEL, RHEL), completely automate the repository updates to fixed points by date or project and to run commands on groups of servers via Salt. All these tasks work equally well in the various clouds and on premise.

Pros

Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels
Uses a lite version of Salt to run commands or scripts on any numbers of servers at once.
Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped.

Cons

The inability of the proxy servers to cache anything not cached on the main server.

Likelihood to Recommend

SUSE Manager is particularly well suited for a mixed Linux OS environment or even with multiple organizations. You can create unlimited groups and or channels to organize repositories without adding storage requirements.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

SUSE Manager: great value for its price

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 2, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SUSE Manager is the central management system for our SLES infrastructure. We use it to initially bootstrap new systems, to have a complete overview of our landscape, to automate configuration roll out, to manage the lifecycle of our systems, to make sure all critical patches are gradually rolled out over the landscape, to audit our systems using openscap, to make sure all systems have exactly the same baseline (regarding software selections AND software versions). All in all, it is the central system, the first go-to when managing our SLES infrastructure.

Pros

Manage the content lifecycle of our products over multiple environments.
Use salt to its fullest extent, including pre-generated states that make installation and configuration very easy.
Manage repositories.
Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
Make it easy to bootstrap new systems.

Cons

The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome.
More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have.
Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required.

Likelihood to Recommend

In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Well supported, mature, and feature rich!

Rating: 10 out of 10

January 20, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

<ul><li>Automate processes, run scripts and control software updates on our 250+ Linux OS servers, including SUSE, OEL, and RHEL </li><li> Create operational efficiencies and cost management (the two biggest reasons we purchased SUSE Manager originally) </li><li> Security team also uses SUSE Manager to audit our patch levels and create vulnerability reports</li></ul>

Pros

OS updates and patching
Salt Stack lite automation

Cons

The inability of the proxy servers to cache anything not cached on the main server

Likelihood to Recommend

SUSE Manager handles the patching/updating of the major Linux OSes to a specific level based on a fixed date very well. This allows us to fully test through each of our non-production environments before moving on to the next, without stopping the updates of the local repository.

Arthur Hamm

Senior Systems Administrator / Analyst Infrastructure III in Information Technology at LafargeHolcim (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

Great value of money,powerful and consistent Business Analytics.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 7, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Overall my experience with SUSE Manager has been outstanding and phenomenal. Over the last 2 years, I have been able to create a content lifecycle for upgrading our sales apps environments. Provides a top-tier support team that is very intuitive and 24/7 proactive.

Pros

Easy-to-use.
24/7 support team.
Automatic deployment.
Detailed compliance audit and reporting.
Linux distributions.

Cons

The UI is hard to navigate and customize.
Skeptical learning curve.

Likelihood to Recommend

I love that SUSE Manager is intuitive with compliance management. Reduces runtime. Amazing with data warehouse and data visualizations.

Douglas Carter

Technical Manager in Information Technology at BairesDev (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Outstanding with IT asset tracking

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 3, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Convenience to manage different servers. Excellent with data warehousing. Brilliant to auto-discover network. Efficient with workflow management.

Pros

Brilliant to manage virtual server.
Excellent with data visualization
Great with data warehousing.
Responsive customer service.

Cons

To configure and install requires skilled personnel
Excellent with managing virtual servers.
Efficient with data visualization.
Terrific with workflow automation.

Likelihood to Recommend

Brilliant with managing different servers. Reliable with third-party integration. Terrific with data warehousing. Efficient with asset tracking.

marcus parker

Production Manager in Product Management at BLG Logistics, Inc. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

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