Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has been great to learn and excited to see what else I can do with it
May 21, 2025

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has been great to learn and excited to see what else I can do with it

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Pushing system patches and verifying he current status of various DevOps tools running within Podman containers. We also use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to push out configuration files and harden systems to meet various governing bodies requirements for air-gapped systems. Until recently we had also managed our Windows systems using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

Pros

  • Deploying network wide changes to all our systems.
  • Monitoring systems for changes and verifying services are up and running.
  • Managing user accounts where domain accounts are not allowed.

Cons

  • Secrets are rather annoying to implement. Additionally using a set password and managing them across distributed systems can be difficult.
  • Modules for pulling system statuses such as disk usage are not easy to pull only the data you want.
  • Perhaps I could not find the correct modules, but using the existing modules to manage running containers is not intuitive.
  • Decreased time of deployment from 4 or 5 hours to a hour or 2.
  • Patching can easily before performed during the week with reboots taking approximately a hour that weekend to allow kernel updates.
  • With the reduction in patching and deployment the SA have more time to address other issues.
  • Using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to deploy software has eased the time need so we can set our focus other places or have time to learn new things.
Getting started with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform was difficult for me. Having to learn yaml to get started, setting up secrets and learning the ins and the outs of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform had a learning curve that I am still trying to overcome. The hardest thing I have had to do with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is find its limitations but when I did find them, see if there were ways around it. I found the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform documentation less helpful than finding people with similar issues on Reddit or stack. There are so many modules available its hard to keep track of them so you will find yourself relying on specific ones that may not actually be the right tool for the job but you can make it work. Currently we are having issues with WinRM on RHEL8 after our RHEL7 machines was decommissioned and that had it working on it. Some of this comes down to the nature of our environment. While it does not overshadow the amazingness of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, it does certain things difficult and in some cases redirects our attention to other tools. Again, I want to stress I am pretty new to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform...so this could all be a limitation of my knowledge. But I feel that as a tool, the documentation could be better.

Do you think Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform again?

Yes

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to push out STIG hardening requirements which makes deploying machines effortless. Ideally we should be working the full deployment process via Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform which would significantly decrease the deployment process as we can running it through a CI/DI. That all being said, I have tried using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to do other system monitoring tasks like monitoring disk space or CPU usage and did not find it useful enough as I could not narrow down the data to manageable amount. I was able to cobble together a playbook that would shutdown containers during patching before allowing a reboot. Then running another playbook that would verify the machines were up and certain services were running before starting up containers in a specific order.

Ansible Feature Ratings

Infrastructure Automation
10
Parallel Execution
10
Node Management
10
Reporting & Logging
6
Role-based access control
8

Comments

More Reviews of Ansible