Ivanti Endpoint Manager vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

You need to push O365 or some product out to your institution. If you need to build out a reboot before and after and maybe something else, [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] can easily do that for you. It then can also use a query to determine who needs that product in your environment and then continue using that query to watch for the machines you targeted to show up once your push succeeded. If you need to, you can use the task scheduler and schedule your software distribution for a specific not in normal business hours or on a weekend.

I'm going to say it is best suited for configuration management. Like I said, patching even with security, things of that nature. Probably less suited is hardware management, but Red Hat IBM/IBM has Terraform for that. So it's a trade off.

Incentivized

• Software distribution - the ability to sit and provide software when a machine calls home works phenomenally well. You may also target based on certain conditions, ranging from LDAP queries down to hardware revisions of individual components.
• Operating system provisioning - the range of choice in sequential execution is second to none. We migrated from MDT to Ivanti's providing with relative ease.
• Patching and compliance - you're able to get extremely granular, and the rollout project templates make rolling it a particular patch from QA to Production an automated breeze

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Mac support - While it's the best I've seen with cross platform support, that doesn't mean they don't have a long way to go to catch up with the functionality of other tools that focus on one specific platform.
• Product coherence - Their core product, the management suite, is great but with every new acquisition the company makes, it seems like there's another product that gets shoehorned into the picture. Making all those disparate pieces work smoothly together is something they're still working on.
• Documentation - They come out with a lot of great features but some are so complicated I couldn't begin to understand the various facets of it all. I realize the days of published manual are long gone but even a PDF covering the major components in detail would be better than having to bump around in the dark until you have to call support for help.
• Software Licensing Management - Every major release seems to completely rewrite this tool but they keep seeming to miss the mark. Lately it's a Microsoft Silverlight program that's very slow and has way too much data to be useful.
• Web Console - The web console is all but unusable. The only way to really work on administration is to use the 32bit console which is great if you're running Windows but a fully featured web console would be much preferred.

Incentivized

• Ability to tell when a task has already been done
• yaml configuration can be annoying at times, perhaps a built in lint so yq isn't needed
• the become feature should be able to be set to true globally without using args

Incentivized

As Microsoft evolves Intune, SCCM, MECM and combines their features into the MS EULA, Ivanti seems to be going the opposite where they are stripping out core products in favor of an EULA + A la cart pricing model that simply is more expensive than Microsoft's pricing. A few years ago, the gap was large enough to justify the extra cost of Ivanti, today the gap has closed significantly enough that the value add just isn't there for us.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Items are logically laid out and most are easy to find. The more advanced stuff can be trickier, but it is still not hard to find. There are a lot of options though, so remembering where some settings are, especially if you do not alter them often, can take a minute, but you will get to them fairly qiickly.

Overall it's good but the new architecture can be complex. Improvements can be made in the Config as Code capabilities for managing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Sometimes it can be difficult for those unfamiliar to understand the relationship between Projects/Credentials/Job Templates, etc.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

TRM\TAM support has been generally very good. Getting reported bug fixes, design changes, UX problems resolved has been a pain. It is often difficult to get problems escalated beyond the TRM\TAM level. Support is fantastic when you can get it, getting it can often require more work than it should, and that is probably our biggest issue.

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.

Incentivized

I spoke on this topic today!

Incentivized

Better in most all categories. On-prem was not an issue for my organization. MS SCCM was lacking features. Airwatch required increasing tiers of service in order to match [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] features, and lacked the robust inventory data we needed. Meraki was very simple to use, but did not meet our needs. I would say that most Airwatch customers aren't using all the features they are paying for, and could save lots of money by using Meraki instead.

As I said earlier, Red Hat Ansible remains a top choice because it is a perfect combination of multiple capabilities. Terraform is good in IAC but not in config automation. Puppet is well-suited for developers, but not for system administrators and infrastructure integrators. OpenShift and Kubernetes are generic automators only.

Incentivized

• Centralized IT - all in one solution that is better in some areas than traditional niche software applications. You'll probably still spend the same amount of time with users on the HD line, but you'll be able to reduce the amount of time it takes for auxiliary Help Desk tasks (ticketing, reporting, background deployment, etc.)
• Cost - This is a negative of course ;) But at some point you can save some money if you ditch SCCM or your other CRM

Incentivized

• We are still early in our implementation and don't have much yet - but I can say that it has already improved the time it takes to deploy a new virtual server for us, as well as making them more consistent.
• In working through what jobs are required, it has really improved the communication between our different teams

Incentivized