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
Splunk On-Call
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
VictorOps is an IT alerting and incident management platform acquired by Splunk in 2018.
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.
I recommend Splunk on-call is more suited where there are high incident queues; multiple teams need to be involved in handling a P1 severity issue. Multiple levels of escalation are needed environment where automated action is required. I recommend the solution for large-scale & medium-scale business units. For small-scale business units, I see the functional value is less.
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.
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.
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.
VictorOps support has proven excellent for us. Because it is such a widely used tool, there is a lot of documentation on usage, and a large community of users to lean on. Also, many engineers have had experience working with VictorOps already, and the tool is so easy to setup / manage that much support isn't really necessary.
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
Splunk On-Call integrates better with our Splunk Cybersecurity and Reporting products due to the same family tree of the same eco system. We were previously using built-in on-call from individual applications and while adequate, they were difficult to manage and support SLA varied greatly across different applications. In addition we also used xMatters which did not integrate well with SAP products nor Citrix products so we were still using more than a single on-call product which was solved by implementing Splunk On-Call
