Ansible Tower

Automating IT with Ansible Tower

Kommentare: A useful tool for certain automations, with solvable problems.

Vorteile:

What caught my attention was that with Ansible you can generate an additional layer of security and at the same time allow users to only be allowed to modify what corresponds to their role, with role-based access control by administrators. Something that can even help to keep track of the tasks of each collaborator.

Nachteile:

The problem that has happened to us is with respect to upgrades, for example in costs. Sometimes when the software is upgraded, the licenses are also upgraded, which requires the purchase of new licenses, i.e. an added cost. This should be solved for the benefit of the user.

RedHat supported automation center tool

Kommentare: For small projects or without a tight RedHat stack integration the free AWX might be better, but for bigger ones, with more complexity, when you are required to contractually guarantee support in all cases you want a tried and tested platform components with manufacturer support and that is where Tower comes in. A key tool to manage your nodes and their tool stack and deployments.

Vorteile:

Ease of use and great integration with the rest of RedHat stack upon which a lot of open source products and offerings are using.

Nachteile:

Price of enterprise support for the features it offers over open-source AWX.

Stable IaaS platform with a STEEP learning curve.

Kommentare: System configuration automation is now done in a jiff.

Vorteile:

It does not need client-side processes or configuration (just ssh access). Command line interface is fast and comprehensive. Support is fast and everywhere.

Nachteile:

The learning curve is steep (I mean it). Reports are not as powerful or customizable as other tools in the market. SSH, while easy to use, lacks security.

Ansible - Sensible Automation

Vorteile:

Ansible Tower offers great control and visibility for managing automation at scale. I appreciated the easy-to-use interface, especially for scheduling and tracking job runs. The role-based access control is also a great feature for large team environments and organizations.

Nachteile:

The pricing can be a bit steep for smaller teams, and some advanced features may feel overkill for simple use cases. Overall, it's a strong tool for those managing large-scale automation.

Great for Automation, Configuration Management, and Auditing/Reporting

Kommentare: We are trying to manage our NetApp Storage cluster configurations for both automated provisioning and security audit configuration management. We're still POC'ing the software but so far it's simple and easy to setup. Once we do more complicated playbooks it'll be interesting to see how it turns out.

Vorteile:

Really like the Automation over other competing products like Puppet (you really need to know how to code in Ruby.) Love the concepts of Playbooks and Plays and the NetApp-specific (https://netapp.io) modules for ONTAP. Really simple to use! The configuration management and Auditing/Reporting are also really good.

Nachteile:

The ONTAP 9.5 to 9.6 has some REST API differences. Also you really need the Tower to do full audit configuration reporting and auditing. The free versions or non-Ansible versions don't have sufficient reporting functionality which is really important. Especially the configuration conformance reports.

Powerhouse of IT Automation

Kommentare: Once I got the hang of it, it made managing computer tasks much easier.

Vorteile:

Ansible Tower is great at automating computer tasks, helping work get done faster and easier. It's really good for managing networks and making everything run smoother.

Nachteile:

The setup can be confusing, and sometimes the program can be slow. Also, the way it controls who has access to what can be hard to understand, and creating a special access code (auth token) can be tricky.

Best web based solution for automation and available as an open source platform.

Kommentare: Overall this tool is a must use for all the IT related stuffs. Anyone can easily operate, troubleshoot the issue and can modify the changes easily in Ansible Tower. The easy modification and deployment makes it best suited and enables Ansible to be the best among all the existing automation tools in the market.

Vorteile:

The tool is really light weight, easy to use and inexpensive software which integrated and runs well in almost any type of servers. Operation and Controlling is really convenient for all IT employees and of course it makes our life easier.

Nachteile:

I almost see no cons about Ansible but this software can be optimized more for always in the list of techies.

Ansible - The configuration management tool with the large community.

Kommentare: It’s helping us in deploying the hundreds of server with no time and no human error as it make it fully automatic after the configuration. Best feature is surely it’s dashboard by which we get the notification once the things are not according to our plan. With the help of Red Hat Ansible Tower we are jumping to pure DevOps environment.

Vorteile:

The Red hat Ansible Tower is a complete one stop tool that can manage your code. Best thing in it provide the large number of template to choice of Configuration management deployment. Scalability of hundreds nodes is also easy. It have master that run on the server. The secure ssh is used to remotely login to client systems. As clients machine does not need any specific setup on the system which make it easy and simple to manage. The uses push configuration technology in which we need can push the setting to the specific system on which we need that setting. For configuration script writing we can use yaml. As it’s easy to learn,setup & manage so it’s every organisation first choice as configuration management tool,which help in devOps practice.

Nachteile:

As the Ansible Tower is now Red Hat Ansible Tower. It’s growing fast and learning curves are more sharp with each updates, I always looking for the new fix and addition features added in updates as I have to check my compatibility of each time the company jumping to the new version. It's sure for Linux users but not very needy for windows users.

The most effective automation tool on the market.

Kommentare: A highly capable IT configuration automation tool with a number of enterprise-level features. Several use cases are supported, including application deployment automation, new server provisioning, and network placement. RedHat provided excellent help throughout the project.

Vorteile:

The product comes pre-integrated with major suppliers like VMWare, F5, and others. This cuts down on the time it takes to learn and integrate (code) with vendor APIs and interfaces. The program allows you to reuse functionality across numerous projects (for example, creating a virtual host, opening a Firewall port, and so on). Individual functional teams (for example, Infrastructure-VMWare, Infrastructure-OS, Network-Security, and so on) might establish their own specialties as a result of this. Content from Ansible that may be reused by several teams with minimal customization.

Nachteile:

The RBAC method is difficult to understand, and the v3.0 documentation is inadequate Otherwise, I couldn't think of anything negative to say about this product.

A premium solution for managing the configuration

Kommentare: Ansible Tower enhancing our software development process as it is the part of DevOps methodology. The Dashboard provide the detail view of our complete environment which help in to scrutinize the errors. User can also customize the notifications as per need with integration with slack and emails. Ansbile Tower can be scale-able at any time. In portal mode we can simplify the dashboard view.

Vorteile:

Red Hat Ansible Tower is the best configuration tool in the market with the largest number of community. It helps in to boost up the software development cycle with DevOps methodology. Playbook can be running in universal yaml language. Ansbile provides the power to manage the remote servers. Job can be configured for schedule run on specific numbers of times. Role-Based access simplify the user management and help in to administrate the inventory. The Enterprise edition support is best option when we are implementing it to new project as 8x5 support always ready for help in your working hours.

Nachteile:

Ansible Tower should work on customization of user view dashboard, unnecessary notification as on by default and you have to disable it. Audit Trail feature should be also more organized and as it holds the sensitive data also.

Ease of use & good API feature

Vorteile:

Easy to manage tool ,& easily define the group of instances & assign the group for execution of jobs.

Nachteile:

Dashboard can be improved& reports are not so powerful.

Great Complementary Ansible Software

Kommentare: Ansible Tower is a great product that can be used both by pro Ansible users and newcomers alike. Initial configuration can be a bit complicated in certain cases but once you get it up and running there is rarely an issue encountered on the software side. Though your playbooks might encounter what seems an unsolvable error every now and then.

Vorteile:

For those that have the knowledge using Ansible in the cli, this will prove as a complementary tool that helps the user have a visual guidance of their projects. This product is also aimed to those who have a general knowledge of Ansible and refer to doing simple execute tasks or configurations. Its a powerful tool that can be combined with other products such as Red Hat Satellite. Ansible Tower enables graphic metrics of your playbook/workflow runs and has different options when configuring access credentials to cloud providers, github repositories, etc.

Nachteile:

The error output messages can be at times ambiguous, which don't advise as to where the problem is happening. It gets confusing identifying the issue because your playbooks might run just fine through the CLI, but once you start using Ansible Tower there are breaking points in which the playbook/workflow fails. Since every project is different and there are various packages and modules being used, usually the user is left over examining python libraries and modules to see how the behavior might differ that from the CLI. The documentation is lacking (Ansible CLI documentation is more robust) and even though you can manage to get to Stackoverflow or blogs that have comments to a similar problem you encountered, usually these provide little to no help at all. If you have a person with experience with the software, I would greatly recommend advocating to them.

Ansible tower- Best tool to manage playbooks

Kommentare: It’s amazing to use and manage tha playbooks.I have used it expensively for playbooks for Kafka , maven etc.

Vorteile:

It is very easy to understand and manage all the playbooks.

Nachteile:

Online support and documentation is not too good.

A powerful addition to any IT Team

Vorteile:

I like that tower not only helps IT teams automate most tasks but I am impressed about its ability to help teams that are used to working with manual tasks. The GUI / Manuals helps understand the concepts behind Ansible and I like that with the RBAC you can allow different tiers of administrators to allow / restrict access to different objects like inventories, secrets, etc. The reports are great and value add you don't get by running playbooks.

Nachteile:

I find that a lot of playbooks can run from other CI/CD tools, specially the ones with Ansible plugins.

Redhat Ansible Tower: Configuration Management tool to deploy & manage the complex system.

Kommentare: Redhat Ansible Tower increases the productivity of product. Monitoring of multiple system is easy on the centerlized dashboard. Push notifications and email help us to keep attention on high priority task. The community is incredible and increasing rapidly.

Vorteile:

The Redhat Ansible tower is best configuration management tool in market as it provides scalable features and orchestration tool for deploying the configuring the system. Continuous integration and deployment enable the centerlized pipeline. The tool manages and helps us to deploy the complex system with no down time. Redhat Ansible Tower architecture comes with the push architecture which is different from pull. Push configuration method cut the unnecessary load from the client server as they don’t have to keep looking for the updates from the master node. Best thing in it is that it supports yaml language for scripting the jobs.

Nachteile:

Deploying and configuration of Ansible into your software life cycle is not a job of one day. In this both developers and operations team have to work together and make it work but the good thing once it embedded with your product lifecycle and DevOps lifecycle keep helping to boost the productivity. Configuration of Master node should come with more simple wizard.

Outstanding tool for Configuration Management

Kommentare: We are offering Ansible Tower to different kinds of teams with in the organization. So that teams don't need to worry about the environment they require. We have integration Ansible with CI/CD tool like Jenkins, Pipelines feature offered Azure DevOps.

Vorteile:

We as a DevOps team using Ansible Tower to provide solution to user manage their hardware configuration based on the requirement. It helps us to provide IaaC service to our end users. We develop various playbooks based upon the requirement which are fulfilling the requirements without worrying about infrastructure. So that development teams can focus on their application/software developments.

Nachteile:

Initially I struggled a bit because it comes with steep learning curve but over the period of time I get along pretty well. It will good if Knowledge articles are there I think this will help the beginners to start using Ansible referring those KBA's.

A DevOps Tool

Kommentare: Ansbile Tower helps in deploying and monitoring the system. The Enterprise support is really the best thing about the Ansbile Tower. The scale capacity helps in clustering and manging the redundancy with capacity. Remote command execution provide the access to the system in case of quick access.

Vorteile:

Red Hat Ansbile Tower is a great tool for automation and enhancing release quality. Ansible dashboard provide the one stop for summarized view. Push config method help to deploy the configuration to the remote systems at once. Scripting jobs & build-in notification is easy and help to manage the production line. The advance audit trail module help to track the events with their time and action with difference feature. Role-Based access help to manage the delegate inventory system. We can scale-up the Ansbile Tower anytime using the clusters.

Nachteile:

Ansbile Tower job scheduling need more modules like viewing all jobs scheduled and failed report in a single panel with more customization. Integration of network account is limited with few application only.

Ansible Tower Best Automation for Networking

Kommentare: previously, we remote to each server to update the Linux, and run update Github, etc. let imagine we have a production server, UAT server, Dev Server, imagine we have 3 development servers become 10 units, and we need to remote to each server every week to update the git, upgrade security patch, sometimes we confuse.
but since we start using ansible tower, we can manage it well, For just the first time we work a lot on designing playbook and pre-test running and later on, we just run one command it deploy and do the same job on the hundred server.
my recommendation, if you have more than 5 servers of Linux, cisco switch, and cisco routers, you should start using ansible tower, you are busy at the first time but free onward.

Vorteile:

The feature I like the most is pre-running and then we can roll back before we run the production. very small software but powerful, with the playbook can update 50 Linux servers/cisco switch at the same time. ansible tower over ssh protocol is the best and well supported with various devices, just need ssh only.

Nachteile:

its pretty cool already, but require peoples to understand a lot of commands because not plenty of UI yet.

Ansible Tower Review

Kommentare: It’s good when it’s come security , user control and Crenshaw controlling.

Vorteile:

For security and ease of management it’s very good tool. this support RBAc which makes it very using and secure. Saving credentials and integration with GitHub is really awesome

Nachteile:

This is bit expensive and when it comes to support not very good. Similar thing can be achieved using ansible.

The Best Configuration Management Tool for Automation of IT & Services

Kommentare: Red Hat Ansible Tower is helping us to deploy on the cloud platform also. The best feature in it of-course the Dashboard. As the dashboard centralize all the features at one screen. Push notification and graphical statistics help in to monitor and prioritizes the jobs.

Vorteile:

Ansible Tower is one of the best CM tool for the automation of the complex deployment of the production and test systems. It also helps in speeding the process with zero human interference after configuring it. It is also easy to setup on master and client systems. To implement the DevOps methodology, The Red Hat Ansible Tower is the best tool to invest in for the Enterprise level infrastructure. Script is also easy in it. Tool is also easy to learn and implement. PUSH method makes it different from other tools as it helps to make the master system free from unnecessary load.

Nachteile:

Ansible Tower is enhancing the features of its product day by day. To move from one version to other higher is also not simple as it needs a proper strategy and planning. Release Management should come with more templates to make the release easy. Master node should be configurable on Windows platform also.

great agentless devops/network automation software

Kommentare: very positive experience through out the implementation and post implementation process - vendor very involved in helping to achieve a positive experience in the usage of the product.

Vorteile:

The fact that it is agentless means that the overhead resources would be almost eliminated and hence would be much more efficient. The product provides 2 benefits - helps automate devops cycle in CI/CD area as well as the network and can be called as perhaps an end to end automation tool.

Nachteile:

As with any other software, there is a learning curve and in this particular case, the tool uses YAML and hence one need to come up to speed with YAML especially if one is very used to powershell scripting.

Very good, but the interface could be better.

Kommentare: Very good! It perfectly solved the problem we were having.

Vorteile:

Easy to implement; Very good documentation; It has all the necessary features; Provides a great API;

Nachteile:

User interface is confusing. Generating auth token is complicated.

Ansible Tower is a user friendly portal to easily manage automation project with Ansible.

Kommentare: I am really happy with the usage of the product. It helps us manage better all our ansible projects and also delegate to our staff roles in the projects.

Vorteile:

Ansible tower is organize in a way that you can configure and manage every aspect of a ansible playbook and roles. It gives you a easy way to manage it. Also the self service feature its really great

Nachteile:

Maybe in the future it can improve the interface so it has more helpful hints to use each section.

Recommended

Kommentare: I like to use it.

Vorteile:

Configuration is not hard, easy for the deployer to practice CD.

Nachteile:

when it deploys EAR file, it takes long time.

Ansible tower for all your deployment solutions

Kommentare: We are able to deploy 1000s of components using andi ke tower very efficiently and it was really helpful in our journey of Continous Deployment

Vorteile:

Performing parallel deployments in a jiff. It’s really fast and provides lots of advanced feature and various level of logging to troubleshoot any deployment failure

Nachteile:

Could have better integration of templates so that same template can be utilized for deployment of component with similar tech stack