Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews & Product Details

Ansible is designed to be very simple, reliable and consistent. It lets you quickly deploy and easily deploy multitier apps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A new Ansible user will take certain time to understand how to use this platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Very easy to implement and light weight.

- Cross platform usage.

- Excellent documentation available on web, version wise. Plus point for a new user.

- Easy to configure and setup. Also, the configuration covers extensive features.

- Availability of Python modules are very important and development friendly.

- It offers a new design to bring "enterprise-grade global support" to ansible automation projects.

- Provides Networking add-ons including full support for selected networking platforms.

- Best for Cloud related setup and development. Also allows you to do Multi-Cloud DevOps Operations.

- Good community response, if you have any query. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

- Windows can be a pain. Very less support for Windows. Linux machine is preferable.

- Not so good GUI. It can be better.

- Creating extensive logic in the playbooks are simpler in other scripting languages. Here it is a little tricky.

- MSSQl and Vault are some of the modules that should also be included.

- Only SSH connection by default.

- Should have a better error handling mechanism.

- Too many modules can create a confusion some times, but due to good documentation it can be solved easily.

- It is hard to pass run-time parameters in Ansible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

the best part I like about ansible is that it is very easy to use. internal SSH connection does not let us worry about connectivity . I have used ansible to deploy scripts and retrieving logs from a remote machine. I have also used ansible to create AWS EC2 instances.

the thing that I like the most is that the documentation provided by the ansible team for every bit of work. its really helpful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ansible does not tracks the dependencies . hence it keeps on executing and stops when there is a failure or error without proper error messages. This feature is provided by other automation tools in the market.

ansible generally provides a command line interface .A graphical user interface would make the work lot more easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Time saving:- Administration tasks such as patching systems can be done quickly and remotely at ease with the help of packaging module, updating and rebooting a system, restarting virtual machines can be done conveniently and efficiently.

Easy configuration management language: - It uses YAML language to write playbooks which is very easy to understand that can be used from developer to n/w admin.

Agentless remote systems:- It requires no agents to install on remote system

Native protocols:- Depending upon device types It uses native protocol like SSH for Unix, WinRM for windows etc.

Cloud native infrastructure management:- It can be used in the process of container build, Cluster management, application life-cyles and many more.

It is open source, you can also write your own plugins, Ansible tower which is easy to use web-based ui. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is platform dependent therefore the code written in one OS will not work on another.

It is slow as compared to other tool like salt

Push model is slow.

Ansible doesn,t fail fast if there is any config error:- There is no feature to check the modules on pre-conditions. So in ansible with minimum syntax check it moves forward till it reaches the module with an error while altering the host config and leaving your host in partially config state. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

we can configure several machines from the single Ansible. Server in-built modules are provided and is very easy to use.I would recommend to go through the official Ansible docs for beginners also try using the best practices from starting.should have basic knowledge of python prior using ansible.Always search for existing modules.Read all error messages carefully before moving further. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Error messages should give detailed information about the error. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We can manage, configure several machine from the single ansible controller without using any client. Several in-built modules already available and is very simple to use.

For beginners I would recommend to go through the official Ansible docs thoroughly.

Try using the best practices from starting on wards

Should have basic knowledge of python and yaml prior using ansible.

Always search for the existing modules available.

Read the error msg carefully while debugging the failure of ansible playbook execution. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The error response is not much informative, should have more detailed information in case of error. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With the help of Red Hat Ansible Automation, we can doing many task on many machine at a time and preparing machine for testing is now so easy with Ansible. No extra efforts required. Reducing timely efforts to prepare test machines environment for our work. simply write playbook for tasks and Ansible automatically execute them so every configuration can be handle by it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing to dislike yet, all the features are sufficient to work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's easy to use and very powerful tool in todays IT world. Redhat provide Ansible Tower REST APIs as well so that It can be integrated with multiple other tools as well. Managing 1000s of nodes is just a piece of cake. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No Major cons as this is the best automation tool, I have worked with. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ansible is extremely easy to use.

You just need to write few lines of code and it works. Using SSH, Ansible can send commands to 500 servers in a go.

It reduces lot of errors which in case of manual configuration would have introduced easily.

We need to simply run playbooks natively via SSH installed on the hosts machines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing much except that YAML syntax is somewhat complex, Although YAML is now a go to format for sharing data, JSON support would have been an added advantage.

Also it has a limitation as compared to Terraform of unable to dynamically changing host files. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Best to install and manage all the configurations needed on a similar set of servers depending upon the host group implementations. Best known for its idempotent capabilities. Have integrated it with industry's best programming and scripting languages.

Easy to learn and implement the desired action. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not precise with debug logs to point the correct reason behind the issue.

Being a JSON format loving guy YAML format is tricky to adapt. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is the one tool for codes and it has a large number of templates. Scalability of hundreds of nodes is easy. Also you can share your code at anytime across teams even during deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is not very handy for windows users. Have to recheck the compatibility with new devices each time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Easy to use and very efficient way to work in a team. Bring lots of productivity with this tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing to dislike, but as the new technology evolves, this tool needs to be upgraded. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Generally its very difficult to manage large groups of servers but Redhat Ansible makes it very easy to configure them. With idempotent operations its better than all its competitors. Its integration with most of the scripting languages make it a dynamic tool to implemen CI/CD tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Logging is not so apt. Error message doesn't give clear reason for root cause of the issue. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Especially this ansible scripts can be executed on multiple machines at a time , like same activity we can perform no of machines that's very useful and time reducing thing.

It would be compatible for all my regular cloud operations and daily administration and testing activities.mostly i like built in features with less code I can use. and it will be supported on maximum OS's covered i.e like windows and mac and linux. This is user friendly easy to understand code.

also it is open source tool is the big advantage for users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Play book script should be OS specific and we need to port if we execute on different OS types, Initial code for operation we need to write more but some of the code can be re-usable for other operations with some changes. As prospective of error handling and debugging also big challenge just ansible uses generic error messages with line number and syntax error message. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have been using it for automating the deployment procedures for various projects that I have been a part of. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

If at all the deployment procedure is long and the execution fails at a particular point, it is painful to run the entire automation script from the start. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is easy learn, very user friendly and to run and debug. It has no dependency, powerful to scale application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You have control over the target host for the duration of the playbook and that’s it, you can’t have long-running tasks. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best thing about Ansible is it's short learning curve. Anyone new to it gets a good understanding of it in very short time. It's very easy to learn and it can be used in a wide range of scenarios. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Till now I have not faced any problem using Ansible. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. Easy to setup and deploy stack for cloud servers

2. Its Agent-less architecture handles it using ssh or paramiko modules as it is written in python

3. Security aspects it is highly preferred as it uses ssh for communication Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only thing i dislike is Its comparatively slow than other cloud provisioning tools eg. Salt as it uses ssh for communication between nodes..

While salt uses ZeroMQ. which is fast Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ansible is a part of IaC (Infrastructure as Code). IaC is a modern approach and I believe that infrastructure is code. It means that we should use the same philosophy for infrastructure as for software development. If we are talking that infrastructure is code, then we should reuse practices from development for infrastructure. Ansible allows us to implement this approaches, i.e. S.O.L.I.D. for ansible, pair devopsing and IaC Testing Pyramid.

However, there are some some basic benefits:

* Efficient : Agentless.

* Simple : Declarative language.

* Secure : SSH / WinRM transport.

* Powerful & Flexible : Modules.

* Mature : Supported by Red Hat. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes people follow imperative approach instead of declarative during developing Ansible playbooks. As a result they don't have idempotent playbooks. It's extremely hard to maintain that kind of roles. Also in the vast majority of cases people forget to implement testing procedure for ansible code. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very simple and powerful tool for automation in complex muti-tier application environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Log debugging is complex and not straigt forward task. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best thing about the Ansible is that it is easy to learn. It can be used to automate deployment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some times it is very difficult to find out the reason for any errors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

it is agent less make it easy to use it, NON-IT person can use Ansible’s playbooks,it useful for IT orchestrating and deployment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We can't do execute tasks parallel and custom module is hard to debug. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One can scale automation as per requirement with control and insights. We can create organization wise automation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing dislikes seems in this product, require skillful brains. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ansible makes managing a large number of network devices incredibly easy and fast. Using ansible I've been able to make changes to our network infrastructure at a pace that no one else at our company has been able to previously. I've modified and endured consistent configuration across 11 datacenters and 7000+ network devices in a single day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The hardest thing to get past is the change in mindset and getting people onboard. You will have we to stop thinking about what the infrastructure currently looks like and start thinking about what do you want it to look like. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

use for automation for system & router configuration Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

if any error occurs then difficult to understand using error logs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.