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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform pros and cons

Vendor: Red Hat

4.3 out of 5

70 reviews
97% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform features an agentless architecture, simplifying integration and reducing setup time. Its YAML-based Playbooks ease the learning curve, enhancing new user experience. The platform excels in managing IT infrastructure with role-based access control and interacting with cloud providers. Despite its strengths, scaling, network performance, and Windows role support need improvement. Documentation and integration with other tools, along with dashboard functionalities, require refinement for optimized use.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Ansible's agentless feature allows convenient management without requiring agent installations on systems.

The automation capabilities efficiently streamline configurations and deployment processes, reducing manual tasks and errors.

Playbooks enable straightforward development and deployment automation, making them highly valuable.

The use of YAML, known for its simplicity and readability, makes writing and understanding configuration files easier.

Ansible Automation Platform integrates well with various applications and devices, contributing to its versatility and ease of use.

CONS

Scalability is limited due to SSH session establishment.

Documentation, especially for installation and API integrations, requires improvement.

Support for additional credential types and modules is needed.

Execution speed and handling of parallelism, such as mass updates, need enhancements.

Compatibility issues with different Python versions can cause complications.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pros review quotes

reviewer2399166

Lead System Administrator at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 8, 2024

The ease of being able to use the modules and collections to define what our business processes are is valuable. We are able to give non-technical people the ability to look at a process and say, "We need a step here. Someone do something and put it right here."

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reviewer1668990

DevOps Consultant at a government with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 13, 2021

Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate.

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reviewer2399148

Systems Anslyst VII - Infrastrusture at a government with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2024

The development tools are decent and being able to consistently manage those servers is really the key, which is why we went with Ansible in the first place.

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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reviewer2399208

System Administrator at a university with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2024

The easy-to-read syntax for YAML files and the interoperability between modules are valuable.

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reviewer1630809

Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 12, 2022

It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left.

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SM

IT Specialist at Los Angeles County Internal Services Department

May 7, 2024

The most valuable feature is that it is easy to build playbooks. The learning curve is not that steep.

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NS

Student at ARTH

Aug 2, 2021

Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible.

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reviewer1453662

Linux Platform System Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Feb 2, 2021

It has improved our organization through provisioning and security hardening. When we do get a new VM, we have been able to bring on a provisioned machine in less than a day. This morning alone, I provisioned two machines within an hour. I am talking about hardening, installing antivirus software on it, and creating user accounts because the Playbooks were predesigned. From the time we got the servers to the actual hand-off, it takes less than an hour. We are talking about having the servers actually authenticate Red Hat Satellites and run the yum updates. All of that can be done within an hour.

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AG

Devops Engineer at Infosys Ltd

Feb 6, 2023

One of the most valuable features is that Ansible is agentless. It does not have dependencies, other than Python, which is very generic in terms of dependencies for all systems and for any environment. Being agentless, Ansible is very convenient for everything.

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Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Oct 21, 2018

The biggest thing I liked about Ansible is the check mode so that we can verify, after we've pushed, that the config there is actually what we intended.

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Cons review quotes

reviewer2399166

Lead System Administrator at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 8, 2024

There should be consistency. I know that it is always changing, but when we are trying to get some users to do something in basic Ansible that they are not really interested in doing but their job requires them to do it, they start finding inconsistencies.

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reviewer1668990

DevOps Consultant at a government with 501-1,000 employees

Sep 13, 2021

Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible.

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reviewer2399148

Systems Anslyst VII - Infrastrusture at a government with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2024

There should be better Windows support. We have had to develop a lot of our own roles because of the Windows platform. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux ones existed but not the Windows versions, so I have had to develop a bunch of Windows ones.

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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Free Report: Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2025.

865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer2399208

System Administrator at a university with 10,001+ employees

May 8, 2024

There have been some differences between the operating systems that we have noticed. It could be down to cryptographic policies, but we have noticed some speed issues. They should work on the speed of deployment on different operating systems.

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reviewer1630809

Automation Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 12, 2022

Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen.

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SM

IT Specialist at Los Angeles County Internal Services Department

May 7, 2024

We are very satisfied with what we have. From a management point of view, whatever makes it easier for my team to help customers write their own playbooks would be something very beneficial. Everything is going as a service. Creating playbooks can become much more consumer-oriented so that customers do not need to contact us to write their own playbooks.

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NS

Student at ARTH

Aug 2, 2021

Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules.

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reviewer1453662

Linux Platform System Administrator at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Feb 2, 2021

When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control.

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AG

Devops Engineer at Infosys Ltd

Feb 6, 2023

The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that.

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Senior Operations Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 21, 2018

We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Configuration Management

Release Automation

Network Automation

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Configuration Management

Release Automation

Network Automation

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Microsoft Intune vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

GitLab vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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Cisco DNA Center vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

VMware Aria Automation vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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Red Hat Satellite vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

AWS Systems Manager vs Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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