AWS Config vs. SUSE Manager

To keep track of changes and to answer many compliance issues this is a life-saver. AWS does a good job providing tools like this. Any AWS workload should be monitored with AWS Config. It even is great for troubleshooting and seeing who changed what at what time.

Incentivized

In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.

Incentivized

• It can help you define rules for provisioning and configuring of your AWS. We use it for this purpose.
• It maintains configuration history. So you can use the AWS Management Console, API, or CLI to obtain details of past configurations
• It gives you a configuration snapshot of all of your AWS resources and you can store it in AWS S3.
• You can integrate it with AWS CloudTrail to correlate configuration changes to particular events in your account.

Incentivized

• Manage the content lifecycle of our products over multiple environments.
• Use salt to its fullest extent, including pre-generated states that make installation and configuration very easy.
• Manage repositories.
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Make it easy to bootstrap new systems.

Incentivized

• Vendor lock-in, no easy migration path for example if you want to move some workloads to Azure, you'd not be able to lift and shift.
• Only at an AWS resource perspective - cannot do desired state configuration at an OS level (which makes sense but be good if you could even as a separate feature within AWS Config).

Incentivized

• The cloning of patches when using the content lifecycle module in a multi-environment landscape with many SLES flavours is a bit cumbersome.
• More premade saltstate for default applications are always nice to have.
• Upgrading SUMA could be easier, especially when a Postgres upgrade is also required.

Incentivized

I am expanding the use of SUSE Manager throughout our organization and can't imagine going back to the "wild wild west" we had before.

The gui is extremely user friendly. The installation and configuration does have a learning curve, it takes a while to set everything up. But once you're passed this initial learning curve, everything is very intuitive. If you want extra automation, there's an api (eventough i personally find the documentation of the api could be ordered better). I gave this product a 9 because of the initial learning curve and the api documentation, but for the rest it suits my needs perfectly.

Incentivized

The performance has never been an issue for us, the dashboard gives us real-time monitoring and the alert sends us the notification within less than a minute of it happening, this applies to all of the monitored resources on AWS. However we can't (or probably haven't figured out how to) integrate with any other third party services, so we can't really evaluate how it integrates with other services

Incentivized

SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.

Despite the comparison it is not really apples to apples, the main purpose of the service is quite similar which is to monitor your application or services. In terms of AWS services, AWS Config provides more options to monitor and log your service on the infrastructure level which is very useful on that level and overall will give you more information about what is currently happening. Meanwhile PaperTrail is more suited to monitor and log your service and could only give you information on the application level.

Incentivized

The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.

Incentivized

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized

• Manages patch levels for most Linux OS by: date, group, cloud or custom channels
• Make it easy to audit our own infrastructure.
• Allows the joining of groups inside SUSE Manager to quickly access or work with servers so grouped.
• 24/7 support team.
• Automatic deployment.

Incentivized