Cisco Intersight vs. OpsCompass

Cisco Intersight is very well suited for doing firmware upgrades across all of your cisco hardware. So far we have had no problems pushing out new firmware. It's also well suited for hardware management. Cisco TAC has the ability to pull logs for the IMC for themselves, which saves you from having to pull the logs yourself and then uploading them to the case. It may or may not be appropriate for upgrading operating systems. I have not been able to test it.

Incentivized

Our AWS Cloud was a perfect fit for OpsCompass. We needed a better method for understanding the size/extent of our Cloud--rather than the manual approach we'd been using. It's saved us a lot of time, and allowed us to delay adding additional heads for at least six to nine months. It also gives us a better/faster grasp of potential security issues - we see them right away, and we can assess each issue far faster than ever before. When we expand to Azure, Ops Compass will be able to do the same thing for us. (We have no plans to expand into Google Cloud Platform, but Ops Compass works well in all 3 clouds, apparently.)

• Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
• Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
• Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
• Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).

Incentivized

• Quick inventory of all my cloud resources
• Detects changes to my cloud resources--including the source of the changes (user or system)
• Cost impacts of changes to my cloud infrastructure

• It is difficult to spot an added or removed VLAN in an Ethernet Network Group Policy or VLAN Policy. The comparison widget will show you that something has changed, but if you have 100s of VLANs, the difference does not stand out. Workaround: we copy the data out and compare it in a text editor.
• If you are transitioning from UMM to IMM, you lose some functionality like vNIC redundancy pairs.
• It is not easy to map the UMM version 4.x server firmware version to the equivalent IMM version 5.x firmware version.
• It is not possible to configure out-of-band management IP addresses on a per-domain basis. You have to configure these ranges via an IMC Access policy (which contains the IP address range/pool) on the server profile. This leads to "server profile template sprawl" where we have to maintain multiple server profile templates since our domains sit on different ranges, even though the servers are for the most part configured identically.
• UCS domains in IMM only support one Ethernet Network Group Policy (VLAN group) per vNIC template.

Incentivized

• I would like to see more integrations to help surface alerts. Slack would be great, as an example.
• An imbedded tour or onboarding would help our new users, but overall, the product is pretty easy to figure out

Been using Cisco Software as a service (SaaS) platform in a production environment for a large medical and health professionals that has critical healthcare and patients care dependency.

Support team is very helpful getting system updated as needed, and vendor support is fantastic. Also get a dedicated Cisco networking engine to review and advise system health and recommendations.

Incentivized

Usability of Cisco Intersight is highly dependent on the licensing purchased. The default (free) license level provides a lot of value for the minimal amount of effort to implement. The paid license levels provide additional features (detailed inventory, configuration management and deployment, etc.)

Incentivized

If you have bigger problems with the on-prem version, the support team is sometimes a bit slow in their reactions and you have to keep going, to get your help. But finally, all problems, that we have addressed, have been resolved to my full appreciation!

You really need a lab to get hands on but it was useful

Incentivized

Very smooth process and we did it for 2 data centers

Incentivized

Our organisation has some experience with Dell OME (the centralised management plane for Dell PowerEdge server, equivalent to Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and UCS Manager, but not enough to contrast the two or say why one is better than the other.

Incentivized

We like that OpsCompass is native, multi-cloud, and gives us a consistent method and approach to managing our security across multiple environments. It was more attractively priced and had easier, simpler deployment. It took us about 30 minutes to get it connected to both of our clouds and get a quick view of all of our infrastructure.

• The negative thing is that we prefer to use the UCS Manager in our company because this bare metal is integrated into the FI and no extra appliance is required. SaaS is generally not viewed favorably in Germany.
• Telling the user that they have to buy Intersight licenses even if they use UCS Manager annoys our customers.

Incentivized

• Our team was able to do roughly 30% more with the product. The automation helps us spot issues without a lot of manual work
• We identified changes that would have had a massive cost impact--spinning up or forgetting about infrastructure we didn't need.
• OpsCompass prevents configuration drift and maintains a healthy state across multi-clouds.