PDQ Deploy & Inventory vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

PDQ Inventory is great if you have a local network of computers on or off a domain. As long as you have a way to log into them with common credentials. Great for large organizations, particularly ones interconnected with VPNs. PDQ Inventory isn't so great for PCs that aren't connected to the same LAN the server is on. (i.e. non-vpn remote users) They used to have a remote agent you could install, but it was removed after numerous issues.

Incentivized

I'm going to say it is best suited for configuration management. Like I said, patching even with security, things of that nature. Probably less suited is hardware management, but Red Hat IBM/IBM has Terraform for that. So it's a trade off.

Incentivized

• Deploy updates to software like Adobe and Java
• Show which computers are currently connected and turned on
• Turn on computers that are off
• Turn off computers that are on
• View which hardware (RAM, HDD, processor, etc) is on each device

Incentivized

• Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
• Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
• Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.

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• The scripting part could benefit from samples / examples
• Deployment scenarios could be included for ease on first use
• Including Inventory directly within Deploy would be great

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• Ability to tell when a task has already been done
• yaml configuration can be annoying at times, perhaps a built in lint so yq isn't needed
• the become feature should be able to be set to true globally without using args

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PDQ is very useful and one of the tools that we use a lot.

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Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.

Incentivized

The interface is straight forward and guides you through the process there. PDQ keeps track of the when new updates are made available writes the scripts and all l you need to do is push the button. (Mr George Jetson) Now with the download done you just sit back worry free and watch the software install in 1% of the time it would take to take care of the PC manually.

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Overall it's good but the new architecture can be complex. Improvements can be made in the Config as Code capabilities for managing Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Sometimes it can be difficult for those unfamiliar to understand the relationship between Projects/Credentials/Job Templates, etc.

Incentivized

Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.

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I have not had to use PDQ Deploy support's process. In terms of the actual application, I haven't found an exe, msi or script that I can throw at it that it can't handle. Being able to call the config file for Office is an especially useful feature.

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There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.

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I spoke on this topic today!

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The only other product on the market is Ninite, the major disadvantaged of Ninite you need to build you own packages and scripts for deployment. I would much rather download the packages and manager the software in this fashion then to take all of the time to do it Ninites way. I would need to go find and keep update date in the industry when a vendor updates something... I have not time to do this Please Choice PDQ.

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As I said earlier, Red Hat Ansible remains a top choice because it is a perfect combination of multiple capabilities. Terraform is good in IAC but not in config automation. Puppet is well-suited for developers, but not for system administrators and infrastructure integrators. OpenShift and Kubernetes are generic automators only.

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• Convenience! Despite being a small team, PDQ Deploy has boosted our ability to deliver up-to-date Windows applications to our client PCs in a fraction of the time it took when the process was a manual one. Our reach has naturally improved; installing a simple application on a suite of 20 PCs no longer seems to be a daunting task.
• TIME-SAVING! I cannot emphasize enough the time savings one can enjoy with this product!

Incentivized

• We are still early in our implementation and don't have much yet - but I can say that it has already improved the time it takes to deploy a new virtual server for us, as well as making them more consistent.
• In working through what jobs are required, it has really improved the communication between our different teams

Incentivized