Ansible or Prime within the Industry

[romanroma]

I am reviewing both options currently for automation; however, I am not sure which one will give me more miles learning. Due to the latter, I would like to hear what folks are using. I am open to both products, just not sure which one will give me more mileage since I have a mixed environment.

[Georg Pauwen]

Hello,

for what it's worth: how 'mixed' is your environment ? If the majority of your devices is Cisco, and you have just a few third party devices, Prime would be the choice, and you just get the VNE drivers for your other network elements. If you have an even mix of devices, Ansible is probably the better choice, and you get the network modules you need.

Pricing is an issue of course, as far as I recall, Ansible has an unsupported community edition, which is free.

[Mark Malone]

Hi just to note too Prime is being removed from the portfolio in Cisco from what we have been told , we have used it for years from Cisco works right up to Prime 3.5 now i think were on, but our acc managers in Cisco are telling us its coming EOL most likely due to DNA being pushed , it is a great tool for reporting like the EOL PSIRT reports and custom reporting, an pushing configs out to Cisco devices , we have nearly 1000 devices registered on it , cuts down on a lot of manual config work and its easily maintained , upgrade and patch it now an again , found some features dont work too well like pushing out software from it

[romanroma]

Hi do you have a link that shows Prime being EOL? I have a project manager that is pushing/selling Prime hard; however, I am on the fence.

[Mark Malone]

There is no official link yet its just the overall plan from Cisco we were discussing over last while , its all going SD with new 9ks , once the older portfolio is replaced prime will be irrelevant as DNA will be managing the newer devices, all these new 9ks your forced to buy the DNA setup just the way its going but prime will still be around for a while yet though but we've been told its days are marked due to the arrival of sd 9ks and the way there being pushed , less and cheaper hardware but paying for more services

[romanroma]

Most of of my Switches are Cisco: 2960x, number of Nexus flavors and a few ASA. However, I do have some edge: Juniper, Fortigate Firewalls and Palo Alto firewalls. I say the environment is evenly mixed with Cisco 2960x switches winning out.

[Seb Rupik]

Hi there,

For a monitoring tool Prime is OK, but for automation tasks (the compliance lifecycle process) I always found it a total minefield! Ansible on the otherhand is *just* an automation tool so not 1:1 comparable, but what it does, it does well. 

It also has a good vendor support, and you are more likely to find an instance of it running within your infrastructure support group, so you won't have to go cap in hand to the finance department asking for Prime licenses. It also means that your playbooks can be run alongside the server teams meaning that out of hours changes can sometimes be executed without needing network engineers present.

@Mark Malone comment about Prime being EoL'd is a relief to hear, hopefully I won't have to cross its path again :)

Cheers,

Seb.

[romanroma]

I am looking for a 100% automation tool, so that is a positive to hear. I know a project manager who runs my team is looking for EVERYTHING in one place, and wants support.

[Seb Rupik]

Suggest you also take a look at www.rundeck.com as a platform for orchestrating your playbooks.

cheers,

Seb.

[Thomas Schmitt]

What are you going to automate? PI has a lot limitations, what is your goal?