Many of the products that I have used in the past were "as good as you wanted to write it". This was the fist thing that jumped out at me about this product. For common tasks (and some not so common) the functionality is already baked into the product. What's more? Now I have a single interface that both Windows and UNIX administrators can both use effectively as well! The compliance engine is what really makes this product shine. We manage 6,000+ servers' configuration drift with over 100 checks each on a nightly basis, track all findings in Remedy ITSM, remediate issues found, and create incidents for failed remediations. As impressive as this is, we do it in a 100% automated fashion meaning that there is no one kicking it off, monitoring, etc. It works so well, in fact, most people forget it's there. We also use BSA for software distribution, audits, server provisioning, and so much more because what's not out of the box it extendible by various methods. So, this is a product that is "as good as you want to write it, but you don't often have to". Now, there is some ramp up time to get proficient. There are some good YouTube videos as well as formal education offerings to aid in this area. The installation looks fairly straightforward, but I would recommend use of BMC's professional services here to get it done completely, assist with performance tuning, as well as providing guidance on security, layout, and even implementation of initial use cases for some real time knowledge transfer to local staff. Upgrades are probably the weakest area of the product, that has gotten better in the last few releases. In a large environment, the upgrade takes hours upon hours to complete from the application / database prospective. Once completed, all agents will need to be upgraded as well. This takes a lot of planning and testing is a must. When problems occur, BSA technical support is pretty good at getting you the right answer though you may experience a few gyrations before feeling like your issue is actively being addressed. My co-worker would tell people "If you can sit at your desk and do it to your server, BSA can do it." When a product like BSA is combined with a product like Atrium Orchestrator, I have to agree with him in most cases. BSA is a powerful, feature rich application that touches the heart of server management, breathes life into automated management, and provides the backbone for our compliance and remediation.

One of the great automation tool I have used, value for money when compared with HP priority solution. Easy to use and easily scalable, also provide very good support for onboarding new devices on platform.

Best tool for automating administrative task like policy enforcement, policy update , Firmware updates, security audits and one of the best Role based access tool for user. new devices from various vendors can be onwarded by just providing customized XML which communicated over SSH with devices for admistrative task. Customer Support team is very responsive and provided very good tech support. Best part is tool is easy to use and having intuitive GUI which makes it finest product in automation.

Tool do not provide "maintance mode" or "trial mode" for assessing impact of changes being enforced by Admin. Generated reports need to improve so that less-technical manager can also understand it very well.

I was tasked with administration of Bladelogic when they guy my company hired quit day 2. I had never used it before. But after a few weeks, I was in love. You can automate anything with it. You can do device imaging. You can do change control. You can even audit all your devices. All with one tool. Works for all the OS systems. Great tool to improve your productivity. Takes some time to get it all ready and working, but once it is, it's great.

You can automate virtually any task. Works with Linux, Unix, Windows.

Definitely need some experience with scripting to fully use it.

Pros: Very powerful tool for automating tasks of system administrators such as patching, software installs/upgrades, security audits, and reporting. Role-based user access gives you a high level of granularity to control access for end users. Agent has little impact on target performance. Scales easily for your environment. Cons: The way it handles job schedules and the fact that there is no "maintenance mode" can make it difficult to take the system offline without causing a disruption to jobs. No way to automate tasks that require interaction. Overall we use BladeLogic to automate numerous tasks and save our company quite a bit of time and money. It does take quite a bit of work up front to get the various jobs working like we want, so you can't install it and expect to be automating everything the next day, but if you take the time to implement it properly and plan out your automation strategically you have a really powerful tool at your disposal.

Bladelogic Server Automation is one of the finest product in the current market, which has many functionalities and it has done wonders at customer environment where ever it has been implemented based on requirements of the customer Best Of Best from Bladelogic Server Automation 1. RBAC mechanism, which can never beat any tools in the current market 2. Standard Compliance and Remediation , which any automation tool dosent have it out of the box 3.Audit 4. Virtualization support Few Cons 1. More functionalities in one tool and people are not aware of those functionalities and workarounds how to do it. now in virtuaalization/Cloud world the significance of costly tools have gone, simple light weight are welcomed by many organizations. SAAS model would be a welcome approach

Pros: RBAC use by ACL is awesome in bladelogic. This is a perfect control system to manage Automation in a critical environment Solid GUI is a plus. A lot of work can be done thru GUI which is great. Passive agent is one of the plus point. Agent is not doing anything everything is done by Bladelogic. This concept helps very low agent break down Con: Provisioning is complex and need more improvement. Short name and FQDN is counted as independent. You definitely has to fix it, sir. larger file download is a tough issue. export import content need better handling in between different independent bladelogic environment GUI can be more faster deploy on 10K server can create a chaos in bladelogic. But as you sell it as a configuration manager, it should have a capability of smooth software distribution on 20-25K devices at a time. Please remember this point. it is very important. In a big organization it is very natural. But Bladelogic is stumbling here. Bladelogic database create lots of lock which always causing Outage. this needs to be fixed. I have never seen such issues with any other Configuration manager so frequently. This is an awesome tools with so many possibilities. This can be the only tools for server deployment and Automation if very basic things work right. This tool has the potential to capture any market it enters. But needs to create smooth service to gain the reliance of the customer.

BMC Automation Suite is the best Automation Tools Available in the market. Best part is that is tool can patch Linux/Unix/Windows systems which can relieve Operation Engineer from many manual tasks. It is also possible to configure sequence of events for servers. It provides good compliance reporting and it can be used to enforce organization-wide policies for IT Infrastructure. GUI of BMC Automation suite seems to be outdated, it's not appealing, BMC should renew provide good UX for one of the best product in the market. BMC Customer Support team shall think from customer point of views, Support team usually do not abide by their respective Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Pros: -->BMC Bladelogic is an excellent server automation tool which helps you not only automate most of the day to day server maintainance and deployment tasks but also lets you build servers with great ease. -->Console is very user friendly -->architecture easy to understand. -->Supports multiple OS like Windows, Unix, Solaris, HPUX,etc -->Package deployment is easy with 0 human errors -->Saves time in case of multiple deployments --> everything can be managed from single console. --> target communication simple agent based Cons: -->RSCD troubleshooting can be time consuming, need tool to troubleshoot it or support agentless communication. --> Provionsing should be easier to use

Very flexible server automation tool. Much more enterprise friendly than Puppet/Chef - e.g. easier to link with things like change control. More functionality out the box in respect to patching, compliance etc. etc. Very powerful software packaging engine. Very stable and scalable. Documentation could be better.

Pros: nice product from BMC, can easily enroll multiple servers, easy to use. Con: need more enhancement to make it user friendly like MS product

10 years of IT experience and 7 of those have been with using Bladelogic as my #1 tool to deliver results. I started with BMC provided Training when we started using the tool for Data Center Management by way of Disaster Recovery Testing and Compliance. Bladelogic's ability to turn server into objects visualized is so important to how we see and configure Application\Middleware Products\Operating systems and audit\validate just about everything we can need to support our Business. The Cloud Lifecycle Management use of Bladelogic also has made delivery of Compute much easier. Having Public Cloud Providor Adapters ready and function would made our delivery of Public Cloud a bit easier.

I have been using BMC BNA Application for more than 3 years and I found it to be very good for Operation team. Pros: Application runs very well on virtual and physical server environment. Efficient. Save lots of time. BMC BNA can provision almost all type of devices and it provides very flexible device onboarding feature by adding new customized command XML for that devices. Cons: Its has a limitation on a number of devices which can be onboard per application installation. - Application not suitable for clustered environment. Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions

We have benefited from BSA to allow a common task to be replicated across multiple customers within excellant timescales. No more manual copies, multiple user account access issues, network bandwidth constraints can be managed etc.

Move from reactive, manual handling of requests to a fully automated system Deliver consistent task and automation workflow results Automate data collection for audit compliance Align with best practices Free up IT resources

Very useful in day to day work - for all simple and complex automation tasks. NSH below is the best feature of whole product to automate things. Saves time and as time is money... very valuable indeed

BladeLogic Server Automation provides the flexibility for today's complex infrastructures and has a user community second to none!

This server automation tool allows you to quickly and securely provision, configure, patch, and maintain physical, virtual, and cloud servers.

It was perfect for our needs! We have had a few issues - but BMC Support quickly responds and resolves the issues!

BMC developed and integrated its Server automation suite as a on stop shop for Automation world

Pros: Fast, granular, centralized. Cons: Reporting capability

Overall great product. Helps us a lot at daily operations.

Nice automation