In talking to customers, we run into a lot of questions about how Shoreline compares with a solution like Ansible. The major difference between Shoreline and Ansible is that Shoreline is an end-to-end platform for incident remediation while Ansible is an IT automation engine best known for configuration management.
Ansible offers “if-then” functionality and is good at running scripts, if you know when you want to run them and where you want to run them (which resources). Ansible doesn’t have monitors, alarms, rich audit trails, blast radii, and circuit breakers built in. As a result, building an automated remediation is much more complex with Ansible.
Given these differences, Shoreline is superior to Ansible in the following circumstances:
- If a new issue requires debugging or human oversight. Shoreline provides debugging and automated runbook capabilities. Ansible lacks this functionality and is only useful for fully automating known issues.
- If you are looking to continuously improve reliability across your fleet. Shoreline’s solution is built to fuel continuous improvement and streamline on-call operations to reduce escalations, MTTR, and toil.
Key Differentiators at a Glance
End-to-end automation platform
Only Shoreline gives you a single platform with integrated monitoring, alarms, and automation. This makes it 10X easier to build automations because so much is available out of the box.
Real-time visibility and debugging
Only Shoreline has real-time, per-second data on your infrastructure. When an outage occurs, you need to know exactly what is going on. For example, you need to know not just that CPU utilization is high, but why it is high. The faster you can pinpoint problems, the faster you can resolve them.
Live Jupyter-style notebooks
Jupyter-style notebooks are a great way to empower self-service repair with the combination of educational content and live runnable code. Shoreline notebooks store the output of commands in-line and make it easy to share and collaborate with other engineers.
Pre-built solutions
Only Shoreline has a growing library of pre-built solutions for the most common incidents that occur on AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Cloud native, secure, highly reliable
Shoreline runs seamlessly across multiple cloud providers, multiple cloud accounts, and Kubernetes clusters. Unlike other providers, Shoreline does not require Cloud provider credentials or SSH keys. Shoreline agents keep monitoring and repairing issues locally, even during cloud provider outages.
Address all types of incidents
New incidents — Shoreline provides real-time, per-second visibility into your infrastructure, and gives you power debugging tools that help solve needle-in-a-haystack problems in seconds.
Known incidents that require human oversight — Shoreline’s Jupyter-style notebooks make it easy to educate and provide live, runable code and tools for sharing.
Repetitive incidents with well-understood solutions — Shoreline’s integrated monitoring, precise alarms, and distributed actions make it easy to build automations in an afternoon.
Comparison of Shoreline vs. Ansible Features
Shoreline
Cloud Reliability Platform
Ansible
IT Automation Engine
Cloud native
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Real-time visibility into infrastructure
Ability to run distributed Linux commands across your infrastructure
Library of pre-built automations
Orchestration layer for deploying and running scripts
Somewhat. Requires a precise alarm to fully automate. In many cases this is difficult to build with traditional monitoring solutions.
Able to fully automate well-understood incidents
Somewhat. Requires a precise alarm to fully automate. Ansible offers YAML playbooks, but these are not interactive, do not guide users through a series of steps, and do not save the output of debug and repair commands for post-mortems and escalations. In many cases this is difficult to build with traditional monitoring solutions.
Integrates with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, ServiceNow Jira, Slack, New Relic, Prometheus, DataDog, and much more
Requires cloud provider credentials and SSH keys to be stored within product
This makes Shoreline much more secure. You only need to assign privileges to the Shoreline agent, like any other user.
