I am in the process of demoing multiple patch management solutions. I’ve tried Lumension, Patch Authority Ultimate, BigFix and Shavlik NetChk… It has come down to two, BigFix and NetChk…
I was wondering if anyone could provide insight if they’ve tried the two as two pros and cons for each.
Hmm, the biggest difference I can think of is BigFix is semi cross-platform. What I mean by that is that they have agents for quite a few OSes, but the full suite of products does not apply to every OS. Shavlik is Windows only.
We haven’t looked at Shavlik in a few years (because of the cross platform need) but as you know the core set of functionality is the same. I’d say they have a nicer user interface - but BigFix version 8 is right around the corner and that interface is an improvement over 7. Shavlik has also embraced VMware and offline vm patching - something I think BigFix desperatly needs. I’m not sure how flexible Shavlik is, but that is by far one of the biggest strengths of BigFix.
Perhaps if you could provide a few areas where you feel you have questions, we could elaborate a little more.
One of the things I just got from them is they have the ability to add custom patching for 3rd party apps not included… They have a wizard to do so. Does BigFix offer anything like this?
Well, I may be wrong and welcome correction, but in the world of BigFix, that could be done, albeit a little manually, through the Software Distribution Wizard. So you’d need to see if their wizard has more magic than the BigFix wizard.
What I really mean is I’m not sure how automagically their wizard would incorporate those 3rd party patches. In BigFix, you would download the patch(es), run the Wizard (target systems, upload patch(es), check for success), tweak the task if needed and deploy.