Runecast Analyzer

System Engineer, I design and manage IT services. Author of Nolabnoparty.com tech blog.

Comments: I can have the situation of my virtual environment always under control from a centralized console knowing if anything bad is occurring to the infrastructure. It allows me to save time and plan appropriate maintenance windows avoiding services disruption.

Pros:

An easy to use solution, very useful to prevent potential issues on your virtual infrastructure. The well designed Dashboard allows you to have the overall status of your infrastructure from a single pane of glass. Being constantly under development, Runecast releases updates as soon as new issues or new KB are released by VMware saving the administrators from potential services disruption. Despite daily checks of the virtual infrastructure, not all issues can be detected on time. If the system has a problem, the users will have a problem. Runecast gives you the information you need to prevent potential and dangerous issues saving lot of time and keeping the environment healthy. Just think about Meltdown and Spectre issue... in large environments to identify hosts affected by this problem takes ages. With Runecast you can have the exact overview of hosts that need to be patched in a matter of seconds.

Cons:

No much to say about cons... for SMBs the application price perhaps can influence the purchase decision but the provided benefits are valuable. Anyway preventing issues surely cost less than fixing.

The best in its league

Pros:

RuneCast made our life so easy. It look a job of days and turned it into minutes. Not only that, we had to ready each and every best practice document for each release and product (vSphere, vCenter, Horizon), RuneCase made it all in one. It also helped us to verify the compliance of our drivers with the release we use of ESXi as this use to be a manual process too. so easy to deploy... its OVF, assign IP and you are ready to go... so so so simple What I also love about it is that they keep on adding features without asking the customers to pay more or bring up a new license... The best value for money you will ever see in todays products.

Cons:

What I would like to see in RuneCast is that... Customers should be able to define their own baselines and it should compare your installation against it... currently it has built-in (vmware best practices, CIS, etc...), where what I see it should allow us to customize and run the analysis against our settings and then print it in a report format ... this will help us to showcase our compliance to audit team

Tried last year

Pros:

Easy integration and installation, everything OK.

Cons:

Well hard to say, its almost 2 years, but maybe price?

Runecast at 'de Volksbank'

Comments: “Our main goal is to serve our customers with a high-end, feature rich and robust electronic banking environment. With Runecast we can now proactively prevent outages on the systems that provide that environment.” On average, we prevent at least one host crash (or not responding) a month. That means 20 to 30 VM’s are kept running each month instead of annoying a customer with a problem at a cash machine or doing their online of mobile banking. That alone makes it worthwhile for us!
We utilize Runecast to prioritise remediation of newly detected issues in each sprint according to their level of severity. We also use it to generate concise monthly reports on the state of our virtual environment.

Pros:

Runecast Analyzer saves De Volksbank’s IT team 75% of time previously spent on troubleshooting and identifying root causes of issues. The tedious manual approach of crawling through VMware Knowledge Base articles has been replaced with proactive automated problem prevention.

Cons:

The upgrade process in the past between major versions. The move from one appliance to another keeping all settings and data.

Runecast simplifies IT Security/Vulnerability Management

Comments: Runecast took me less than 15 minutes to deploy on my own and needs little to no maintenance. It just works every single time. I never have any problems with it and support is always friendly and prompt when I do need help with a license issue or something. I cannot rate this product highly enough.

Pros:

The thing I like most about this software is its ease of use. I simply pull up the dashboard and I can visually see based on colors how severe a vulnerability is. I can then very easily drill into any of the vulnerabilities Runecast detected and get valuable information on how to mitigate the vulnerability in question.

Cons:

The only thing I would improve about this software is creating more "push button" compliance assessments (NIST, CMMC, etc.).