Explore the new features & functionality in the latest release of the Itential Automation Platform (IAP).
New Features to Simplify & Scale Network Automation
Itential continues to develop features and functionality to help network teams at every level of their automation journey; from teams just getting started building their first automations to teams that are already proficient in using Itential to build, test, and publish network automations for self-service.
With the latest release to our suite of automation products, Itential is making it even easier for network teams to deliver and scale automations and enforce network compliance faster and with greater accuracy than ever before.
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What’s New?
Simplify
- Modernized Workflow Canvas
- Enriched Workflow Builder Capabilities
- Improved Automation Execution Visualization
- Enhanced API Compliance
- Device Group Enhancements
Scale
- Blue/ Green Architecture
- Container Support for IAP and IAG
Reimagined Workflow Building Experience
The workflow builder experience is the core of the value that the Itential Automation Platform delivers to our customers: the ability to build, test, and deploy low-code automation and orchestration workflows as quickly and reliably as possible.
In 2023.1 we have redefined and rebuilt our workflow canvas experience from the ground up to ensure the best possible user experience, while also ensuring full compatibility with any previously created workflows.
Modernized Workflow Canvas
- Simplified User Experience: All new redesigned canvas.
- Redesigned User Interface: Enable new or experienced automation engineers to learn and build more quickly than before.
- Grid Positioning: Easily build visually precise, understandable workflows by dragging tasks and snapping them into alignment.
- Context Sensitive Menus: Ability to right click on elements within the workflow canvas and quickly access features specific to that element.
- Task Palette: Simplified and flexible task palette that can be repositioned anywhere on the canvas or removed to optimize space.
- Canvas Export: Export the workflow canvas as an image for documentation and team collaboration.
- Gen 1 & Gen 2 Compatibility: Full compatibility with previous IAP automations.
Enriched Workflow Builder Capabilities
- Multi-Select: Select multiple tasks in a workflow and operate on them all at once.
- Copy & Paste: Select one or more workflow tasks to copy and paste on the canvas to quickly be reused in the workflow.
- Undo & Redo: Quickly revert a change to a workflow element or redo the change to simplify the build and test process.
- Hotkeys: Enable power users to utilize more hotkeys for frequently used functions so they can build and modify automations faster.
- Transition Drag Zones: Create transitions between tasks faster by using intelligent drag zones that can auto-select the appropriate transition type between tasks.
Improved Automation Execution Visualization
- Visual Rendering: Workflows that are executed are visually rendered with the appropriate workflow canvas.
- Status Updates: Job execution will highlight status updates as each task executes, making easy to identify the overall path and execution status of each task in Operations Manager.
Enhanced Configuration Management Capabilities
Itential continues to be the only automation platform that can manage configuration and compliance for both CLI physical devices and API-based cloud and virtual services.
In 2023.1 we are building upon our already robust API compliance capabilities and greatly simplifying the process of enforcing compliance rules by providing powerful features that allow you to deal with deeply embedded JSON configurations, as well as applying rules across a list of object configurations. This enables users to go further and do more with ensuring configuration compliance for API-managed network solutions like SD-WAN, Cloud, or service configurations in your organization.
Expanded API Compliance Capabilities
- Expanded Controls: For rules and evaluations for JSON compliance, allowing for more flexibility in determining that API-managed network services are complaint.
- Simplified Discovery: Of keys, values, or both in deeply nested objects to ensure that complex JSON objects can be parsed for compliance audits.
- Flexible & Reusable JSON Compliance: With support for variables and regular expression matches for JSON values.
Device Group Enhancements
- Build Flexible Device Groups: Visually identify device OS types and create Device Groups based on OS type identification according to your operational model.
- Run Compliance Audits for Device Groups: Quickly increase the scale and scope of your configuration compliance and remediation processes by allowing Device Groups to be associated with nodes in a Golden Configuration tree, allowing compliance audits to run across the entire group.
- Intelligent OS Awareness: Increased awareness of different OS types in Device Groups and Golden Configuration trees, allowing more intelligent handling of how configuration compliance reports are run.
Scale Network Automation to Fit Your Environment
Scalability and ease of installation are frequent requests especially for those customers who manage their own Itential environments. The combination of IAP container deployments along with our Blue/Green enablement enhancements will support your efforts to both simplify upgrades, as well as scale them as your needs evolve and your automation utilization increases.
- Blue / Green Architecture: Reduce job execution on existing Blue servers through increased job management controls. Increased control over task execution to enable faster drain down from Blue to Green server environments.
Read the White Paper - Container Support: IAP and IAG supported as OCI-compliant images that can be managed by your platform of choice like Docker, Kubernetes, and others.
Additional Supporting Features
- Service Accounts: Support for Service Accounts to increase security and granular authorization of northbound systems that utilize Itential APIs.
- Itential Automation Gateway (IAG) Library Updates: Updated the supported versions for many script-based automation tools including Ansible, Netmiko, and Terrafrom to increase integration with these automation assets.
- OpenAPI 3.1 Support
- IAG APIs: Provides documentation for API calls in IAG, and allows users to view and test API calls from a visual interface before implementing them in other platforms.
- Apps, Adapters, & Integrations: Provides documentation for API calls in IAP and allows users to view and test API calls from a visual interface before implementing them in other platforms. Extends internal APIs to include direct API calls to Integration and Adapter methods to facilitate API gateway functionality.
