According to Gartner, by 2022, network teams will spend 3x more time working in public cloud infrastructure than they do today. In response, organizations need a consistent and unified approach to managing environments across physical, virtual, and cloud-native infrastructure. Solving this challenge of modern network configuration management is the focus of our latest product release.
With Itential 2020.2, we’ve introduced brand new configuration management capabilities for simplifying device configuration, compliance, and remediation across physical, virtual, and cloud-native networks. Some of the new capabilities and features included in this latest release:
- Network & Cloud Configuration Manager – Enable network teams to manage physical, virtual, and cloud-native network infrastructure, normalizing these constructs into a unified application for simplified automation.
- Automation Studio – Make it even easier to build automations and provide a much cleaner way to start prototyping and brainstorming workflows.
- Operations Manager – Measure automation value to your business and provide immediate feedback for an organization’s automation initiatives.
- Codeless Integrations – Integrate to any OpenAPI system within seconds.
- New IAP Homepage – Homepage widgets to get you directly where you need to go.
Let’s take a look into how each of these new features and capabilities work together to enable network teams to automate across network and cloud infrastructure.
Network & Cloud Configuration Manager
As we see the adoption of more diverse cloud-native network services on the rise, we built a way to keep things as simple as possible for network engineers with the addition of API-based compliance reports. With this new capability to our existing Configuration Manager, you can easily enable visibility and governance to aid automation in all network environments including public cloud.
In this new release, we have extended our existing Golden Configuration capabilities to now support API managed network infrastructure. This is what makes it possible for networking teams to manage configuration and compliance over any infrastructure type, whether it is CLI or API based. Also, any adapter or integration call you have added to IAP is now available in Configuration Manager to define Golden Configurations and run compliance checks against, so you can detect potentially dangerous configuration drifts before an outage happens.
We’ve also included a new Configuration Editor that allows for multi-line changes of all your configurations.
Watch Configuration Manager Demo >
Automation Studio
In Itential’s Automation Studio, we launched a new automation experience that is tailored to help users build modular, re-usable, and maintainable automations that can be easily shared, understood, and used by others across your organization. We have implemented several different features to achieve this goal, including a new automation canvas, loops over automations, default error handling, a best practice analyzer, universal stub tasks, and a clean grid-based layout for automation.
All of these tools and improvements help to lower the barrier of entry so that anyone can start building network automations in a low-code, drag-and-drop environment without the need for extensive training.
Watch Automation Studio Demo >
Operations Manager
It is vitally important to have visibility into the full scope of active automations. With Itential’s brand new application, Operations Manager, there is a new home for everything related to daily operational usage in the Itential Automation Platform. Operations Manager tracks metrics on each job and task and saves these details for detailed reporting and analysis to provide immediate feedback on your automation initiatives.
This new applications will include Job Manager and Job Dashboards, Automation Catalog, and Events Manager. With our new Job Dashboard users get a unified view of all jobs that have run in your environment, if each task was worked within its SLA, and how much end-to-end as well as manual labor time was saved by running automations in IAP.
Additional Itential 2020.2 Features & Enhancements
Codeless Integration
With codeless integrations, Itential is taking the next step on our successful path of integrating with any 3rd party system for full end-to-end automation. You can now import any OpenAPI or Swagger specification directly into the Itential Automation Platform and have the defined tasks available on all IAP servers without the need to deploy code or even restart the IAP server. Codeless integrations share a dynamic pool of worker nodes, basically reducing the memory footprint of an integration to 0.
New IAP Homepage Design
Itential’s new homepage allows for customized widgets to be displayed to make the platform more personalized for each user. Widgets will be released as they become available and will include Favorites, Recently Used Documents, Dashboards, Messages, and small training / best practice snippets.
Watch Solution Overview Demo >
Check out Itential’s 2020.2 product release documentation and be sure to watch our on-demand webinar, “Simplify Configuration & Compliance Management Across Network & Cloud Infrastructure” to learn more about how to enable visibility and governance to aide automation in all network environments including public cloud as well as see a firsthand demo of these exciting new capabilities and features.
Rich Martin
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
