At Itential, we’ve always been committed to making automation as practical to adopt as possible so teams and organizations can see value right away. From our leading low-code SaaS platform to our massive library of open integrations, everything we make helps your team ramp up automations quicker and enables more people to participate, increasing the value automation can bring back to your organization. In our latest release of IAP 23.1, we’re doubling down on that in two major ways: an all-new reimagined workflow builder experience and enhanced API compliance capabilities.
With IAP 23.1, we aim to deliver a smoother, easier, and more powerful experience, enabling our customers to build robust automations even faster. Here’s a breakdown of what’s included in our latest release:
Reimagined Workflow Building Experience
The workflow builder experience is the core of what the Itential Automation Platform delivers to our customers. It’s where users build, test, and deploy low-code automation and orchestration workflows as quickly and reliably as possible. Our easy and powerful user experience gives teams the ability to really ramp up automation participation, which is key to seeing organization-wide payoffs.
In IAP 23.1, we’ve 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. We’ve redesigned the look and added key new capabilities to enrich the automation workflow experience, both while building and assessing automation execution. An improved workflow building experience means everyone on the network team is able to get started quickly and participate in creating automations, testing them, and ultimately delivering self-service networking to the IT organization.
Key Features
Modernized Workflow Canvas
- A redesigned UI with grid snapping, canvas exports, and context-sensitive menus.
- Modular, flexible approach to UI elements like menus and asset libraries.
- Full backwards compatibility with previous-gen IAP automations.
Enriched Workflow Builder Capabilities
- Improvements like multi-select, hotkeys, copy-paste, undo-redo, etc.
- Intelligent Transitions to auto-select transition type between tasks.
Improved Automation Execution Visualization
- Visual rendering of workflow execution.
- Status updates and task pathing in Itential Operations Manager.
Enhanced Configuration Management Capabilities
Hand in hand with delivering an easier experience building automations is providing an easier way to manage configuration and compliance across your distributed, hybrid infrastructure. Improvements like device group flexibility, JSON-powered API compliance, and compliance audit intelligence allow for deeper, more specific controls for building rules that define configurations for API-managed network services.
There’s a lot of complexity at the core of network configuration, so as more network solutions adopt APIs, we’ll continue to see more complex configurations represented with JSON. That means more complex JSON objects. Enhancing Itential’s JSON-based API compliance features gives users more ways to build appropriate configuration standards, even for the most complex network service configurations.
Key Features
API Compliance Capabilities Powered by JSON
- JSON compliance rule and evaluation controls for greater flexibility.
- Simplified discovery of keys and values to parse complex JSON objects for compliance audits.
- Support for variable matches and regex matches for JSON values to make compliance more flexible and reusable.
Device Group Enhancements
- Flexible device groups with intelligent device OS type identification.
- Associate Device Groups with nodes in a Golden Configuration tree to scale compliance audits across the entire group.
- Intelligent awareness of OS types in Device Groups and Golden Configuration trees for improved configuration compliance reporting.
Additional Features & Improvements: Scale, Support, & Standardization
With large-scale improvements to the workflow building experience and to API-based configuration management and compliance, Itential 23.1 makes it easier than ever to build automations with confidence. But just improving these core sets of features isn’t enough.
To make sure our users can take advantage of these improvements as much as possible, we’ve made sure to include plenty of new ways to scale your automation reach, improved tools for managing your automation ecosystem, and continued updates to Itential’s assets and documentation to further the benefits of standardization.
- Blue/Green Deployment Architecture: Alongside our primary SaaS deployment model, we also support customers who choose on-premises deployment. For those customers, delivering services to new locations or adapting infrastructure to meet spikes in traffic can sometimes be a challenge. With this new blue/green dual-environment setup, updates, infrastructure changes, and new site deployments can be managed seamlessly, without any service interruptions for your end users.
- Container Support for IAP and IAG: Containers are the industry standard for application development. Now, you can deploy the Itential Automation Platform and Itential Automation Gateway with containers using common solutions like Docker and Kubernetes, spinning up new instances almost instantly to drive adaptability and enable scale. This lets you work how you want to work, fitting Itential right into your established best practices.
- Service Accounts: For many kinds of automations, you’ll want to give another system access permission to Itential, whether that be a DevOps pipeline, a network inventory system, or an ITSM platform. Service Accounts give you more control by tailoring these machine-to-machine accounts to suit the way your services might change and adapt over time.
- IAG Library Updates: We’ve made key updates to support the latest Ansible, Terraform and Netmiko libraries to ensure customers always have access to the most current tools available.
- OpenAPI 3.1 Support: Documentation is now standardized across everything in the Itential ecosystem, from IAG APIs to applications and Integrations. We’re doubling down on our commitment to standardization and practicality, and to do that we had to ensure anything that wasn’t already defined by the OpenAPI 3.1 standard was updated to match.
I’m thrilled with what we’ve been able to deliver in this latest release, because making automation as easy to adopt, as quick to get started, and as dynamically scalable as possible is really where our customers are seeing results. Network automation teams will be able to build more automations faster while maintaining compliance, even as infrastructure sprawls and decentralizes. And they’ll be able to deploy those automations at scale to match.
For a full breakdown of the new release, click here. To browse our 2023.1 release documentation, click here, or to take an interactive tour of the new features, click here.
Interested in a test drive? Sign up for a free workshop, or request a demo here.
John Bejjani
Head of Product Management ‐ Itential
John Bejjani is the Head of Product Management at Itential where he guides the developing roadmap for the Itential Automation Platform. He is passionate about helping customers of all sizes address their network and service automation and orchestration needs.
