Bringing collaboration and scale to automation: The latest in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Since launching Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform at AnsibleFest last October, we have continued to expand the capabilities of the Platform to make it even easier for organizations to build and operate automation at scale and increase collaboration across teams.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform combines the simple and powerful Ansible solutions with hosted service capabilities for cross-team collaboration, governance and analytics -- resulting in a solution designed to exponentially increase the value of automation. We’ve seen that enterprises not only need the ability to easily create automation, but they also need to be able to share and reuse automation across projects and teams with the right level of governance and control. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps provide a solution they can use across teams and domains, and a solution they can grow with as they progress on their automation journey. 

With today’s shifting global dynamics and the need to do more with less, we understand the unique role automation plays in helping remote workforces and IT teams that are stretched to their limits. We’ve heard from customers these past weeks about how automation has helped them to scale up capacity, make changes to accommodate global remote workforces and cope with surges in demand that are almost unprecedented. Since the beginning, one of Ansible’s overarching goals is to create a simple automation language to help organizations easily get started. And one of our goals with launching the Platform is to enable our customers to continue to scale that automation and get more done with less. Those goals continue to be our focus now more than ever as we enhance and refine Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and its capabilities. 

Introducing automation services catalog

We are pleased to introduce automation services catalog. Automation services catalog brings curated automation of infrastructure and application deployments to business users with governance and approvals. As users aim to break down automation silos by allowing greater access to automation, they often need controls and governance in place to protect their resources and environments from unwanted change.

Automation services catalog provides greater visibility over what is being automated while extending Red Hat Ansible Automation into organizations. It helps organizations to maintain the controls and compliance prescribed by their business. The catalog provides lifecycle management for automation resources, spanning the provisioning, retirement and logging of Ansible platforms whether they are physical, virtual, cloud, or container-based environments. Automation services catalog is scheduled to be available early this summer for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers on cloud.redhat.com.

Improving efficiencies with Automation Analytics

With the announcement of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform we introduced Automation Analytics, enabling users to see how specific automation actions perform in detail. Since launch, more than 130 customers have activated Automation Analytics, giving them access to insights around modules and resources that are used most often, the health of automation and how an automation environment is performing. The tool was developed jointly with our customers to help bring their automation to the next level and allow employees to engage across different groups and personas.

We plan to expand and evolve the analytics capabilities to provide our users not only with resources that will better enable them to understand how their automation is working but also help them to better measure success. The latest features and enhancements include:

• Enhanced filtering enables users to filter by Red Hat Ansible Tower cluster and by date. This enables users to perform drill down filtering to individual clusters to get data relevant for a specific physical site or group. 
• Additional job stats provide information around the number of total runs, total time, average time, success rate and the most failed task, and the failure percentage of that task. With this information, users can then quickly scan job templates and concentrate efforts on fixing jobs with low success rates that are highly utilized.

• Organizational statistics improvements: Within organizational statistics we have added additional filters to help compare automation adoption between organizations. Organizations between multiple Ansible Tower clusters are aggregated when they share the same name. You can now filter by the top and bottom five organizations based on total job template use.

Providing more certified content through Content Collections

Ansible Content Collections has gained momentum since launching in October 2019. Ansible Content Collections organizes Ansible content including modules, plugins, roles and playbooks, making it easier for customers and contributors to distribute, share and consume content independent of Ansible release cycles. Additionally, supported, pre-composed partner content is made available via Content Collections, helping users to more quickly and easily get started with automation. 

This certified Ansible Content Collections lives in Automation Hub - a centralized repository for Red Hat and its partners to publish content, and for customers to discover certified, supported Ansible Content Collections. We now have more than 30 certified partners, 26 of which have certified Content Collections. And Automation Hub now houses over 1,200 certified Ansible Modules up from 100 modules in November. We’re excited about the traction we have seen so far and continue to focus on developing partnerships with more organizations to help provide our users greater access to the certified fully formed automation content they need to scale their automation. 

Getting started with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

To help organizations automate what they can so that they can keep their focus on the biggest priorities, we offer free 60-day trials of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform that can automate up to 100 nodes. The free 60-day trials include access to everything included with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. Get started with a 60-day free trial of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform here.

Additionally, we will also be hosting an Ansible Ask the Expert series to help users get started with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, or to answer specific questions related to their automation efforts. The webinar schedule can be found here. Join us and let us help you get started.