Welcome to the future. Today we have DVRs to watch bad TV for us. Voicemail to give the brush off to annoying telemarketers. And little circular robots to do just as bad of a vacuuming job as my kids do. Automation has indeed set us free.
While my opening may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it does illustrate how pervasive automation is in our daily lives. However, when it comes to managing private clouds, we could still use a bit more.
Implementing a private cloud provides the utmost in IT infrastructure flexibility. But without the right automation tools, managing a cloud environment can be a real headache—and eat up enormous personnel resources trying to keep everything running smoothly.
That’s why I wanted to share with you a cool NetIQ technology that I came across. NetIQ Aegis allows IT operations and security professionals to take the mundane, repetitive tasks that consume so much of their time—and automate them.
The hardest thing about Aegis is explaining what it does—because frankly, it will do just about anything you want (in terms of IT automation). The Aegis toolkit works across hardware and software combinations and features an intuitive graphical interface for creating automated processes. You just drag and drop activity icons onto the designer and connect them with workflow logic (if-then statements, for-next loops and so on).
The Aegis IT automation platform has been designed to orchestrate IT tasks using the tools you already have in your environment. All you need is a trigger to start a process running. Triggers can be manual, scheduled or event-driven. Here’s an example of each:
- Manual—You want to know if your retail stores are PCI compliant. You manually launch an Aegis process that incorporates NetIQ Secure Configuration Manager. The process automates auditing your application servers and network, and informs you of any configurations that violate applicable PCI policies. In this case, a system isn’t patched to the latest level. Your Aegis process sets an exemption for 30 days, and continually follows up with system administrator to get the system patched.
- Scheduled—One of your custom apps for order processing suffers from memory leak. Your developers don’t have the time to fix it, so you set up an Aegis process to reboot your servers on a weekly basis to clean up the memory. The process takes the first server out of load balancing, powers it down, powers it up, restarts services in the correct order, rejoins the server to load balancing and then repeats with the next server—all during the most advantageous time-slot, of course.
- Event-driven—The disk on one of your servers is almost full. As a result, one of your mission-critical applications can no longer write to the database. Your business is effectively coming to a standstill. You have NetIQ AppManager installed and it realizes what’s happening and triggers an Aegis process that you’ve created to automatically respond to known errors like this. The Aegis process automatically deletes unneeded temporary and log files, and provisions additional disk space on your SAN. Problem averted.
As you can see, using the Aegis toolkit, you can automate most anything in your IT environment, reducing labor costs and ensuring that the task is done correctly the first time.
I have a friend who purchased solar-powered automatic lawn mower. Now that’s some household automation really I could use.
–Richard
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