Make Your Machines as Smart as You Are
Have you ever analyzed how much time your organization is wasting doing repetitive tasks? Surveys indicate businesses have automated only about 30% of their IT processes, and that represents a lot of wasted time. Let us show you how to get all that time back and put it to work by adding more intelligence to your network. ProvEase can automate all your routine tasks, giving you and your staff more time to focus on growing your business.
What Is ProvEase?
ProvEase easily automates any repetitive task. It can also effortlessly change any individual components of the task. It automatically configures virtual, cloud, and dedicated servers. Critical updates and new features can be deployed in minutes.
ProvEase employs reusable definitions for ease of automation. There’s no need to create custom scripts more than once to manage servers--our definitions can configure or reconfigure a large number of servers simultaneously. Tasks can be automated at any stage in the IT lifecycle.
ProvEase includes fine-grained filtering for selectivity, so you can see just what you need to change.
Need scalability? ProvEase can deploy as many new servers as you need, with lightning speed and very little effort.
ProvEase can even model your entire business, making it easy to report on and adapt.
What ProvEase Can Do for You
Your IT network does many assignments efficiently, but it’s still dependent on a system administrator to manage many monotonous humdrum tasks. ProvEase can inject some automated human knowledge into that collection of servers and routers. ProvEase not only automates complicated routines, it makes them more flexible and adaptable. With ProvEase, you’re no longer limited to a predefined command set. ProvEase unlocks the power of your network in ways you never thought possible.
Whatever proprietary system you run, ProvEase is easily connectable. Its conflict resolution capabilities ensure your system is in the desired state and minimizes errors. ProvEase’s reporting capabilities provide a full history of provisioning changes.
ProvEase includes a preview function. Not sure exactly what changes you want to make? They can be thoroughly tested in Preview first.
How to define the provisioning flow in ProvEase:
Recognize variable information in ProvEase.
Automating a system depends on identifying the variables in the workflow. When provisioning is executed we perform variable substitution.
Put the variable information in your provisioning system (define the fields).
Fields are defined through the administrator’s web interface. Fields constitute the variable portion of ProvEase. Fields can be text, numbers or boolean values.
You are restricted to entering only valid field type information in the provisioning workflow.
Create provisioning devices.
Devices are systems that are connectable to provisioning systems. They can be Linux servers, Windows servers or even robots. ProvEase gives you interfaces that you can use to connect to them. ProvEase has built-in SSH, Telnet, SMTP, and SNMP interfaces, but you can make it extendable by writing your own provisioning device class by using a simple preloaded template.
Create templates
Templates are the core of the provisioning system. Commands for devices are created in templates. Templates are snippets of text files, commands for devices that have variables inside. When provisioning actions are executed, variables are replaced with real data and executed on provisioning devices. It’s possible to have many templates per workflow. If there are problems with the first template, some parts of the second template won’t be executed.
The preview function replaces the variables with mock data to show you the exact changes that will execute without actually changing the data. When you have empty inventory, it substitutes random values in the template. For the inventory variable COLOR, it replaces template $COLOR with the word “COLOR.” The template “this $COLOR is mine” would be rendered in preview as “this COLOR is mine.”
Templating command language
The templating language uses an extended command set based on the Jinja2 templating language. The templating language acts as a command set for provisioning actions, replacing variables with real data. Our custom command set can provision anything, even the behavior of robots. After you have defined your desired outcome, you can create a configuration module that can be used in any server and OS environment. Create a configuration module once, and you can use it again and again. Objects can be easily added, deleted, and modified.
Conflict Resolution
Conflict resolution in ProvEase works two ways: reverting to the beginning state or forcing conflict resolution. Conflicts are recognized by comparing results to predefined error states inside the provisioning workflow. When an error state occurs, provisioning stops and the user is notified that an error state has been detected. The action screen offers two ways to resolve conflicts:
Pending actions are cancelled and everything reverts to the beginning state. The user can correct the error and repeat provisioning.
Forcing conflict resolution results in errors being cleaned up and provisioning completed. The user should correct the problems leading to the error, as identified by the error messages on the action screen.
Reporting
A detailed history is retained for all system actions, whether modifying, adding, deleting, or provisioning. You can print reports by date, device history, and provisioning object history (including bagel types).
System requirements
- We provide ready-made packages for Debian stable 32bit, Debian stable 64bit.CentOS 6.4 32 bit, CentOS 6.3 64 bit
- Disk requirements: 1GB ProvEase system files and templating engine, 80GB provisioning database disk space
- RAM: 2GB
- CPU: any recent CPU.