For years we’ve used older system management tools such as Ivanti LANDESK, Kaseya VSA and Dynatrace Application Monitoring. They’re still great, but as we move to the cloud, containers and continuous integration and development (CI/CD) DevOps programs such as Puppet, Chef and SaltStack have risen in importance. Red Hat, a leading business Linux distributor, has a foot in both worlds with Red Hat Satellite and CloudForms. Now with the next generation of both programs, Red Hat is bridging the gap between legacy sysadmin tools and DevOps.

As Red Hat explained in a February press release, “IT infrastructure is increasingly complex with disparate systems across physical hardware, virtualized environments, private cloud deployments, and public cloud instances. The heterogeneous nature of modern enterprise computing can often require a new type of management solution, one that can improve scale, speed, and stability while still providing a clear picture across disparate infrastructures.”

That’s where the latest releases of Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms come in. These two solutions now integrate with Red Hat Insights, a predictive analytics and remediation program based on the Ansible DevOps program and Red Hat Ansible Tower, a program that makes Ansible easier to use with a visual dashboard, role-based access control, job scheduling, graphical inventory management and a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) API.

With these integrations, the programs can identify and manage critical risks in both legacy and cloud/container era IT approaches and automatically generate Ansible playbooks to remediate those risks. This, along with additional product improvements, will help improve agility and decrease complexity for hybrid cloud users.

Specifically, the new Red Hat Satellite 6.3, with its deeper Ansible integration, can provide a dynamic inventory source for targeting automation via Red Hat Ansible Tower. In addition, Red Hat Satellite provisioned systems can request additional automation or reflect their current state back to Red Hat Ansible Tower.

Red Hat Satellite 6.3’s enhanced integration with Red Hat Insights enables companies to more proactively identify performance and stability threats. This integration builds out an Insights planner playbook for use with Ansible or Ansible Tower, enabling organizations to automatically remediate Insights findings.

Red Hat Satellite 6.3 now also provides greater flexibility for hybrid cloud computing with the addition of support for Satellite and Satellite Capsule Server running on Amazon EC2. As enterprises extend workloads across public clouds, being able to bring more consistent and enterprise-scale system management capabilities with these deployments makes perfect sense.

As for CloudForms 4.6, it boasts increased support for automated infrastructure provisioning and scaling of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Openstack Platform deployments. It also make more Ansible capabilities available natively within CloudForms. This includes giving CloudForms the power to execute Ansible playbooks and the ability to link into Ansible-deployed compute resources.

The end goal is to enable you to use whichever tool you’re most comfortable with to not only manage, but also automate, all your IT needs using Ansible. This enables you to get the most from your existing sysadmin skills set while improving your bottom line. And what business doesn’t want that?