Introduction to ManageIQ

ManageIQ is an Open source hybrid IT management platform to manage Public & Private cloud providers, IT automation like Ansible Tower, and container environments like Kubernetes & OpenShift.

Architecture

ManageIQ is based on Ruby on Rails. The ManageIQ web application is shipped as pre-built virtual appliance based on CentOS.

Providers

ManageIQ can manage cloud, virtual infrastructure etc. as a providers. Providers can be further classified into Cloud, Infrastructure, Configuration Management, Network, and Containers.

Cloud Providers

Cloud Providers facilitates with the management of three public clouds viz. Amazon web services, Google Compute Engine, and Microsoft Azure platform. There also exist on-premise(private) cloud provider OpenStack Platform(OSP).

Infrastructure Providers

Infrastructure Providers facilitates with the management of traditional infrastructure products such as VMware vCenter, oVirt. There is also an infrastructure provider that can manage on-premise(private) OpenStack Platform Director.

Cloud Management Providers

Configuration management providers enable us to use the capabilities of Foreman and Ansible Tower for configuration management.

Network Providers

Network providers allow us to visualize and manage the software-defined network components in the virtual or cloud infrastructure.

Container Providers

Container providers allow us to connect to and manage Docker container managers.

Capabilities of ManageIQ

The Capabilities of ManageIQ include Insight, Control, Automate, service catalog, integration workflows.

Insight

Insights analyzes IT infrastructure to provide real-time assessment for risks related to performance, availability, stability, and security. After thorough analysis of logs, installed packages, configurations any critical issues requiring attention are clearly displayed.

Control

Control functionality can be used for the security and configuration policies using the information retrieval from insight.

Automate

Automate functionality allows to automate the orchestration of workflows and resources in virtual infrastructure. Automate allows us to create and use powerful workflows using the Ruby programming language or as Ansible job, and features provided by the Automation Engine such as state machines and service models.

Service Catalogs

Self-service catalogs enables users to order the orchestration workflows with a single click of a button. Automate comes with an interactive service dialog designer that can be used to build rich dialogs, containing elements such as text boxes, radio buttons, and drop-down lists.

Integrate

As an extension of its Automate capability, ManageIQ is able to connect and Integrate with many Enterprise tools and systems. ManageIQ come with Ruby Gems to enable automation scripts to connect to both ReST and SOAP APIs, as well as libraries to connect to several SQL and LDAP databases, and the ability to run remote PowerShell scripts on Windows servers.