Product Update: What's New in UAC 7.7

Hi everyone and welcome to today's webinar. My name is Caroline from Stonebranch and I'll be your moderator today. Today we're going to talk about the latest product update here at Stonebranch and everything that's new in our UAC 7 .7. Before we get started, just a quick note. This event is designed to be interactive, so if you have a question, click on the Q& A tab in the dashboard and submit every question that you have to us. We'll answer live at the end of this webinar. In the event we're not able to get to your question, we'll follow up with you after the event. Additionally, in the right-hand corner of your screen, you'll find some handouts that are related to the session today. Feel free to go ahead and take a look. So with all that said, it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker today. Gwyn Clay is our Chief Product Officer here at Stonebranch. Gwyn is calling in from our Frankfurt office, and I'm here in Alpharetta, Georgia at the Stonebranch headquarters. Let us know where you're calling in from today. With that, let's go ahead and get started with today's session. Passing the mic over to you, Gwyn. Thank you, Caroline. My name is Gwyn Clay. I am the Chief Product Officer here at Stonebranch and I'm actually rejoining, I just rejoined back on September 1st. I was with Stonebranch about a decade ago and I'm really excited to be back here at Stonebranch. It feels like home. And it's a really great time, in the company's history, in terms of our growth. We're constantly acquiring new customers. And we have a pretty exciting roadmap planned for the years to come. But today we're going to talk about version 7 .7. And we're going to go through some of the key features that we have. We're going to talk about, of course, our new integrations that we're continually developing and we're going to do something exciting. We're going to do a live demo of the Universal Self-Service and then we'll have some time for questions at the end. So let's get started. First off, these are the highlights for 7. 7 and they're broken into a few key areas. A couple of them are related to security. We are constantly improving our workflow capabilities and we'll be highlighting the Boolean and Conditional Logic features. Our web services and our continued focus on our traditional platforms with new enhancements around the iSeries, or what's more colloquially known as AS400, and of course z/ OS. Plus, we have many other enhancements. There's over three dozen enhancements that we've delivered with this release of 7. 7. And if you hit the release notes, it'll give you all of the details. What's also important to note is that 7. 7 is available. We released about two weeks ago. And it's available for download from the download center and, of course, it's available for SaaS. If you wish to upgrade, contact the support organization. So first off, let's talk about what we've been doing with web services. So we've had web services since the origins of Universal Automation Center. But recently we focused on ensuring that all of our web services APIs stay compliant with the OAS 3. 0 standard. So the Open API spec, what it does is it provides a standardized way to describe any sort of web-based or HTTP APIs. So we're now using Swagger for all of our documentation. And why is this important? Consistency in API documentation gives customers a lot of comfort and it also enables them to more quickly adapt them, which accelerates time to value. A lot of time, you want to use some code generators which will provide some stubs for integration points. And there's many of these that know how to read the Open API standard and will produce code in many different languages. So whether it's Java or Python, it'll auto-generate that for you and you can then hand that to the development teams who want to integrate. Also looking forward into the future, and I know that many of you are currently building out your generative AI capabilities within your own environments, like we are here at Stonebranch, and GPT-based solutions do an extremely good job of consuming API definitions and then allowing these GPT-based chat clients to interact with these APIs and, as a result, with Universal Automation Center. So let's take a look at it. And you'll notice that when you log into 7. 7, you'll notice that there's a new icon that wasn't there before, in the top right-hand corner, which was like an information icon. And that's the link to the API documentation. So when you click on that, it's going to open up a new tab, which is going to produce all the documentation for all of the REST APIs within Universal Automation Center. So it's just one left to the documentation link. And from there you'll be able to not only learn about each of the APIs, but you'll also be able to test it and validate it that the API strings that you're using are accurate. Moving forward. We've also added support for Boolean logic within our workflows. So previously we had a lot of different conditions that you can use for your workflow, decide if you wanted to move to the next step or not, or if you wanted to even skip that condition. But they were mostly based on the AND predicate. In 7. 7, we've added both OR and AND and then you can use a combination both AND and OR to create a lot more flexible workflow dependencies. So this is really useful when you have many tasks that have upstream dependencies. So you may have a single task and it has many upstream dependencies and you want to be able to provide that flexibility. So one example we're going to look at right now is around using tasks for a cluster broadcast. So maybe taking a second and talking about what a cluster broadcast is. A cluster broadcast is where you have a single task definition, but you want it to be broadcast across a broad number of agents. So for instance, you may have a, say for instance, a Linux task and instead of specifying one single location, you're defining a cluster. As you were to add more agents to the cluster, it would actually create more tasks. So in this example here, you're able to set up your conditional expressions. And when the task is launched, it's going to build these relationships dynamically and you're going to be able to set these conditions on the vertex. So we're going to move to a couple of security topics. And in 7. 7, we're going to be supporting OAuth2 single sign-on and also API bearer tokens. So maybe if we take a step back here, we've had single sign-on since almost the beginning of Universal Automation Center using protocols like SAML, using LDAP. So this isn't a new concept for us. I think adding OAuth2 just provides us a lot more flexibility, especially with the popularity in the market. So you can not only use this for authentication, you can also use it for action URLs as well. So OAuth2 is becoming a widely adopted standard. It's especially popular with the cloud vendors like AWS and Azure and also with single sign-on providers such as Okta. So here's an example of how you would set this up. So you would basically go under the single sign-on page under administration, and you would go in and define your details. There's very detailed instructions available in documentation and we recommend that you work with your security team for setup config, configuration for ensuring that you have an optimal implementation of this. Also, from an authentication perspective, we're happy to also include HashiCorp Vault as a new credential provider. And this leverages the same way we have been using other credential providers. And the reason for its inclusion is really based on its popularity. HashiCorp is one of the most popular open-source secrets management system. And it's widely used both for on-premise, cloud, hybrid cloud environments. And when we look at how this has been implemented, this is implemented in a very consistent fashion as how we've been implementing all of our other credential providers as well. So when you select your list of credential providers, you can select HashiCorp Vault. And then you'll be provided a list of provider parameters and you can go in and set the details for each parameter specific to HashiCorp in order to get this configured. Also with version 7. 7, we've been introducing some new z/ OS capabilities on how to monitor external jobs submitted outside of UAC. So maybe a couple examples on this. Perhaps you have another automation solution, like a console automation solution, or another scheduling solution on your z/ OS environment. And you want to be able to have UAC take action when a specific job on the mainframe is submitted. So in order to do this, we've introduced a z/ OS monitor and also a z/ OS monitor trigger that'll enable us to track this. So we can set different criteria for when the z/ OS monitor feels that the condition has been satisfied to move to the next step in the workflow or even to launch the workflow in the first place. This is conducted through the z/ OS agent, which will handle all of the monitoring while the universal controller is the one that initiates the trigger. And you can also include this if you're creating a composite trigger as well where you want to have the monitoring of the external mainframe process with perhaps another monitor. So this just gives us new and more flexible ways of automating on the mainframe. And it's also part of our ongoing commitment to continually enhance and optimize z/ OS capabilities on UAC. The mainframe continues to be a very important strategic platform here at Stonebranch. And if you look at it, still a great percentage of the world's data either resides or at some point passes through applications on the mainframe. So for any large enterprise, it's going to be a continuing and enduring platform for many years into the future. And here you can see that we've added in two new menu items that you'd connect to through services. First is the z/ OS Monitor Trigger under the Triggers, and then under the monitors you'll see there's z/ OS Monitor as well highlighted in red. And then just really from a configuration perspective, on the right-hand side you'll see that you just select the z/ OS monitor that you want to monitor and then trigger off of. And then on the left-hand side, you're going to see that you can specify a number of criteria in order to determine whether a job has started, ended, abended, and so forth. So that gives you a lot of flexibility of when you want to trigger the conditions that you want in order to trigger the z/ OS task. In addition, with 7. 7 we have a brand new iSeries agent. So this is being built for the ground up to take advantage of the modern capabilities of our universal agents. So it's been implemented in the very same consistent manner as our Windows, Linux agents, and we've created a new task type for it. The previous generation of the agent that used UCMD and UDM will continue to be available. And why we have done this is that we have identified that iSeries, or as many people refer to it as the AS400, it continues to be an enduring and highly mission-critical part of traditional data centers. And here you'll see that we've created a new IBM iSeries task. And there you can configure not only iSeries agents, but also iSeries agent clusters as well. Good. So we've covered off the top six features. Let's go through some new integrations that we have introduced as part of 7 .7. So first off, maybe just a quick reminder to everyone about our integration hub. Within our integration capability, we have the ability to not only build your own integrations, but also to log into our integration hub and browse through and select integrations that you may find valuable for your enterprise and be able to download those and easily implement those with an automation center. And there's over 100 integrations available today on the integration hub. So these are some of the new integrations that we've been offering. And we've been offering some pretty key categories that are valuable to a lot of our customers. So first of all, with self-service, we now have a service catalog, an updated integration for the service catalog for ServiceNow, and we've also integrated with Jira as well. From a container perspective, we are able to now monitor for jobs running with an OpenShift and then also automate deployments in Kubernetes and OpenShift as well. We continue to broadly support the Oracle and SAP ecosystem, whether it's the technical components like SQL ODBC or the business applications through the Oracle Scheduler and with SAP, we continue to expand outwards with our integration points within SAP. And finally around data and ensuring that we can automate data pipelines. And these are data pipelines, whether or not it's for automating data collection for a BI solution or whether or not you're building AI pipelines in order for your new business initiatives around generative AI and machine learning. And then also we continue to extend out into our cloud infrastructure as well. An important part of any sort of data or cloud strategy is also data transfer. And one of the challenges that a lot of customers face is around inter-cloud data transfer. So whether you're transferring data from an EC2 bucket to AWS or to Google Cloud or whether it's your own private cloud, we continue to leverage our capabilities to enable customers to do that. You'll also notice that we've noted, on several of these integrations, OpenTelemetry. And that's a standard that we will be continuing to support for years to come, as we believe that it will be a cornerstone of any form of infrastructure automation moving forward. And of course, we've also introduced a series of new UAC utilities as well. Everything from JSON and CSV tool support, enabling file-based automation and managed file transfer with file compression and decompression, and also security access as well. All of these integrations and utilities are available for download. So let's go through a poll question. So of the UAC 7. 7 features discussed today, which ones are you most interested in? So we talked about the single sign-on enhancements, we talked about with OAuth2, HashiCorp Vault support, Boolean and Conditional Logic to give more flexible ways of automating your workflows, the OpenAPI specification around our web services, our iSeries agent monitor, and our z/ OS external monitor. Maybe you could just take a moment to vote. And Caroline, maybe you can reveal the results. Hey, Gwyn, I don't know if you can see the results, but it looks like we have a lot of folks excited about single sign-on enhancements. We have a good 17 votes for the Boolean and conditional logic edition, so folks are really excited about that. And then I'm also seeing a lot of votes for the z/ OS external monitor option. Excellent. Okay, great. Thank you very much. So while this is not part of 7 .7, we have a new capability that will be coming soon, which is really around self-service automation. So maybe let's talk a little bit of a background on this. So for many, many years, Automation Center has been satisfying the needs of what we call our UAC power users. So these are our customers who are really focused on workload automation, whether it's from an operations perspective and a command and control or whether they're going in and designing new workflows. And for those users who are sophisticated automation professionals, it's really the ideal interface to be able to undertake all of that work. And we've always had business users and other stakeholders and we always had the application developers help desk and IT admins who've had some level of interest in finding out where their automations are currently progressing. However, this has really started to accelerate as we've expanded the addressable number of use cases for Automation Center as the entire market has evolved from being a workload automation solution to a service orchestration and automation platform. And there's now broad demand and an imperative for automation just due to the sheer scale and complexity of today's computing environment. As a result, there's been many different kinds of stakeholders from DevOps engineers and even cloud and IT professionals. And also a new class of user around the data scientists and the data engineers building their data pipelines for BI, analytics, and also AI use cases. And if you look at how users interact with the solution today, from a UI perspective, it's clearly we have the primary UAC user interface. We have web services, APIs, and CLIs, which you can use for application-to-application integration. And we have a number of customers who've also leveraged them to build their own self-service interfaces or help to incorporate Universal Automation Center into their existing service catalog solutions, whether it's something like a ServiceNow or a Jira or even more of the traditional solutions like a Remedy. For developers, we introduced jobs as code and we continue to enhance those capabilities. And then also the service desk integrations and then the messaging integrations as well where you're able to interact with the system not only through the UI, but with messaging platforms such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. However, we felt that there was a need to also do something from a UI perspective for the citizen automator, the DevOps engineer, the business users, the IT and cloud administrators. And this is what we are going to be talking about today. But before that, we have a cool question. How are you providing self-service automation to your organization today? Have you built your own self-service interface that you're connecting Automation Center to? Or are you using a service desk platform like ServiceNow? Have you done something different that was neither of the above? Or are you not doing that today at all? Let's take a moment to do a poll and then maybe Caroline you can read off the results For sure. Thanks Gwyn and thanks everybody for responding. It looks like on my end there's a lot of people who are not using self-service automation right now and it's something that they don't have access to yet. And then the people that I'm seeing who do have it, it looks like they're mostly using ServiceNow. And there are a few responses that say they are building their own interface or they have a different platform. But it looks like on the majority, we're a group of nos here and self-service automation is something new for us. Okay, well that's great. So let's see, let's move forward and into the demonstration. Okay, so before we get started, just a couple of important things to note about our new self-service client. First of all, this is not a replacement for the UAC user interface. So many of you have gone through great lengths to become masters of this user interface and we're not taking anything away from you. This is really a solution that's meant for the citizen automator. So for UAC power users out here, this is really for your internal clients to help them interact with our system better. Second of all, when we're logging in, we're going to be using the exact same credentials that we would use if we were logging into Automation Center ourselves. So as a result, any of your business users or self-service users are only going to be able to see and have the permissions to interact with the definitions within the system based on their existing rights today. So we're going to go in here and we're going to log in. And the first thing that you're going to see is the home page, which essentially shows all the activity data that you are enabled to see yourself. And what we've done is we've aggregated all of the different statuses into four key areas, the problems, the waiting areas, what's running, and what's done. And then we've set it for this, we've configured this environment to have a time horizon between one hour and 24 hours. Just a few things before we drill into the details. The self-service client will support multiple languages. So here an example is the implementation of German. We're going to switch it back for me in English, which will just be a little bit better for the demonstration. Also, we introduced a calm mode. So for people who are working long hours and their eyes get a little tired, they'll be able to dim down the display just a little bit. And we'll also offer a dark mode for those people who really enjoy that. What's also really important is that the screen is designed to be responsive. So as you end up working on smaller and smaller screens, including the most important screen of all, which is the one in your pocket, the user interface will adapt and auto-align for your screen real estate. So we're using a new UI technology with what's called responsive design to be able to provide this for you. Now let's take a deeper look at the screen. So first of all, you have your states and you're able to just easily navigate through the states. You can also pin the states as well. So if you're really only interested in what's running or waiting, you can pin those. If you only care about what's not working, you can pin that very easily as well. Searching is very simple. You just basically type in a couple of characters and it'll very quickly go through your list of tasks which meet the criteria. We have a new construct called self-service groups, which is a little like business services that may be set up to be a little more restrictive and to be configured for your self-service users. And then also you of course, you can filter on task types. So if you only wanted to see workflows for instance, you can click on that and it'll very quickly filter based on that. Through here you also have the ability to go through different pages and pagination. I'm running at a fairly high resolution. Of course, if you were to go down into smaller real estate, you'll see that there's more available than what we have today. From here, you can go in and you can configure which fields you want displayed within the UI. And of course, this is where you issue the commands. And what's important is that you're only allowed to issue the commands that you have authorization for and also contextually within the specific task type itself and the current status that it has. So maybe let's start off and let's look at something that's been a success. So we'll take a look at, say for instance, this task. And we'll go in and we can go and retrieve the output. This is a very simple output here, but it's displaying the standard out. And then also here, you can scroll through the various attempts that had been made as well. And there's a handy copy to clipboard capability. To get back to the main screen, you either just click here or you'll also see that there's a slider. And you may wonder why we have a slider like this. But if you start thinking about when our screen is much, much smaller like this, on your phone, the slider will come in very, very handy on a touchscreen device. One click gets you into the task definition itself. For here you can issue some of the commands. Right away you can browse through the details of that specific task instance. And then if you actually want to go to the originating task definition, it's just one click to do that. And it'll go through here. It'll identify the task, what the command was, and all of the other general settings. And it has a handy menu here where it can navigate in between different areas very, very quickly too. But let's return back to here. Also within the solution we have, you'll notice there's four different areas of the UI. We've talked about the tasks already. We can also look at the forecast, which will detail the next scheduled runs of each of the individual tasks. And allow you to also filter. You can go into the actual list of tasks itself and navigate through the task definitions, into various different types of tasks. Go into the details, this one's a web service. And be able to continue to scroll through and take a look at all of the task details. If you like what you see, you also have the opportunity to launch from here. If there's a reason for the launch, you can define it. It'll confirm and it'll successfully launch it. And you can see it run. Go from here and see the output itself. And if you wanted to, of course you can copy the output. So from this task list as well, let's go back to our web services task. So we'll go here and we'll filter on web services. This was the task that we were running. We could go directly and show it into the dashboard where it'll specifically go to this context and then one button to reset it. And if we go back to this web services task. We also have an experimental feature, right now that we're looking at, which is also viewing it in the controller, which will enable you to actually bring up the full universal controller and navigate through it as well to see even greater details than what you'd traditionally have within the UI itself. And that may be something that we only turn on for specific power users into the future. And of course time triggers and other triggers as well. So here you have a list of all of your triggers. You can go in and enable or disable a trigger. And if you want to scroll through and find a task that you say, for instance, wanted to trigger now, you can just click, confirm that you want to trigger it. And if you go to the dashboard, you'll see all of the tasks that are running. So this is just a quick overview of the new self-service UI. Now the question that you may have is when can I get it? We are currently right now working through probably the last third, last half of the capabilities that we want to introduce in the preliminary version. And within that version, we will be sending it out to a select set of customers who are interested in partnering with us to ensure that it meets the demanding requirements of your environment. And we hope to have that out over the next several months. So in a nutshell, this is our self-service UI. Now let's take this back to our presentation and I will just very quickly change over, back to our presentation. Thanks Gwyn, and thanks for that great demo. I think you do a great job of walking us through all the new features and especially the self-service opportunity. And I think from the poll we learned that that's something that a lot of people are not doing yet. And so great job showing that. Well, we hope to help a lot of customers with that Caroline. Okay, so let's move forward here and maybe just a few wrap-up slides. So just one important thing, if you haven't accessed it yet, there's a new 2024 Magic Quadrant for Service Orchestration Automation Platforms, and we're very proud to be defined a leader in this Magic Quadrant. Now, the last time solutions like ours were actually evaluated by Gartner, it was over a decade ago. And it's really just due to the renewed mandate for higher and higher levels of automation that Gartner has really revisited this. And as workload automation has evolved into this category of SOAPs, it's really paved the way for incremental research into this field, which we're very happy that Gartner is doing now. So just a few last points. Just an important note for those of you upgrading to 7. 7 agents. If you're upgrading to OpenSSL version 3, please note that the SSL configuration may override Universal Agent's behavior and to fully review the documentation. Also, some of the older cyphers we are using have been deprecated for this release. And for the IBM iSeries users, please review the release notes regarding Universal Command and Universal Data Mover support for the iSeries platform. For those of you using the HP-UX agent, we have released a new HP-UX agent, version 7. 7, and it's available on request. We also want to hear from you on what your strategy is for the lifecycle with HP-UX within your enterprise. And of course, one of our big focuses for today was on the self-service solution. So please contact your Stonebranch rep through customer support or contact myself directly, and we'll help you figure out how you can have automation for all. And I think it's time for some questions, Caroline. Yep, for sure. And thanks, Gwyn. Like you said, we are here to help people on their automation journey. And so if you're watching along with us today and anything that Gwyn showed sparked your interest, please, please do reach out to us and start the conversation. We are ready to go and ready to get you to where you need to be. And so with that, let's answer some of the questions that the folks are asking in the chat. Before we do that though, just for our fun, let's see where people are calling in from. It looks like we've got a few other folks. I see Alpharetta. I see somebody else joining us from Frankfurt. It looks like we've got folks in Oklahoma City, Boise, Idaho, so some United States folks represented. Thank you guys for joining us. Topeka, Kansas. I'm seeing a few folks in Europe, too. I know it's a little bit late for you guys over there. So thanks for joining us, folks in Copenhagen. And we actually have a good handful of people on the other side of the world and entirely. I'm seeing India and Manila and Kuala Lumpur. So for you guys who are joining us in the middle of the night, thank you so much for being here. And we're really happy to have you guys joining us. Like I said earlier, the recording of this session is going to be shared with you after the event. So if you're watching along and it's really late at night for you and you maybe didn't catch some details, we're going to send it to you after, so don't worry. But let's go ahead and get into some of the more technical questions. And I'm just going to work through these, Gwyn, from the most popularity and up votes that I'm seeing. So the first question that I'm seeing is from Matt from Nationwide. Hey, Matt. He asks, "Can the z/ OS external monitor monitor the status of z/ OS started tasks in the CICS regions or in any other applications?" Yeah, I think it's more focused on z/ OS batch jobs. But I will confirm this with our development team around started tasks. And CICS? I think for CICS, we'd probably have to have a specific monitor for that, but we may have already resolved this particular solution for customers in the past. Gotcha. Cool. So we'll follow up with you, Matt, and let you know the specifics there. And we can talk through your use cases too if you're going to be at the Stonebranch UserVerse event that's coming up. So let's go to another question I'm seeing here. This one's from Sean, also from Nationwide, and he says, "If the overhead for this self-service entry point causes impacts to performance, is it a feature that is able to be disabled? And can we control the resources consumed?" I think the answer to that would be yes. So first of all, this is an optional feature. We're not going to force anyone to use this user interface. This is really for people who want to provide this service to their customers. Second of all, we're still trying to finalize the deployment, but there will be options of deploying it within its own what's called Tomcat container. And there you would be able to control the resources on that platform as well. But these are good questions because if you open it up to a very wide range of users, you could have a lot of people who are logged into it, continually refreshing data. The refresh on this will be set a little bit higher than what we have for power users, so we won't have the ability to set a five-second refresh on this. It'll be a little bit longer because as these users are typically going in to check on something verse actively monitoring a broad set of workloads. For sure. Thanks, Gwyn. Let's go on to another one. And I think you already answered this, but just a clarifying point. Is 7. 7 officially released? It is officially released. It was released on either the 3rd or 4th of October. I think it was the 3rd of October where it was released. So it's two weeks old at this point. And in terms of installation, I would recommend that you go to 7 .7 for a number of reasons. First, you get access to a whole bunch of great new features. And second of all, from a support lifecycle perspective, you'll have longer before when you need to think about when you want to upgrade next. You may be a customer who wants to upgrade every time there's a new version. But we also have some customers who only really upgrade maybe every second or every third version as well, depending on what their resource situation looks like internally and whether or not there's specific features that they'd love to activate on the platform. Awesome. And just maybe one other thing. Sometimes people like to install a slightly older version because they have this belief that it'll somehow be more stable, but we do an enormous volume of testing on our solution. Our software runs at in some of the largest data centers on the planet, running some of the most mission-critical workloads imaginable. And we take ensuring the quality and availability of the solution seriously. Awesome. Thanks Gwyn. And I think that's a great note for us to end on. So if you're looking to get started in 7 .7, we encourage you to go ahead and do so today. So thank you Gwyn, great presentation. And I know that you are available to anybody who wants to talk or learn more about any of this stuff. Thank you to our audience for joining us today. When you leave this session, you'll have a quick survey pop-up. Please let us know your thoughts. We are very, very excited to hear from you and we would really appreciate your time so that we can make our webinars great and well tailored towards you. I've mentioned this already, but later today you'll receive an email that's going to have the recording of today's sessions and all the documents that we've shared here. So thanks again everyone, and we will see you at our next session.