Platform Overview
Security Infrastructure Automation Platform
Indeni facilitates an open development process between developers and network engineers. The first two steps in the process are “collaboration” and “coding”. This is where the scripts are written by a developer with the goal of automating certain manual tasks that network engineers wish they wouldn’t need to do anymore. Once the code is ready, it is “built” – ready to be run on the platform. The next phase is the “testing” phase, during which manual and automatic tests run on the scripts to ensure they are safe to use and achieve the intended goal. As part of the “testing” phase, a code review is done by a “mentor” – a person who has a lot of experience with coding on the platform and was not involved in the “code” stage. Once the code is built and tested, it is “released” to the entire Indeni user base – every single user gets the scripts that were added. Think about it for a moment – a developer can sit in Greece, write a script and a week later it’s running in some of the largest enterprises on whole sets of configuration data collected from devices
How it Works
The first two steps in the Indeni Open Development process is “collaboration” and “coding”. This is where the scripts are written by a developer with the goal of automating certain manual tasks that network engineers wish they wouldn’t need to do anymore. Once the code is ready, it is “built” – ready to be run on the platform. The next phase is the “testing” phase, during which manual and automatic tests run on the scripts to ensure they are safe to use and achieve the intended goal. As part of the “testing” phase, a code review is done by a “mentor” – a person who has a lot of experience with coding on the platform and was not involved in the “code” stage. Once the code is built and tested, it is “released” to the entire Indeni user base – every single user gets the scripts that were added. Think about it for a moment – a developer can sit in Greece, write a script and a week later it’s running in some of the largest enterprises on the planet. That developer’s investment of a few hours into the script results in tens of thousands of hours saved globally.
Indeni Users
After the scripts are “deployed” in production, they run constantly to “automate” otherwise manual work. The scripts’ behavior is analyzed constantly and whenever a script needs to be updated, or a new one added, the user chooses to “collaborate” with the developers, and the cycle starts again. Indeni users collaborate with the developers and other users in the largest community of certified professionals, Indeni Crowd.
Indeni Developers
The developers are network and security engineers, similar to the users of the platform. These individuals have on average three security and network certifications from vendors such as Cisco, CheckPoint, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, Radware and more. What we often see is that users evolve into developers over time, as they get more attracted by the prospect of writing code. Through the Indeni open development process network and security engineers make their lives easier and drastically improve the resiliency and agility of the infrastructure they are responsible for.
Turn Key Solution Architecture
The Indeni Automation platform is comprised of many components including Indeni Server, Indeni Insight, Indeni Automation Elements and the Indeni Collector. Let’s take a closer look at the Indeni Server which includes the Collector, Software, and User Interface.
Indeni Server
- Collector – The Collector is a fairly lightweight component whose sole purpose is to interact with network and security devices, issue commands and API calls and collect data. The scripts the Collector runs are written in IKL. The data collected by the Collector is comprised of small atomic units called “metrics”. Some “metrics” can be pretty large, containing whole sets of configuration data collected from devices
- Server – The Server is where the data processing actually occurs. There is only one Server in each environment and with it are installed multiple types of databases, all of them on the same virtual or physical machine. The Server instructs the Collector which devices to connect to, what credentials to use, what commands to issue, and it receives the output from the Collector. The metrics received from the Collector are stored in special databases, depending on the type of metric. The Server also contains the Rule Engine, which runs analysis scripts written in IKL on top of the metric data collected from devices. The scripts can generate issues for the user to action. Lastly, the Server makes all of its data available through APIs, to be consumed by external components such as the Dashboard.
- User Interface – The Indeni Server user interface that is used to change settings, add devices and view the issues generated by the system. Every action possible through the user interface and every data point presented, are all available through the
Server’s APIs.
Indeni Insight
Indeni Insight is a continuously updated database that provides the global network and security community with the data to understand how devices behave in the real world. By democratizing this data, Indeni enables engineers and architects to make better decisions, and write better code.
Indeni Automation Elements
The full set of scripts developed and approved by community members are called “Automation Elements”. The Automation library is open and fully accessible. You can view the issues and actionable remediation steps here, and also the code here.
Indeni Community
The largest community of certified network and security IT professionals. Indeni Developers collaborate with hundreds of certified IT professionals with certifications such as CISSP, CCNA and more. Within the community developers learn how to code automation elements for IT infrastructure and automate repetitive tasks.