The new Ascender Pro: Fixes what breaks, proves what happened

Today CIQ is shipping the biggest update to Ascender Pro since it launched: a platform that watches your infrastructure, decides what to do when something breaks, proves what happened after the fact, and controls where its own content comes from. Four pieces make this possible, three built directly into Ascender Pro and one released as open source for the wider Ansible community.

The problem: too much signal, not enough hands

Every fleet generates more signal than a team can act on by hand. A disk fills up. A service won't restart. A configuration drifts from baseline. Closing the gap between that signal and a fix has traditionally meant a person: someone has to notice the alert, understand it, and log in to fix it, one host at a time, one environment at a time. That gap is where downtime comes from, and it's where audits turn into weeks of manual reconstruction instead of a five-minute query.

Ascender Pro closes that gap today.

Reaqt: the reflex

Reaqt watches events coming directly from your fleet, whether that's a syslog message or an HTTP webhook, and checks them against rule sets you define. When a rule matches, Reaqt fires the right playbook automatically, no person in the loop, no ticket, no page. Each rule set gets its own endpoint and its own authentication token, so a credential tied to one integration never exposes any other.

Picture a disk nearing capacity at two in the morning. The cleanup playbook you already wrote runs seconds after the event fires. Nobody's phone lights up. The team reads about it in the log the next morning, if they read about it at all.

Registry: the hub

Ascender Registry gives you a private, controlled home for the Ansible collections and execution environment containers you run. Pull specific collections and versions down from Ansible Galaxy and host them locally, publish your own private collections the same way, and serve all of it through the same API structure as upstream Galaxy, so nothing about your existing tooling has to change.

Because Registry is a single, purpose-built service instead of a large multi-dependency application, the footprint difference is real: the open source project it replaces ships as a 770MB container image with 93 known vulnerabilities, and Ascender Registry ships at under 30MB.

Federated Inventories: one trigger, any environment

This capability has quietly been shipping in Ascender for a bit, and it deserves its moment. Most teams don't run one inventory, they run many: one per region, one per environment, sometimes one per business unit. That's a problem the moment something outside Ascender needs to trigger a job, because a ticketing system or a vulnerability scanner usually knows a hostname and nothing else about where it lives.

Federated Inventories groups your existing inventories together without flattening them, preserving each one's own variables and instance groups. Point a single job template at a federated inventory, and Ascender figures out which underlying inventory a target host actually lives in, then runs the job against just that host, splitting one request across as many environments as it needs to. Paired with Reaqt and Ledger's visibility, a single vulnerability alert can become a fix on exactly the right host in exactly the right environment, automatically.

Galaxy Proxy: giving back

Public Ansible Galaxy can be slow, especially at the top of the hour, when everyone's automation jobs kick off at once. Galaxy Proxy sits between your fleet and Galaxy and caches every response, not just collection downloads, cutting typical wait times by as much as 75 to 80 percent.

We're releasing Galaxy Proxy as open source, available to any Ansible user, including teams running AWX or another Ansible-based platform. Ascender Pro customers get the full Registry application on top of it. This is a direct contribution back to the community that built the ecosystem Ascender lives in.

Why we built it this way

"Enterprises running Linux at scale have been stuck choosing between an automation platform that does everything and one they can actually own and trust," said Gregory Kurtzer, founder of Rocky Linux and CEO of CIQ. "Ascender Pro gives operations teams a way to detect a problem, control what's running in their environment, and get the fix to exactly the right host, automatically, all built from the ground up on our own roadmap. It's the same principle behind everything we build at CIQ: own your infrastructure, control your own destiny, and never be at the mercy of somebody else's roadmap."

What this means if you're already running Ascender Pro

Reaqt, Registry, and Federated Inventories are available now, and existing customers can pick them up by rerunning the installer. Galaxy Proxy is available today as open source, whether or not you're an Ascender Pro customer.

Learn more

See how the pieces fit together on the Ascender Pro product page, or download the solution brief for a deeper technical walkthrough.

To see the full platform in action, CIQ is hosting a live webinar, "How to run your whole Ansible lifecycle on one platform," on July 30 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT, featuring Brian Rieb and the engineer who built Ascender Pro, Jimmy Conner. The session walks through what the integrated platform looks like in practice: a fix launching in seconds before a small problem becomes an outage, every action recording itself so the proof exists before anyone asks, and one launch running across the whole estate. Registration is open now.