Keep small problems small: automated patch management, built on Ansible

Ascender Pro is CIQ's infrastructure automation platform for running Ansible at enterprise scale. It executes playbooks across large server fleets, reacts to infrastructure events with automated fixes, records everything it does for audit, and manages the Ansible content your automation depends on. The full automation lifecycle ships as one integrated platform under one support agreement.

Ascender Pro includes five components that ship together: Ascender, the control plane that runs your playbooks; Reaqt, event-driven automation that fires jobs the moment a matching event arrives; Ledger, the audit layer that logs what the platform itself does; Registry, a local hub for Ansible collections and Execution Environments; and Galaxy Proxy, an authenticated caching gate between your fleet and upstream Galaxy content. None of them is sold separately. They are capabilities of the platform.

Both platforms run Ansible automation at enterprise scale with a controller, event-driven response, and a content hub. Ascender Pro delivers that same loop with Enterprise License Agreement pricing instead of per-node subscription, typically at 60-80% lower total cost. Playbooks, roles, and collections carry over without retraining because both platforms run the same Ansible. AAP's certified-content ecosystem is broader today; if specific certified collections are load-bearing for your environment, evaluate those against your actual usage.

Yes. Ascender Pro runs standard Ansible: the same playbooks, roles, collections, and Jinja2 templating you already use, with the same agentless connection model. The control plane is derived from the AWX upstream, so teams coming from AWX, Ansible Tower, or Ansible Automation Platform keep their existing automation as-is.

Yes. Ascender Pro is the supported path for teams that have outgrown self-managed AWX or legacy Tower. You keep every playbook and workflow you have built, and you gain enterprise SLAs, 24/7 support, and indemnification, plus the pieces AWX will never ship: an event layer, a local content hub, and a platform audit log.

Federated Inventory lets one job launch fan out across multiple regional inventories automatically. Ascender splits the launch into simultaneous child jobs, each executing on that inventory's own instance groups, so every region runs the job on its own local execution nodes. Limits are honored, role-based access control is enforced across all source inventories, and no inventory sync is required.

Ascender Pro records who did what, when, and with what outcome as it happens, across every job, change, and automated action. Ledger logs what the platform itself does, and drift detection watches your baselines between runs. When an auditor asks for a quarter of production changes, the answer is a query against a trail that already exists, not a reconstruction project.

Ascender Pro is agentless and deploys in your environment. Registry keeps your Ansible collections and Execution Environments on your own infrastructure, and Galaxy Proxy caches upstream Galaxy content behind one authenticated gate, so your fleet's content path does not require internet egress. Regulated and restricted network segments get the same automation as everything else.

No. Ascender Pro is one platform under one license and one support scope. Reaqt, Ledger, Registry, and Galaxy Proxy are capabilities of the platform, not line items. Deploy what you need now and turn on the rest when you are ready, with nothing new to buy, learn, or renew.