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Examining the capabilities of Opalis

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For anyone whose ever been at the receiving end of a request to ‘just grab some info’ or work out how to ‘easily send information’ to and from different technology solutions, Opalis is the solution you will wish you’ve always had.

Opalis is that rare breed of technology that has just as much benefit to the people who pay for the product as it does to the people that use it. 

The business will reap considerable cost savings and an increase in the speed of information availability, whilst the techies will look back at all the scripts, utils and general use of string and chewing gum that used to comprise of the ‘integration’ solutions with fair disdain.

Put simply, Opalis can automate just about any Datacenter process that you have in a simple graphical workflow toolset.  Think about anything that has to be done, from looking up information to automating an operational process to linking disparate systems to each other.

So, lets take a look at some of the ‘real world’ scenarios that Opalis can be used in: (the scenarios are unlimited, these are just some off the top of my head)

  • Reading and Writing to/from everything between a text file and a database
  • Running WMI and PowerShell queries and reacting to the outcomes
  • Seeing system and application behaviours in monitoring solutions, raising tickets, remediating the issues, documenting what was done and then closing the tickets
  • Patching virtual hosts – live migrate running machines to another host, kick of the patching process, validate success, restart if required and then move guests back.
  • Deploying new server instances (through tools such as SCCM and VMM)
  • Server Patch Management
  • Integrate different management solutions in a Managed Service Provider model, across many customers.

There are just so many things you can do with Opalis, your imagination is the outer perimeter!  There are management packs for all the major vendors out there today, and where the packs don’t exist, there are usually tools like WMI, PowerShell and other interfaces provided by the solution developers.

I have no doubt that Opalis will continue to evolve, so what would you like to see included?

I’ll kick this off with some ideas, and also leave the poll open for other suggestions – please let me know!