SaltStack Enterprise 6.3 lets ops take the pulse of their infrastructure

SaltStack Enterprise 6.3 lets ops take the pulse of their infrastructure

The enterprise flavour of infrastructure automation software SaltStack has emerged in version 6.3, tackling vulnerability management and IT monitoring for a change.

In the new release, SaltStack Enterprise (SSE) finally includes a performance and health dashboard, so that teams can get to the bottom of system failures or outages more quickly. With SaltStack being big on security and reliability, it seems a bit strange that this addition is coming just now, but it’s surely something organisations will appreciate.

The dashboard visualises over 25 metrics and comes with an endpoint compatible to popular monitoring system Prometheus. The latter means data from SaltStack Enterprise should be easy to funnel into other monitoring tools, which can be helpful for the integration into a more complex toolchain and opens the product to a wider range of customers.

Version 6.3 has also been fitted with a much highlighted plug-in for analytics tool Splunk Enterprise. The addition comes courtesy of a new technical alliance partnership with Splunk and is mainly useful to turn the ingested metrics into automated remediation steps though it also helps to monitor a systems availability etc. 

The last release already included a way to forward data into Splunk, though the new plug-in is supposed to make the handling a bit more comfortable. Something to talk to finances about, since customers need to be signed up to both commercial products in order to make use of the change.

Apart from that SSE has learned to work with vulnerability management tools Qualys, Rapid7, and KennaSecurity, and received simplifications to the Tenable integration. Amongst other things, these enhancements allow users to get an overview of the risks posed by vulnerabilities found in a system. Displaying such information is a current trend to help teams rank issues for subsequent patching efforts.