CIQ expands Ascender Pro with automated remediation tools

CIQ has added automated detection and remediation tools to its Ascender Pro IT automation platform. The update also includes an open-source release for Ansible users.

The new functions centre on a component called Ascender Reaqt, which monitors server fleets for issues such as full disks, failed services and configuration drift, then applies fixes automatically without manual administrator intervention. The software works across cloud environments and on-premises systems.

Ascender Pro is built on Ansible, the open-source automation tool widely used to manage large groups of servers. The latest release is designed to reduce the need for operations staff to watch dashboards, triage alerts and log in to individual machines when routine problems appear.

Alongside Reaqt, CIQ introduced Ascender Registry and Federated Inventories for existing Ascender Pro customers. Registry lets administrators host Ansible collections locally, control which versions users can run and publish private collections. It also serves as a container registry for execution environments.

Federated Inventories addresses a common operational issue: external tools such as monitoring platforms or vulnerability scanners may know a hostname but not the inventory where that machine resides. The feature groups existing inventories together and identifies the correct underlying inventory when a job runs, allowing a single request to be routed across multiple environments.

CIQ also released Ascender Galaxy Proxy as an open-source project for the wider Ansible community. The tool acts as a caching layer between Ansible and the public Galaxy repository, storing responses to reduce delays when the public service is slow or unavailable.

Galaxy Proxy can cut typical wait times by 75% to 80%. It is available to any Ansible user, including those using AWX or other Ansible-based platforms, rather than only Ascender Pro customers.

Platform changes

Reaqt was written from scratch as independent Go services rather than adapted from an existing open-source project. Each rule set has its own endpoint and authentication token, with a web application for managing users, teams, permissions, providers, rule sets and listeners.

The design gives administrators a central interface and an API for controlling automated remediation workflows across their infrastructure. The system is also backed by dashboards and metrics, though CIQ framed the main operational change as removing a person from the middle of the detection-to-fix process.

Gregory Kurtzer, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of CIQ and Founder of Rocky Linux, said the launch was intended to address a longstanding trade-off in Linux operations tooling. "Enterprises running Linux at scale have been stuck choosing between an automation platform that does everything and one they can actually own and trust. That's the problem we set out to solve with this release. 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. Galaxy Proxy solves a problem the entire Ansible community shares, so we're giving it back as open source. 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. Full ownership where it matters, real contribution back to the community that got us here, that's what building infrastructure the right way looks like."

Operational focus

The release reflects growing interest in reducing manual work in infrastructure operations teams, particularly in large server estates where repeated low-level incidents can consume staff time. Problems such as configuration drift, service failures and storage issues are common targets for automation because they often follow established remediation steps.

By combining monitoring signals with pre-defined remediation rules, vendors in this area are trying to move beyond job execution and orchestration to systems that can act directly when faults appear. CIQ's additions place Ascender Pro more firmly in that category while also extending the product into software package control and inventory routing.

Bjorn Hovland, President of CIQ, said the practical value for customers lay in reducing friction in everyday operations. "For our customers, this release isn't about matching a feature checklist; it's about giving operations teams their time back. Federated Inventories alone removes a routing problem that used to require its own tooling or a manual step, and paired with Reaqt's automatic remediation, a single alert can turn into a fix on exactly the right host without anyone standing in the middle."