What’s New in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6

By Luca Berton · Published 2024-01-01 · Category: installation

Explore Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6, featuring the new automation dashboard, Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant, and self-service automation portal.

What’s New in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 Overview

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) 2.6 is now generally available, introducing new capabilities that blend AI-powered assistance, scalability, and real-time analytics. This release focuses on helping IT operations teams automate more effectively, measure impact, and scale across hybrid environments.

Red Hat describes this release as a step toward “automating for the future,” emphasizing trusted automation foundations for modern enterprise IT.

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Key Highlights

With the 2.6 release, Red Hat delivers three major feature areas designed to drive measurable value: Unlock more value – Track and visualize automation ROI with the new automation dashboard. Operate more efficiently – Harness generative AI through the Ansible Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant. Achieve new levels of scale – Expand automation access with the new self-service automation portal.

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Unlock More Value: Automation Dashboard

The automation dashboard provides an on-premise, secure utility for visualizing and reporting the business impact of automation initiatives.

Benefits

• Monitor performance: Track job success rates, time savings, and ROI in real-time. • Optimize efficiency: Identify underutilized or overextended nodes to rebalance workloads. • Secure insights: The dashboard runs entirely on-premise, ensuring sensitive data stays protected. • Flexible reporting: Export dashboards to PDF or CSV for use in BI tools or presentations.

This new dashboard helps automation teams demonstrate value, justify investment, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.

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Operate More Efficiently: Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant

AAP 2.6 integrates the Ansible Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant directly into the user interface — expanding the use of generative AI across the platform experience.

Highlights

• Context-aware chatbot: Ask questions in natural language — “How do I upgrade Ansible?” or “What’s an execution environment?” • Instant answers: Get validated, non-hallucinated responses based on Red Hat’s latest documentation. • Flexible AI integration: Bring your own LLM on-prem or connect through Red Hat AI. • Faster onboarding: New users can learn the platform more easily with real-time guidance.

This integration marks a shift from AI-assisted code generation toward AI-assisted operations, helping IT teams troubleshoot, configure, and manage automation more efficiently.

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Achieve New Levels of Scale: Self-Service Automation Portal

The new self-service automation portal in AAP 2.6 simplifies automation access for non-technical users and domain experts.

Key Features

• Point-and-click automation: Launch pre-approved playbooks through guided forms. • Admin control: IT teams maintain full governance while delegating execution rights. • Ease of use: A clean, user-friendly interface empowers more teams to automate tasks safely.

This feature supports broader automation adoption across organizations while maintaining compliance and security.

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Additional Enhancements in AAP 2.6

Beyond headline features, AAP 2.6 delivers several enhancements for performance, usability, and integration: • Event-driven Ansible: Expanded Kafka topic support, HashiCorp Vault integration, and new EDA job labels. • Refreshed UI: A modern, responsive interface with improved accessibility. • AI-assisted inventory (Developer Preview): Describe your topology — AAP generates a validated inventory automatically. • Expanded integrations: New and updated collections for Cisco, Arista, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Red Hat AI, and Splunk.

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Upgrade Guidance

AAP 2.6 introduces a streamlined upgrade path for users on versions 2.4 and 2.5: • Direct upgrades from both 2.4 and 2.5. • Automated IAM migration preserves users, roles, and permissions. • Simplified enterprise auth setup for SAML, LDAP, and OIDC configurations.

⚠️ Important: This is the final release supporting RPM-based installations (RHEL 9 only). Starting with AAP 2.7, all installations will transition to containerized deployments.

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