Rocket DevOps (formerly Aldon)

I am often asked by customers about the most recent addition to the Rocket Aldon suite of products, the Rocket Ops Portal. I have tried to provide a brief overview below of the most asked questions, but if you have any others, just let me know! The Rocket Ops Portal is free to customers with a Rocket Aldon maintenance agreement.

What is it?

The Rocket Ops Portal is a Web Based Portal for Lifecycle Manager IBMi Edition (LMi) and Lifecycle Manager Enterprise Edition (LMe), used for Release Management and Deployment monitoring. The Ops Portal allows you to approve and promote tasks from one environment to the next within a specific Group/Application/Release, trigger any associated deployment operation, perform adhoc deployments, and monitor all deployment activity to your IBMi and distributed systems.

What will I gain from using it?

Helps to be Compliant

The Ops Portal was designed based on DevOps Best Practices, to allow separation of duties to be easily enforced. The Ops Portal uses standard authority from within LMi/LMe, with additional authority required to access the Ops Portal. This ensures that only authorised roles can perform specific functions throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

Provides Visibility

The Ops Portal provides a clear view of all environments within the software lifecycle of an LMi/LMe Release and lists all associated tasks that currently reside in each environment. All deployment activity that is performed within LMi/LMe can be monitored using the Ops Portal, which provides a single view across the complete enterprise. A user can see all the deployment profile, location, and target information, along with reports from the Send, Receive and Install steps of a deployment process.

Ease of Use

An important factor of the Ops Portal is that it provides an easy to use web interface to perform functions that would previously have required a 5250 Green Screen or the LMe GUI Client; this can significantly reduce the training time required for new staff. Actions such as a Deployment Backout, Task Creation, Request to Promote and Promote, amongst others, can be performed by authorised users directly from a web browser or mobile device. Email notifications are easily configured to send out alerts of any issues relating to deployment operations.

Do I need it to use the JIRA Plugin?

Rocket recently released the JIRA 2.0 Plugin, which is used to connect a JIRA instance directly to LMi and LMe, to perform functions such as linking issues to tasks, task creation, task promotion etc.  The Plugin uses the Ops Portal as a connection component, so if you wish to take advantage of the JIRA 2.0 Plugin, please ensure to install the Ops Portal first.

Does the Ops Portal Provide API’s?

Yes! The Ops Portal now provides a RESTful API, which follows current, widely used API standards. With Ops Portal RESTful API, you can fetch LM(e) and LM(i) data and perform basic operations such as creating a task, promoting a task, getting release information, and so on.

How do I get it?

Existing customers can download the Ops Portal from the Rocket Customer Portal. Please ensure to download the version compatible with your instance of LMi/LMe.

If you would like more information on the Ops Portal before downloading, you can watch two short five minute overview videos here, in Part1 and Part2. If you have any other questions, please ask!