We’re proud to announce Assimilation Release 1.1.7. This release of the Assimilation System Management Suite has two major emphases – adding support for Docker and Vagrant, and adding subgraph queries for visualization. These are exciting features which provide capabilities which extend the reach and usefulness of the Assimilation Suite.

Assimilation Release 1.1.7: Docker and Vagrant Support

Our Docker support gives us comparable features to “Docker Security Scanning” – in a much broader context. Even more Docker capabilities will be coming in future releases. With Docker, some information comes from the host OS and some from the container. With Vagrant, most information comes from the contained VM. Both of these are representative of our ability to model a container or a VM in approximately the same as a full-fledged operating system – without requiring resident agents. Although this is currently implemented for Docker and Vagrant, this same methodology extends naturally to other encapsulation mechanisms such as LXD and KVM.

Assimilation Release 1.1.7: Subgraph Queries

Subgraph queries exploit the graph representation of the dependency and interconnectivity information in our Neo4j graph database. Visualization is a great way to provide insight into how certain things work, and how all the pieces are related to each other. In a data center, there may be many hundreds of thousands of objects and relationships which are possible to show in a visualization. Of course, trying to visualize everything simply results in confusion instead of insight. So what exactly should be visualized in order to produce insight? What you want is all the things related to some particular server, service, network switch or port. With a conventional database, finding this out is expensive and difficult.

Subgraph queries return of a collection of objects related to each other in exactly the desired ways, so that insight can be produced by the visualization of just the relevant pieces, and how they are related to each other. This takes advantage of the natural capabilities of the Neo4j graph database in which all data is stored.

These queries are available through our drawwithdot visualization tool, our command line interface, and our REST interface. The REST interface is designed to support fully interactive visualization using tools like the D3 JavaScript library.

All in all, these new features both provide exciting new capabilities right now, and lay the groundwork for an even more exciting set of future capabilities. Not only that, but it’s just in time to demo some new capabilities in my talk at SaltLakeCity DevOps Days.