G-CLOUD - OCTANE ENVIRONMENT MANAGEMENT AND REPORTING

Issue Identification and Trends

Monitoring metrics and other integrated data can be historised and analysed over time to identify trends and allow retrospective reviews to be conducted. Users will see a high-level overview of the health of monitored environments and can also drill into the detail of individual subsystems to pinpoint issues. The software can be configured or extended with custom extensions to our ORQA automation and integration platform regardless of whether external APIs exist.

Alerts and Notifications

OCTANE's flexible alerting and notification system ensures operational attention is focussed on the most important issues. Endpoint connectors to email, APIs, messaging and chat clients, and even social media, can be included to ensure relevant stakeholders are kept up-to-date. By using powerful expressions and adapters to environment definitions, the system can also dynamically detect new environments and discover services, minimising the configuration changes required.

Metrics and Dashboards

Application metrics from environments and subsystems can be retrieved and stored, either directly or by interfaces into existing systems where appropriate, to leverage existing resources. Powerful visualisation capabilities allow highly customised, bespoke dashboards to be created based on your requirements to gather all the information points required, regardless of the source.

Examples of metrics and monitoring that may be implemented include checking:

• disk space, CPU and memory usage
• response times to HTTP requests
• page load times
• correctness of display in different browsers, versions, devices, screen sizes and operating systems
• responsiveness of web sites under load
• business transaction simulation (execute your own user workflows automatically and benchmark the time for execution)
• database benchmarks and cache hit-ratios
• errors and anomalies detected in logs
• intrusion detection, traffic analysis and login statistics
• and many more...

Security and Encryption

Security of your systems is assured through the use of reverse SSH tunnels, API keys, and flexible security permissioning schemes to ensure your data always remains under control. Encryption is standard and 'deny by default' policies are used throughout the applications, whether on shared SaaS or private installations.

Additional features

With ORQA automation you can even record recovery or response actions to take place when certain situations are observed, which further expands the ability of your system to recover from abnormal situations. For example, you may wish to archive certain log files should free disk space be getting low.

Integrations with issue and defect tracking systems are also possible with ORQA ensuring that observations in production are always appropriately tracked in the development organisation with the relevant details.

There is also capability for managing self-service environment requests on cloud architectures where new environments can be created on-demand according to need, eliminating unnecessary delays and costly excess capacity when tests are not being run.

Compliance and Compatibility

OCTANE allows users to customise access to data of various sensitivity levels and includes a platform that permits connectivity to the UK government's PSN with either our cloud-hosted SaaS or fully-managed hybrid / private cloud installations, regardless of whether they are run on Azure, AWS, UKCloud, or other platforms (subject to appropriate accreditation according to data classification level and user environment).

User Administration and Application Security

The OCTANE application is a security solution that's been accredited for use in various public-sector projects for data up to OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE in public cloud installations. The four-tier structure follows a blueprint for segregation of data that satisfies the highest public cloud infrastructure requirements in the UK public sector today.

Intrusion detection, active monitoring, firewalls and web traffic filtering further protects the system and OCTANE offers a web interface utilising the latest web server security and encryption standards, achieving an A+ in the Qualys SSL Labs analysis.

OCTANE regularly goes through independent penetration tests in addition to our own automated security analysis.

Data Control and Security

OCTANE uses strong role-based access control (RBAC) weaved throughout the entire framework at a foundational level and uses APIs to further segregate workloads and data permissions. In addition, a strong, permission-based object model can allow clients to further extend the data models to be customised precisely for their particular needs, allowing rich reports and real-time dashboarding.

Several logical organisations can also sit within the same distribution and operate entirely independently, allowing large-scale usage and sharing amongst teams and departments. Standard security principles like 'least-access' and 'deny-by-default' are built-in.

Access to the system can include restrictions across functions (horizontal) and within certain records inside data sets (vertical), limiting the rights and ability for different areas to affect each other. In-built sharing functionality permits views and dashboards to be managed and shared amongst users and groups of users in any combination (itself governed by customisable permissions). These are all made available for customisation by the client according to specific requirements.

Modern Technical Platform

OCTANE is based upon best-of-breed open source technologies and we embrace the cutting edge. Our solutions are containerised, operating system agnostic (based on Java), automated using Ansible and use the latest industry best DevOps practices.

Auditing and the Corporate Record

All data manipulation is indelible and audited. All designated business data objects are versioned and historised and can show exactly what data has changed and what it was at any given time in the past. All changes to data through the application are audited, whether through the user interfaces or APIs.