Platform capabilities
Every feature. Every domain.
A complete breakdown of Cortex Engineering Platform capabilities across Zero Trust execution, agentic AI, multi-cloud inventory, Service Catalog orchestration, ITSM integration, and diagnostics.
Domain 01
The Automation Supply Chain
A governed, end-to-end automation supply chain that treats every workflow, provisioning action, and remediation playbook as a versioned, policy-validated artifact — from authoring and approval through execution and audit. Terraform, Ansible, CI/CD pipelines, and serverless are abstracted behind a unified Service Catalog with built-in governance at every stage.
Core Catalog Experience
6 featuresCentral storefront for all automation, provisioning, diagnostics, and workflow services. Parameterized, version-controlled entries with environment-aware targeting across Dev, Test, and Prod.
Signed and promoted automation artifacts with input validation, default values, and mandatory parameter enforcement. Templates are reusable across teams and tenants.
ITSM-driven approval gates embedded at the catalog level. Execution is blocked until required approvals are satisfied, with automatic RITM and change record creation.
Tenant-isolated catalog scopes with role-based visibility. Each team or business unit sees only services they are authorized to consume, with shared governance at the platform layer.
Full execution lineage with run logs, input parameters, output artifacts, and approval records. Every catalog execution is immutably recorded for audit and compliance.
Catalog items enforce environment-specific validation rules. Promotion paths between Dev, Test, and Prod require explicit approval and policy clearance before execution proceeds.
Multi-Engine Orchestration
8 featuresAbstracts orchestration across Terraform, Ansible AAP, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Harness, and serverless. Teams interact with the catalog — not individual engine CLIs.
Infrastructure provisioning with plan preview, policy checks, drift detection, and state management. Supports TFC workspaces and self-hosted Terraform Enterprise deployments.
Configuration management, remediation playbooks, and diagnostics workflows executed via Ansible AAP job templates with full credential injection and output capture.
CI/CD pipeline dispatch via workflow_dispatch events with parameterized inputs. Execution status and artifacts are captured back into the catalog execution record.
Progressive delivery, canary release management, and enterprise pipeline execution integrated into the catalog governance layer with change evidence linkage.
Multi-step, dependency-aware Stack definitions with conditional branching and output-to-input parameter passing between execution stages.
Event-driven function execution for targeted tasks — secret rotation, health checks, compliance snapshots — with full policy enforcement and execution traceability.
Bring existing Ansible playbooks, Terraform modules, and CI/CD pipelines into the catalog without rewriting. Secure execution boundaries are applied at ingestion time.
Domain 02
Intelligent Policy Framework Service (CIPF)
A unified, intelligence-driven policy and identity control plane that governs every automation action from request through execution. CIPF embeds Zero Trust identity controls and Policy-as-Code enforcement as a single cohesive framework — ensuring that who runs what, against what, under what conditions is evaluated, validated, and recorded at every step.
Identity & Access Controls
6 featuresOIDC/SAML integration with enterprise identity providers. Identity is propagated across all connected automation engines — every run is attributed to an authenticated principal with full traceability.
Time-bound, least-privilege execution permissions issued per run. JIT roles are scoped to the specific catalog item, target environment, and resource set — no standing privilege is retained post-execution.
Role-to-service and role-to-stack level access enforcement. Permissions are evaluated at execution time against the requester's current role assignments and group memberships — not cached at session start.
Hard and soft multi-tenant security boundaries. Execution contexts, catalog scopes, and resource targets are strictly isolated between tenants with no data or permission bleed across boundaries.
Dev, Test, and Prod execution contexts enforced as distinct security domains. Promotion between environments requires explicit policy clearance and approval gate satisfaction before any execution proceeds.
Every execution produces a tamper-proof audit record capturing the authenticated identity, applied permissions, policy decisions, inputs, and outputs — compliance-ready by design for SOC 2, FedRAMP, and ISO 27001.
Policy Enforcement Engine
6 featuresOPA/Rego guardrails are evaluated before any execution proceeds. Policy failures block the run immediately and surface a structured violation report with specific remediation guidance for the requesting team.
Infrastructure risk validation against Terraform plan output. Policies inspect resource types, counts, regions, and configuration attributes before apply is permitted — catching misconfigurations before they reach production.
Policy enforcement aligned to the Tag Registry. Executions that would produce untagged or incorrectly tagged resources are blocked at the policy gate with specific tag violation details and required corrections.
Differentiated policy sets for Dev, Test, and Prod. Production policies enforce stricter controls including change window validation, CMDB CI existence verification, and mandatory approval requirements.
Compliance-ready execution history with full policy decision records. Every ALLOW and DENY is captured with the evaluating policy name, input context, and timestamp — providing a complete policy enforcement audit trail.
Admin-managed authoritative tag catalog with mandatory and optional tag enforcement. Supports AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, and Kubernetes label/annotation standards, with CMDB, HR, and Finance taxonomy integration for full metadata lifecycle governance.
Domain 03
Inventory & Asset Intelligence
Real-time, multi-cloud resource discovery with cross-domain dependency correlation. Every automation decision in Cortex is inventory-aware — knowing what exists, who owns it, what it depends on, and whether it has drifted from its approved baseline before executing any change.
Discovery & Correlation
6 featuresLive discovery across AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. Compute, networking, storage, IAM, managed services, and serverless resources are normalized into a unified inventory schema with consistent metadata.
Clusters, namespaces, deployments, services, ConfigMaps, and workload metadata — including OpenShift and RKE2 environments — mapped into the cross-cloud resource graph.
Relational and managed database service discovery across cloud providers. Captures engine type, version, tier, connectivity configuration, and ownership metadata.
Infrastructure ↔ Platform ↔ Database dependency mapping. Understand the full blast radius of a change before executing — services, downstream consumers, and shared dependencies are surfaced automatically.
Context-aware automation scoping using live inventory state. Catalog items can target resources by tag, owner, environment, region, or dependency relationship — not just by hard-coded identifiers.
Policy-based configuration validation comparing live resource state against approved Stack definitions. Drift events trigger alerts and can initiate automated or catalog-driven remediation workflows.
Domain 04
Agentic AI & Agent Capabilities
21 named AI agents embedded across every platform domain — not a chatbot layer, but an execution-aware intelligence fabric built on LangGraph orchestration, MCP servers, and a RAG/vector knowledge store. Agents understand context, policy, and inventory state before taking or recommending action.
Core AI Capabilities
6 featuresPattern recognition across execution history, telemetry, and inventory state to generate operational insights. Diagnostic agents surface probable causes and recommended actions without requiring manual log triage.
Behavioral anomaly detection across automation runs. Agents learn normal execution patterns per catalog item, environment, and team — surfacing deviations that indicate misconfiguration, drift, or security anomalies.
Inventory and execution search via natural language interface. Engineers can query resource state, execution history, and dependency relationships without constructing structured queries or writing scripts.
AI agents translate natural language intent into catalog execution — selecting the correct template, inferring parameters from inventory context, and validating scope before surfacing a structured execution plan for approval.
Pre-execution risk assessment combining inventory dependency data, policy evaluation results, and historical execution outcomes to produce a per-run risk score and blast-radius estimate.
AI-driven RCA correlation across logs, telemetry, and execution lineage. Agents generate ranked hypothesis chains with supporting evidence. Predictive operations capabilities identify emerging failure patterns before incidents occur.
AI Agent Registry — 21 Named Agents
21 agentsAI Infrastructure
4 componentsMulti-step, stateful agent workflows with conditional branching, tool use, and human-in-the-loop approval gates. Agents can chain across domains — inventory lookup → risk scoring → catalog execution — in a single governed workflow.
30 Model Context Protocol servers providing agents with structured access to inventory, execution history, policy state, ITSM records, and observability data — without direct database or API access.
Cache-Augmented Generation (CAG) layer providing agents with grounded knowledge from runbooks, Stack definitions, policy documents, and execution history — reducing hallucination and improving contextual accuracy.
OpenAI and IBM watsonx model backends with model routing based on task type — conversational interfaces, structured data extraction, code generation, and risk scoring use purpose-optimized models.
Domain 05
ITSM / Service Management
Every automated action is change-governed, sprint-traceable, and knowledge-documented. Cortex bridges the gap between DevOps execution velocity and enterprise service management process compliance — without creating friction for engineering teams.
ServiceNow Integration
4 featuresServiceNow Requested Items (RITMs) trigger governed catalog execution. Approval status, SLA timers, and fulfillment state are tracked in both Cortex and ServiceNow simultaneously.
Full change lifecycle alignment from CHG creation through execution and closure. Change records are automatically updated with execution evidence, run logs, and approval records.
Live CMDB Configuration Item (CI) data is injected into execution context. Automations are CI-aware — target scoping, impact assessment, and approval routing all use real-time CMDB state.
Execution results, output artifacts, and run summaries are written back to the originating ServiceNow record — closing the loop between request, execution, and fulfillment confirmation.
Jira & Confluence Integration
3 featuresAutomation-to-backlog linkage — catalog executions can automatically create or update Jira issues, providing sprint-level visibility into infrastructure and platform operations work.
End-to-end DevOps visibility linking Jira epics and stories to specific catalog runs, Terraform plan outputs, Ansible job IDs, and deployment events — from sprint planning to production change.
Automated documentation updates triggered by service provisioning events. Stack deployments, configuration changes, and inventory updates can be reflected in Confluence spaces without manual authoring.
Domain 06
Diagnostics & Observability
A standalone diagnostics microservice with catalog-delivered playbooks, multi-backend telemetry integration, and AI-driven root cause analysis. Diagnostic runs are first-class catalog items — governed, traceable, and repeatable like any other automation.
Diagnostics Engine
5 featuresStandalone, independently deployable diagnostics engine with its own API surface. Decoupled from the execution engine to ensure diagnostic workflows remain available during platform incidents.
Playbook-driven validation workflows delivering health checks, configuration audits, connectivity tests, and compliance scans as self-service catalog items with full execution history.
Diagnostics are delivered as parameterized catalog items — any team can run pre-approved diagnostic playbooks against their target resources without needing direct access to the underlying tooling.
Observability events from Datadog, Splunk, or Elastic can trigger catalog-delivered remediation workflows automatically — closing the loop from alert to action within the governed execution framework.
Telemetry pipeline integrations for real-time monitoring, execution metadata streaming, SLO burn tracking, and deploy event correlation. Each backend is independently configurable per environment.
Domain 07
Secrets & Credential Hardening
Zero static credential storage across the platform. Secrets are dynamically issued, runtime-injected, and automatically rotated — with full support for HashiCorp Vault, Akeyless, and all major cloud KMS services.
Secrets Management
4 featuresShort-lived execution tokens issued per run with automatic expiry. Credentials are generated at execution time, scoped to the specific target resources, and revoked upon run completion.
Native integration with HashiCorp Vault, Akeyless, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, and GCP KMS. Secrets are retrieved at execution time from the authoritative source — never stored in the platform.
Secrets are injected into execution contexts at runtime — never embedded in catalog templates, Terraform variables, or Ansible inventories. Eliminates entire classes of credential exposure risk.
Detection of long-lived, expiring, or stale credentials across integrated systems. Drift events surface in the inventory layer and can trigger automated rotation workflows via the Service Catalog.
Domain 08
Integration Coverage
Cortex sits above your existing toolchain — orchestrating, governing, and intelligently connecting the tools your teams already use. No rip-and-replace. Existing investments in Terraform, Ansible, ServiceNow, Datadog, and others are preserved and enhanced.
Enterprise Integration Catalog
18+ integrationsDeployment Models
3 modelsDeployed entirely within the customer's infrastructure and network boundary. Full control over data residency, upgrade cadence, and network isolation. Supports air-gapped environments.
Cortex-managed deployment with SLA-backed availability. Customers connect existing toolchains via secure outbound connectors — no inbound firewall changes required.
Control plane hosted by Cortex with execution agents deployed customer-side. Supports scenarios requiring data plane isolation while reducing customer operational overhead for platform management.
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