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.

75+features across 8 domains
21named AI agents
30MCP servers & tools
18+enterprise integrations

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 features
Unified Service Catalog

Central storefront for all automation, provisioning, diagnostics, and workflow services. Parameterized, version-controlled entries with environment-aware targeting across Dev, Test, and Prod.

Catalog Templates

Signed and promoted automation artifacts with input validation, default values, and mandatory parameter enforcement. Templates are reusable across teams and tenants.

Approval Workflows

ITSM-driven approval gates embedded at the catalog level. Execution is blocked until required approvals are satisfied, with automatic RITM and change record creation.

Multi-Tenant Catalogs

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.

Execution History & Lineage

Full execution lineage with run logs, input parameters, output artifacts, and approval records. Every catalog execution is immutably recorded for audit and compliance.

Environment Awareness

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 features
Tool-Agnostic Execution

Abstracts orchestration across Terraform, Ansible AAP, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Harness, and serverless. Teams interact with the catalog — not individual engine CLIs.

Terraform / Terraform Cloud

Infrastructure provisioning with plan preview, policy checks, drift detection, and state management. Supports TFC workspaces and self-hosted Terraform Enterprise deployments.

Ansible Automation Platform

Configuration management, remediation playbooks, and diagnostics workflows executed via Ansible AAP job templates with full credential injection and output capture.

GitHub Actions & GitLab CI

CI/CD pipeline dispatch via workflow_dispatch events with parameterized inputs. Execution status and artifacts are captured back into the catalog execution record.

Harness & Azure DevOps

Progressive delivery, canary release management, and enterprise pipeline execution integrated into the catalog governance layer with change evidence linkage.

Stack-Based Workflow Definition

Multi-step, dependency-aware Stack definitions with conditional branching and output-to-input parameter passing between execution stages.

Serverless & KNative Functions

Event-driven function execution for targeted tasks — secret rotation, health checks, compliance snapshots — with full policy enforcement and execution traceability.

BYO Automation Ingestion

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.

A
Subdomain A
Zero Trust & Identity
Identity-centric execution architecture where every run is authenticated, scoped, and time-bound. Zero Trust controls are foundational — not bolt-on — enforced at every layer from request initiation through completion.

Identity & Access Controls

6 features
Identity-Centric Execution

OIDC/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.

Just-In-Time (JIT) Access

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.

Fine-Grained RBAC

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.

Tenant Isolation

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.

Environment Segmentation

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.

Immutable Execution Lineage

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.

B
Subdomain B
Policy Management
OPA/Rego-based Policy-as-Code enforcement embedded at every execution gate. Policies validate infrastructure plans, tag compliance, environment scope, and identity constraints before any change is applied.

Policy Enforcement Engine

6 features
Pre-Execution Policy Validation

OPA/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.

Terraform Plan Policy Checks

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.

Cross-Tag Validation

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.

Environment-Specific Policies

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.

Immutable Audit Logs

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.

Tag Registry & Metadata Governance

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 features
Multi-Cloud Inventory

Live 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.

Kubernetes Inventory

Clusters, namespaces, deployments, services, ConfigMaps, and workload metadata — including OpenShift and RKE2 environments — mapped into the cross-cloud resource graph.

Database Inventory

Relational and managed database service discovery across cloud providers. Captures engine type, version, tier, connectivity configuration, and ownership metadata.

Cross-Domain Dependency Correlation

Infrastructure ↔ Platform ↔ Database dependency mapping. Understand the full blast radius of a change before executing — services, downstream consumers, and shared dependencies are surfaced automatically.

Inventory-Driven Targeting

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.

Drift Detection

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 features
AI-Assisted Diagnostics

Pattern 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.

Execution Pattern Learning

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.

Natural Language Queries (NLQ)

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.

Intent-to-Execution Translation

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.

Risk Scoring & Blast-Radius Modeling

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.

Root Cause Assistance & Predictive Operations

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 agents
Catalog Concierge
Service Catalog
Execution Planner
Orchestration
Policy Guardian
Policy-as-Code
Drift Sentinel
Inventory
Inventory Navigator
Inventory
Dependency Mapper
Inventory
Risk Assessor
Governance
Blast Radius Analyst
Governance
Diagnostics Agent
Diagnostics
RCA Investigator
Diagnostics
Anomaly Detector
Observability
Remediation Advisor
Operations
Predictive Ops Agent
Operations
Change Governance Agent
ITSM
CMDB Sync Agent
ITSM
Secret Rotation Agent
Security
Credential Auditor
Security
Tag Compliance Agent
Governance
Knowledge Discovery
Intelligence
NLQ Interface Agent
Intelligence
SRE Reliability Agent
SRE

AI Infrastructure

4 components
LangGraph Agent Orchestration

Multi-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.

MCP Servers & Tool Layer (30 tools)

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.

RAG / Vector Knowledge Store

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.

Multi-Model Support

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 features
RITM-Driven Automation

ServiceNow Requested Items (RITMs) trigger governed catalog execution. Approval status, SLA timers, and fulfillment state are tracked in both Cortex and ServiceNow simultaneously.

Change Lifecycle Governance

Full change lifecycle alignment from CHG creation through execution and closure. Change records are automatically updated with execution evidence, run logs, and approval records.

CMDB Context Injection

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 Status Feedback Loop

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 features
Story & Issue Creation

Automation-to-backlog linkage — catalog executions can automatically create or update Jira issues, providing sprint-level visibility into infrastructure and platform operations work.

Execution Traceability

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.

Confluence Documentation

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 features
Diagnostics Microservice

Standalone, independently deployable diagnostics engine with its own API surface. Decoupled from the execution engine to ensure diagnostic workflows remain available during platform incidents.

Ansible-Based Diagnostics

Playbook-driven validation workflows delivering health checks, configuration audits, connectivity tests, and compliance scans as self-service catalog items with full execution history.

Catalog-Based Diagnostics Delivery

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.

Event-Driven Remediation

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.

Datadog, Splunk & Elastic Integration

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 features
Dynamic Credential Issuance

Short-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.

Vault & Cloud KMS Integration

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.

Runtime Secret Injection

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.

Credential Drift Detection

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+ integrations
IaC
Terraform / TFC
Automation
Ansible AAP
CI/CD
GitHub Actions
CI/CD
GitLab CI
Delivery
Harness
CI/CD
Azure DevOps
ITSM
ServiceNow
Agile
Jira
Knowledge
Confluence
Security
HashiCorp Vault
Security
Akeyless
Policy
OPA / Rego
Observability
Splunk
Observability
Datadog
Observability
Elastic
AI
OpenAI
AI
IBM watsonx
Identity
OIDC / SAML

Deployment Models

3 models
Customer-Managed

Deployed entirely within the customer's infrastructure and network boundary. Full control over data residency, upgrade cadence, and network isolation. Supports air-gapped environments.

Hosted (PaaS)

Cortex-managed deployment with SLA-backed availability. Customers connect existing toolchains via secure outbound connectors — no inbound firewall changes required.

Hybrid

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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