How does it work?

So, you've checked our website and the Getting Started guide. You might be thinking: "That's cool!, but how do I take this to the next level?". In this document, we're going to take you through the basic concepts of Quantaleap. By the end, you'll be able to put the pieces together and dive deep to build meaningful automations.

Overview

At its heart, Quantaleap is a system for building and running workflows. A series of tasks (or actions) that automate a certain process. A workflow will let you organize building blocks that interact with integrations to automate complex processes. We can abstract most of the internal workings of Quantaleap to explain the lifecycle of a workflow and how it relates to other components of the platform:

tip

If you're familiar with serverless platforms (Microsoft Azure Functions/Logic Apps, AWS Lambda), you'll be up and running in no time. Alongside webhook and scheduled triggers, Quantaleap will allow you to trigger workflows based on Machine Learning insights.

Concepts

Integrations

Third-party services, including cloud platforms and SaaS tools, can be connected to Quantaleap. Integrations provide bidirectional communication between Quantaleap and external platforms to support a variety of features:

• Read information about resources within cloud platforms to allow our Data Platform to provide analytics
• Interact with API's to administer resources on third-party platforms

All integrations are set up and configured from the web portal. Once completed, the integrations can be used within workflows. We define 4 categories of integrations:

Name	Description
Hosting Provider	The platform where your cloud services and infrastructure are hosted.
CI/CD	The platform where you test, build and release software.
Messaging	Productivity tools that are used for communication purposes.
ITSM	IT monitoring, ticketing and incident resolution systems.

Triggers

The first thing you'll do when creating a workflow is configuring a trigger. A trigger defines criteria to be met for a workflow to be executed. Quantaleap will continuously evaluate these conditions and start the workflow once they are met. Triggers can come from a variety of sources:

Name	Description
Alert	This trigger allows you to run a workflow based on fixed thresholds in monitoring data. Contrary to the insight trigger, no Machine Learning is applied to evaluate the condition of the trigger.
Insight	This trigger provides a way to dynamically run workflows based on data insights. Quantaleap will analyze your cloud resources to detect performance, consumption and configuration based anomalies. The resulting events can be consumed. This trigger is powerful for creating self governing incident detection and resolution workflows.
Scheduled	This is a simple and useful way to run a workflow on a recurring basis. Quantaleap will start the workflow at timed intervals.
Webhook	The traditional callback style trigger that starts workflows upon receiving an HTTP payload on a published HTTP endpoint. This trigger is helpful for integrating Quantaleap with external services.

Actions

Actions are the components that bring workflows to life. They contain the functionality that is executed as part of a workflow. Each action is an encapsulated piece of functionality that interacts with the various integrations that are configured in your environment. Depending on the integration that is used, actions can range from reconfiguring resources on cloud platforms to interacting with CI/CD systems to trigger a software release, or simply sending an email.

info

The actions that are available are integration specific and depend on the functionality that external platforms provide as part of their API's.

Jobs

Workflow executions are represented by jobs. Jobs can be viewed from the web portal to check the activity and execution details of a workflow.

Closing Notes

You are ready to start exploring the opportunities of Quantaleap. Our use case library will give you a helping hand.