Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 Overview
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) 2.6 is now generally available, introducing new capabilities that blend AI-powered assistance, scalability, and real-time analytics. This release focuses on helping IT operations teams automate more effectively, measure impact, and scale across hybrid environments.
Red Hat describes this release as a step toward “automating for the future,” emphasizing trusted automation foundations for modern enterprise IT.
---
Key Highlights
With the 2.6 release, Red Hat delivers three major feature areas designed to drive measurable value:
1. Unlock more value – Track and visualize automation ROI with the new automation dashboard.
2. Operate more efficiently – Harness generative AI through the Ansible Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant.
3. Achieve new levels of scale – Expand automation access with the new self-service automation portal.
---
Unlock More Value: Automation Dashboard
The automation dashboard provides an on-premise, secure utility for visualizing and reporting the business impact of automation initiatives.
Benefits
- Monitor performance: Track job success rates, time savings, and ROI in real-time.
- Optimize efficiency: Identify underutilized or overextended nodes to rebalance workloads.
- Secure insights: The dashboard runs entirely on-premise, ensuring sensitive data stays protected.
- Flexible reporting: Export dashboards to PDF or CSV for use in BI tools or presentations.
This new dashboard helps automation teams demonstrate value, justify investment, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.
---
Operate More Efficiently: Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant
AAP 2.6 integrates the Ansible Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant directly into the user interface — expanding the use of generative AI across the platform experience.
Highlights
- Context-aware chatbot: Ask questions in natural language — “How do I upgrade Ansible?” or “What’s an execution environment?”
- Instant answers: Get validated, non-hallucinated responses based on Red Hat’s latest documentation.
- Flexible AI integration: Bring your own LLM on-prem or connect through Red Hat AI.
- Faster onboarding: New users can learn the platform more easily with real-time guidance.
This integration marks a shift from AI-assisted code generation toward AI-assisted operations, helping IT teams tro