Itential Academy is currently in private beta. Contact your Customer Success Manager (CSM) to get access.
Itential Academy is a training platform that provides hands-on learning for Itential customers. All users in your organization can access training courses and launch training environments to practice course exercises.
What is Itential Academy?
Itential Academy offers:
- Training courses - Self-paced courses covering Itential features and concepts
- Training environments - On-demand training labs with pre-configured shared lab infrastructure (Cisco IOS, Infoblox) for hands-on exercises
Access Itential Academy
You access Itential Academy through Cloud Hub:
- Cloud customers - Use your existing Cloud Hub account
- On-premises customers - Receive a dedicated Cloud Hub organization for training, separate from your on-premises deployment
To access Itential Academy:
- Sign in to Cloud Hub.
- Click Itential Academy in the left navigation.
- Browse available courses and select a course to begin.
All users in your organization can access training content. No special permissions are required.
Training environments
Training environments are on-demand instances that you launch from within training courses to complete hands-on exercises. Training environments connect to a shared lab, which provides pre-configured third-party infrastructure (Cisco IOS routers, Infoblox) for you to experiment with during courses.
The following table shows how training environments differ from Platform environments:
| Aspect | Training environment | Platform environment |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Hands-on training exercises | Real orchestration and automation work |
| Lifespan | 4 hours, or when you complete a course or terminate a training environment | Persistent |
| Data persistence | Does not persist between sessions | Persists |
| Visibility | Only visible to the user who launches it | Visible to authorized users in your organization |
| Connection | Shared lab (Cisco IOS, Infoblox) | Your environment |
Launch a training environment
To launch a training environment:
- Open a course in Itential Academy.
- Click Launch Environment when prompted in the course content.
- Wait for the training environment to provision (typically 2-3 minutes).
A training environment ends:
- Automatically after four hours
- When you close a course
- When you click Terminate on the Itential Academy Training card in the Cloud Hub Environments page
When your training session ends, your seat is returned to your organization's allocated seats.
Training environments do not persist data between sessions. Each new training environment instance starts with a clean configuration to ensure you always work with a fresh environment when following course exercises.
View training environment
Your active training environment appears on the Environments page in Cloud Hub under a separate Itential Academy Training card. This card displays:
- Training environment name and status
- Time remaining until automatic termination
- Terminate button to end the session early
Training seats
Training seats determine the number of concurrent training environments your organization can run simultaneously. Organizations start with zero seats by default.
Seats are shared across your organization rather than assigned to individual users. For example, an organization with three seats allows any three users to run training environments concurrently.
When a training environment closes, its seat returns to your organization's available seat pool.
When all seats are in use, the Launch Environment button becomes disabled and displays the message: 0 out of 5 seats available. Contact your CSM for additional seats.
Complete a course
When you complete a course, the behavior depends on whether you have an active training environment:
- Course without training environment option - Course marked complete normally
- Course with inactive/expired training environment - Course marked complete normally
- Course with active training environment - You see a warning modal:
Completing this course will immediately shut down your active hands-on training environment. Any unsaved work will be lost.You can cancel to continue working or click Complete Course to complete the course.
You can re-launch a training environment for any course, even after completing it, to revisit exercises or practice specific skills. Each launch starts a fresh training environment.
Frequently asked questions
Why should I use Itential Academy instead of LearnUpon?
Itential Academy replaces LearnUpon and offers several improvements:
- Integrated experience - Access training directly from Cloud Hub without switching between systems
- Universal access - All users in your organization can access training courses by default
- Hands-on environments - Training environments connect to real lab systems (Cisco IOS, Infoblox) for practical exercises
- Updated content - Current training materials aligned with the latest Itential Platform features
Can my whole team train at the same time?
Your ability to train simultaneously depends on your organization's training seat allocation. By default, organizations start with zero seats. Contact your Customer Success Manager to purchase additional seats if you need multiple team members training with hands-on Platform instances at the same time.
All team members can access course content and videos simultaneously. Training seats only limit concurrent hands-on Platform instance usage.
What happens to my LearnUpon progress?
Progress data from LearnUpon is not migrated to Itential Academy. If you need records of completed LearnUpon courses, export them before the transition.
Next steps
- Browse available courses in Itential Academy
- Launch a training environment to begin hands-on exercises