Ralph DCIM on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

The estate, modelled the way operations teams think about it

Ralph is an open source DCIM, data centre infrastructure management, and asset management system. Data centres contain server rooms, server rooms contain racks, and racks contain hardware at specific rack unit positions. Every machine carries its model, serial number, barcode, status, purchase and invoice details and the service it belongs to, so the question of what is in a given rack, and who owns it, has one answer instead of several spreadsheets. Alongside the data centre it tracks back office equipment such as laptops and phones through the same lifecycle, and attaches licences, support contracts, domains and networks to the assets they cover.

Built by a company that runs on it

Ralph is developed and released by Allegro, the largest e-commerce platform in Poland, which uses it to manage its own data centre estate. The feature set reflects the problems of an estate large enough to need the discipline, and releases follow a dated cadence. This image ships release 20260902.1.

No default login, in any window

Ralph's own packaging seeds an administrator called ralph with the password ralph, and this image never creates that account at all. First boot seeds upstream's provisioning routine with a password generated for that VM alone, so the published default is never written and then rotated, it simply never exists, and first boot refuses to open the front door if an account named ralph is found. The administrator password, both database passwords, the application secret key and the TLS certificate are all generated on your VM and written to a file only root can read. Before release, two VMs launched from this image were compared and shared no secret of any kind, including the database server identity and its TLS key material, and a password taken from one was refused by the other.

Exposed surface

Off the VM, this image answers on ports 22, 80 and 443 only, and that set is asserted by equality against every socket the machine opens rather than against a list of the services we expected. Port 80 only redirects to HTTPS and serves an unauthenticated health endpoint for load balancer probes. The database, the cache and the application server are bound to the loopback interface, and the metrics endpoint the web framework exposes without authentication is refused at the web server. The web server terminates TLS with a certificate minted on each VM, rewrites every client supplied forwarding header so a caller cannot claim another address, and passes the browser's own host through so sign in works on a custom name or port.

How it is built

The application is the official upstream release, pinned by immutable digest rather than a moving tag, so every VM runs byte identical code. The web server, database, cache and container runtime all come from the Ubuntu archive, so unattended security upgrades keep them current for the life of the image. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is fully patched at build time. The database ships with Ralph's full schema already applied and not one row of data, so your estate starts empty.

Licence and attribution

Ralph is published under the Apache License 2.0. Ralph is built by Allegro; cloudimg is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Allegro, and the name is used only to identify the software this image runs. Ralph and Allegro are trademarks of their respective owners.

Support

24/7 support from cloudimg, and a step by step deployment guide covering the first sign in, modelling data centres, server rooms and racks, loading an existing inventory over the REST API, adding a DNS name and certificate, backups and upgrades.