Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By : Sean Sullivan
Book Image

Demystifying Ansible Automation Platform

By: Sean Sullivan

Overview of this book

While you can use any automation software to simplify task automation, scaling automation to suit your growing business needs becomes difficult using only a command-line tool. Ansible Automation Platform standardizes how automation is deployed, initiated, delegated, and audited, and this comprehensive guide shows you how you can simplify and scale its management. The book starts by taking you through the ways to get Ansible Automation Platform installed, their pros and cons, and the initial configuration. You’ll learn about each object in the platform, how it interacts with other objects, as well as best practices for defining and managing objects to save time. You’ll see how to maintain the created pieces with infrastructure as code. As you advance, you’ll monitor workflows with CI/CD playbooks and understand how Ansible Automation Platform integrates with many other services such as GitLab and GitHub. By the end of this book, you’ll have worked through real-world examples to make the most of the platform while learning how to manipulate, manage, and deploy any playbook to Ansible Automation Platform.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Getting Ansible Automation Platform Up and Running
6
Part 2: Configuring AAP
13
Part 3: Extending Ansible Tower

Using and configuring notifications

Notifications are ways to send messages somewhere when an event occurs in the Automation controller. These notifications are made through a variety of mediums, such as emails, slack messages, or webhooks.

Understanding the basics of notifications

These are extremely useful for approvals so that users respond to them, but also for critical pieces such as an inventory failure. The important part is that these are knobs that can be turned on and off as needed.

The events that can trigger a notification are as follows:

  • Workflow Approvals: A workflow approval node is active and needs to be approved or denied.
  • Start: When a job or a project/inventory synchronization starts.
  • Success: A notification is sent on success.
  • Failure: A notification is sent on error.

Each of these sets a state for when to send a notification. However, these events only pertain to some things in the Automation controller. The following objects...