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

Dashboard introduction

The dashboard is the first thing that appears in the GUI when logging into the Automation controller. This will show the following things:

  • The total number of hosts
  • The number of failed hosts
  • The number of inventories
  • Inventory sync failures
  • The number of projects
  • Project sync failures
  • A job-status graph of successful jobs versus failures
  • Recent jobs
  • Recent templates

The dashboard looks like this:

Figure 5.1 – The Automation controller dashboard

The dashboard chart can be adjusted to display a different period of time, only certain job types, or only successful or failed jobs.

Along the side is the navigation for accessing all the objects in the Automation controller:

Figure 5.2 – The Automation controller navigation bar

The navigation bar is the primary way of navigating the Automation controller.