Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By : Gineesh Madapparambath
Book Image

Ansible for Real-Life Automation

By: Gineesh Madapparambath

Overview of this book

Get ready to leverage the power of Ansible’s wide applicability to automate and manage IT infrastructure with Ansible for Real-Life Automation. This book will guide you in setting up and managing the free and open source automation tool and remote-managed nodes in the production and dev/staging environments. Starting with its installation and deployment, you’ll learn automation using simple use cases in your workplace. You’ll go beyond just Linux machines to use Ansible to automate Microsoft Windows machines, network devices, and private and public cloud platforms such as VMWare, AWS, and GCP. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll integrate Ansible into your DevOps workflow and deal with application container management and container platforms such as Kubernetes. This Ansible book also contains a detailed introduction to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to help you get up to speed with Red Hat AAP and integration with CI/CD and ITSM. What’s more, you’ll implement efficient automation solutions while learning best practices and methods to secure sensitive data using Ansible Vault and alternatives to automate non-supported platforms and operations using raw commands, command modules, and REST API calls. By the end of this book, you’ll be proficient in identifying and developing real-life automation use cases using Ansible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: Using Ansible as Your Automation Tool
6
Part 2: Finding Use Cases and Integrations
16
Part 3: Managing Your Automation Development Flow with Best Practices

Integrating Ansible with monitoring tools

Because Ansible is flexible and can automate most of your day-to-day jobs, it is a common practice to automate every possible use case, even if it is not efficient. One of the so-called non-standard use cases we have learned from the community is using Ansible for monitoring purposes, as follows:

  • Monitoring the service or application status in a system
  • Running health checks on endpoints (applications, web services, or clusters)
  • Monitoring network and security device rules or status

The following diagram shows a typical scenario where Ansible automation jobs are scheduled to run health checks on managed nodes or applications. These jobs can be either running as cron jobs from an Ansible control node or as a scheduled job in an Ansible automation controller:

Figure 14.3 – Using scheduled automation jobs for monitoring

This method is possible and easy to implement but is not efficient. It...