Ansible Tower — Global Workflow Report

Automation -both mechanical and computational- has become a hot topic over the last few years. Software systems and infrastructures are getting more complex than ever, making tools such as Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) ones almost compulsory when working with non-trivial environments.

In this article, we will take a look at an interesting use-case that involves Red Hat’s Ansible Tower’s Automation Platform, defined as “an enterprise automation platform for the entire IT organization, no matter where you are in your automation journey”.

This is not an introduction article on Ansible Tower; we will herebyI assume that you have experience with the following topics:

- Designing Ansible Tower Workflows

- Using Ansible Collections

- Working with Ansible Tower’s APIs

The scenario

The following use case arises from a tricky problem faced while using Ansible Tower Workflow in a challenging environment, which comprises:

• Up to 15.000 target hosts in production with different operating systems and middlewares
• Security healthchecks run in Ansible on every host
• Multiple teams involved in security analisys of reports generated by ansible playbooks
• A complex Ansible Tower Workflow

An example of our customer’s workflow

One of the main goals for our customer, in this scenario, is to keep track of the status of each single host during all Workflow executions. Unfortunately, Ansible Tower platform doesn’t offer an out-of-the-box solution to manage this problem.

So far, our customer had never had a global view for the Ansible Tower Workflow execution status, which made troubleshooting tough and time-consuming. In particular, to check a single host’s status, we needed to click on each Workflow Node, scroll down to the end of the log, and view the PLAY RECAP written in it! 😞

As you can imagine, working with thousands of host and Workflows composed by dozens of Worflow Nodes, the probability of something failing is not negligible, which makes an easy troubleshooting a key requirement for quick fixes and improvements.

We therefore asked ourselves: can we create some reports showing the status of the Workflow for each host at a glance?

The solution: Ansible Tower Workflow Report

The solution we suggest is based on an Ansible role which achieves the following:

• get the job execution status in a Workflow for every node composing the Workflow
• manipulate the data, in order to get information grouped per host
• generate a .csv report with this information
• optionally, send this report by email

Note: all the code shown in this post can be found on this GitHub repository.

Prerequisites

We will need:

The tasks for our ansible_tower_workflow_report role are divided into 3 task groups:

Task #1: Get workflow jobs

This file includes all the tasks necessary to get the information needed to generate a report

1. retrieve a list of Workflow Nodes Jobs IDs, calling the Ansible Tower API using *lookup* module with ansible.tower.tower_api().

2. Iterate over this list to get the Jobs IDs related to the Workflow Nodes Jobs ID.

3. Query Job Host Summaries and create a list of dictionaries with info for each host during Job execution.

4. In conclusion, the 🎩 trick, group by host_name, to get all the information grouped for each host.

Take a moment to understand host_summaries, a data structure composed by a list of lists where:

• list[*].list[0] contains the host_name
• list[*].list[1] is a list of dictionaries, job_host_summaries, which contains all the information about all the Job Template executed in the Workflow for that host.

Task #2: Generating a report

To generate .csv report we use a Jinja2 template.

Gluing the blocks

To use this role you need an Ansible Playbook such as the following one:

Make sure you run this playbook on localhost (i.e. the Ansible Tower Machine)

Then set up Ansible Tower Platform :

1. Create a Project that point on your repository
2. Create a Job Template referring to the workflow_report.yaml playbook
3. Add a Survey for this Job Template named workflow_id of type Number
4. Find one existing Workflow Job ID for which you want you get the report

5. Finally launch the Job Template passing in Survey the Workflow Job id

Final results

Here is an example of the .csv report generated.

As you can see, we have obtained a complete status of the Workflow per host at a glance.

Conclusions

The complex scenario described here paves the road to many other topics regarding Ansible Tower Workflow management, which we will describe in future posts. For instance, it is possible to implement a log analysis infrastructure using ARA.

What do you think of this approach? Have you ever tried achieving a similar goal? Your feedback is very welcome!