Network Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Git is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that enables you to manage changes to files, review and restore earlier versions of files, compare two versions of the same file to identify changes, and record a log of who made what changes to files and when those changes were made.

Git enables multiple users to collaboratively work on content for network automation projects.

Automation controller provides a centralized location from which you can run your network automation playbooks and review the results of those runs.

An automation controller project specifies the location of a Git repository that stores Ansible code and, if needed, a source control credential to authenticate to the Git repository.

An automation controller job template specifies the inventory, machine credentials, automation execution environment, project, and playbook to use to run your Ansible code on the managed nodes.

To get more verbose output from the ansible-navigator run command to help troubleshoot problems, you can specify the -v option one or more times.

Ansible Lint is a tool that uses rules to detect issues in a playbook. You can run the ansible-lint package inside an automation execution environment by running the ansible-navigator lint command or by configuring VS Code to use it.

The ansible-navigator command can produce playbook artifact files that store information about playbook runs, which can be reviewed by using the ansible-navigator replay command.

Three common reasons why network automation tasks fail are connectivity issues, authentication issues, and timeout issues.

You can use the platform-specific *_ping modules to verify connectivity to managed nodes.

To isolate an error, you can run a playbook with the ansible-navigator command, using its --limit option to limit the run to specific managed nodes.