Managing Enterprise Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
Review data in the Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform cloud service in order to automate issue remediation, and to detect and alert you to configuration drift.
Insights for Ansible Automation Platform can guide you through the process of resolving existing issues on your platform. It can also alert you to proactively eliminate problems before they occur. Insights for Ansible Automation Platform provides the following tools:
- Advisor
Reports on issues with systems and produces remediation playbooks.
- Drift
Reports on differences between systems.
- Policies
Alerts you to specific changes to system facts.
- Notifications
Provides information on automation infrastructure status.
Advisor reports on issues with your systems that Insights for Ansible Automation Platform has identified, and automatically produces Ansible Playbooks to remediate many of those issues. You can download these playbooks and run them with your automation controller or with ansible-navigator.
To use Advisor, from the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, access the Overview dashboard, and navigate to → .
The page displays a list of issues that apply to your systems. By default, the list is ordered based on the value for each issue. This risk is assigned one of four values (Critical, Important, Moderate, or Low) based on the probability that the issue has a negative impact on your infrastructure and the severity of that impact if it were to occur. You can sort the list by any column in the table.
The column organizes each issue by the type of impact it has (on availability, performance, security, or stability). The column estimates the risk that applying this change might disrupt your systems (High, Moderate, Low, and Very Low). You can find more information on the issue and its impact in the detail page of an issue. This page usually includes a link to a Knowledgebase article with more information. To open the detail page of an issue, click the name of the issue.
You can download an executive report of all recommendations in PDF format by clicking the link.
In the column of the issue, an Ansible icon and the word is displayed if Advisor can generate an Ansible Playbook to remediate that issue.
Important
Advisor cannot generate remediation Ansible Playbooks for some issues. In those cases, it provides other information and manual instructions on how to remediate those issues.
To generate the required playbook for affected systems:
Click the name of the issue to open its detail page.
Select the checkbox next to each affected system that you want to remediate.
Click and enter a name for the new playbook in the field, and then click .
Review the selected systems and make any necessary changes, and then click .
Review the information about the issues included in the remediation playbook. Click if you want the remediated systems to reboot after the changes have been applied. The detail page in Advisor indicates if a reboot is required to complete the remediation of the issue.
Click to create the remediation playbook.
Navigate to and locate the playbook that you just created.
Click the name of the created remediation playbook, and then click to download the playbook to your workstation.
You can use the following procedure to generate a playbook to remediate some or all issues that apply to a particular system:
Navigate to → . Click the name of the system that you want to remediate to open its detail page.
Select the checkbox next to each issue affecting the system that you want to remediate.
Click , enter a name for the new playbook in the field, and then click .
Review the selected issues and make any necessary changes, and then click .
Review the information about the issues included in the remediation playbook. Click if you want the remediated systems to reboot after the changes have been applied. The detail page in Advisor indicates if a reboot is required to complete the remediation of the issue.
Click to create the remediation playbook.
Navigate to and locate the playbook that you just created.
Click the name of the created remediation playbook, and then click to download the playbook to your workstation.
Drift is used to detect unexpected differences between the current configuration of a machine and the configuration that you expect. It reports on differences between two systems, between a system and a standard baseline configuration, or one system at two different points in time.
You can use Drift in the following scenarios:
Find different versions of operating systems among servers that should have a uniform operating system.
Determine whether or not two systems have the same version of a software package installed.
Identify differences between a working and a nonworking system to help perform root-cause analysis of issues.
Detect differences in hardware configuration that might be the cause of differences in performance.
The following procedure details how to use Drift to compare systems.
From the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, access the Overview dashboard, and then navigate to → .
Click .
Select the checkbox next to each system that you want to compare, and then click .
Review the page. The page shows a table where the left-most column is a list of facts, and the other columns represent the values on each compared system. By default, the columns are sorted by the state of the differences, starting with facts that are different between the compared systems, followed by the facts that are the same.
If a fact has subvalues (if its value is a dictionary, for example), you can click the arrow next to the fact to display the subvalues.
You can use historical profiles to identify changes that a single system has undergone over time.
Use the following procedure to compare a system to one of its historical profiles:
On the comparison page for the selected system, click the blue clock symbol under the name of your system.
Select the checkbox next to the historical profile you want to compare.
Click to display the comparison page.
You can create one or more standard baseline configurations and then compare your systems against them.
From the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, access the Overview dashboard.
Navigate to → .
Click .
In the window that opens, enter a name for the baseline.
You can create a baseline from scratch, in which case you must enter each fact by hand.
You can copy an existing baseline, if you have one.
Finally, if you have a system already configured to reflect the baseline, you can copy the facts from an existing system or historical profile.
If you create a baseline from an existing system or historical profile, use the following procedure:
Select a system or historical profile from the list that is added to the window.
Click .
To compare the baseline to a system, use the following procedure:
Navigate to → .
When finding differences between systems, instead of comparing two systems, select the baseline and a system from the web UI.
You can use the Policies component to create alerts to notify you when certain things change on your managed hosts. You can define the condition you want to monitor, based on facts collected by the platform, and trigger a notification when the condition is met. Typically, the notification is either sent by email or by triggering a webhook that you have already configured.
For example, your security team might need to know if a certain RPM package has been installed on one of your systems. You can set up a policy that monitors the installed_packages system fact, which lists the installed RPM packages on a system. If new facts are gathered for a managed host and that sensitive RPM package is present on that system, then the policy triggers the notification.
Note
See the References section for more information about the system facts and operators that you can use as conditions for these policies.
Use the following procedure to create a new policy:
From the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, access the Overview dashboard, and then navigate to to display the page.
Click .
Click , and then click .
Enter a name for the policy in the field. Optionally, enter a description for the policy. Click when done.
Define the conditions for your policy in the field. Click to validate that your condition is well structured, and then click .
Click .
Click and then click .
Click the switch to enable it.
References
Remediating Configuration Issues Using Advisor and Ansible Playbooks
Comparing System Configurations and Baselines in Red Hat Insights Inventory
Monitoring and Reacting to Configuration Changes Using Policies
For more information about using Ansible facts in Policies, refer to the Appendix from Monitoring and Reacting to Configuration Changes Using Policies at https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_insights/2022/html-single/monitoring_and_reacting_to_configuration_changes_using_policies/index#assembly-policies-monitoring-appendix-ref-materials
