ARA Records Ansible for Ansible Reporting

Discover ARA, a powerful tool that tracks Ansible activities and provides comprehensive overviews, enhancing your automation experience. Learn how to install and use ARA to monitor changes, audit compliance, and troubleshoot effectively.

Original post: https://blog.while-true-do.io/spotlight-ara-records-ansible/

Introduction

Are you an avid Ansible user? Do you find yourself utilizing Ansible in pipelines or collaborating across teams? If so, tracking changes and keeping tabs on your last runs might be a priority. Enter ARA, a powerful tool that records Ansible activities and provides a comprehensive overview. In this article, we’ll delve into ARA, exploring how this tool can elevate your Ansible experience.

Ansible Overview

Ansible stands as an open-source automation software designed for tasks ranging from small-scale use cases to managing entire cloud ecosystems. Using minimal YAML configurations, you can automate processes such as package installations, network configurations, or even Kubernetes deployments on platforms like AWS.

ARA — ARA Records Ansible

ARA steps in as an Ansible reporting solution, capturing ansible and ansible-playbook commands regardless of their execution location or method. Achieving this functionality involves integrating a simple callback plugin into your existing content.

Reasons to Use ARA

Let’s take a closer look at ARA and understand its potential benefits. The first question that may arise is, “Why should I use ARA?” While ARA isn’t mandatory for running Ansible or enhancing playbook performance, it provides transparency into the execution process. ARA proves invaluable for:

Compliance Audits

Change Management

CI/CD Tracking (e.g., GitOps)

Self-Service Portal Use Cases

Troubleshooting and Diagnosing

While not essential, ARA proves immensely helpful in various scenarios, offering a detailed insight into the execution timeline, failures, and changes made.

Installing the ARA Server

For those accustomed to running most services in containers, ARA follows suit. The initial setup involves spinning up an ARA container for testing purposes, as Playbooknstrated below:

With Podman

``bash


$ podman run --name api-server --detach --tty \
  --volume ara:/opt/ara:z -p 8000:8000 \
  docker.io/recordsansible/ara-api:latest



With Docker

`bash


docker run --name api-server --detach --tty \
  --volume ara:/opt/ara:z -p 8000:8000 \
  docker.io/recordsansible/ara-api:latest



This setup is suitable for testing; for production environments, proper authentication and other configurations should be considered.

Running Playbooks
Now that ARA is up and running, let’s explore how it works. ARA functions by requiring a playbook or any Ansible command to make a callback to the ARA API server. Configuration involves setting up Ansible on the control node to use the ARA callback plugin.

Creating a project directory and installing Ansible in a Python virtual environment can be achieved with the following commands:

``bash

Create project directory

$ mkdir myProject

Change into it

$ cd myProject/

Create a Python virtualenv

$ python -m venv .venv

Activate the new virtualenv

$ source .venv/bin/activate