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Sign up[Meta] User survey: Are you using ARA ? What is your use case ? #103
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Hi! I'm using ARA 1.x, for the advanced logging, tracing and debugging capabilities (even when compared to Jenkins, AWX/Tower or Rundeck) - especially when working with multiple playbooks and systems. Simply put: ansible logs are so much more readable thanks to Ara! Wish list? Perhaps better integration with AWX/Tower or Jenkins, though you can already to that. Maybe improved authentication and authorization for enterprise space? That's something Tower excels at, so perhaps a tower integration would solve that. Also, documenting how to use ARA with molecule - using raw_env_vars ANSIBLE_CALLBACK_PLUGINS. There are a few magical tools (ara, molecule, ansbile-lint) that make life so much easier. I think the biggest item on my wish list would be awareness. Perhaps even inclusion in the documentation and official Red Hat material, such as DO447 - Ansible Best Practices :-). Thanks for developing Ara, and Happy New Year! |
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+1 we are already an AWX shop. Having defined and documented way of running ARA alongside AWX would be a big help and get those people who might dread having to support them as totally different/side-by-side. |
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I use ARA a lot at customers sites, when they don't want the complexity of Tower or AWX, but must be able to have some playbook insights. But with the newer versions of ARA ( |
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@tonk oh, I am quite interested in this but it would definitely be easier on run on EL8 or perhaps in containers. I unfortunately won't be at CfgMgmtCamp but would love to watch your presentation if it's recorded ! |
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I am trying to use ARA 1.x to talk to multiple Ansible server. |
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ARA 0.x Using it to show detailed results of tasks in bigger plays mostly during development of modules, plugins, playbooks, etc... Its really nice to use the web UI rather than scrolling through a terminal mess especially on larger plays with many hosts. I'd switch to 1.x, but there isn't the detail task results. There was a WIP change on opendev I believe, but I can't find it now. I'd help code it, but just don't have enough time to learn react/patternfly |
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@tonk, @berendt, @nahun: Appreciate the feedback about ara-web ! It helps emphasize that the frontend needs more attention. You might be interested in a recent blog post where I wrote about the situation of ara-web and the re-introduction of a built-in javascript-less interface in 1.2: https://ara.recordsansible.org/blog/2019/12/31/2019-in-retrospective-for-ara-records-ansible There is also an open issue to disambiguate and clarify what is the purpose and status of the built-in UI vs ara-web: #88 Edit: You can see a live demo of the built-in interface here: https://api.demo.recordsansible.org/ |
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Hi David, being relatively new to ansible, I just ran into ARA few days ago and this is really a very very nice tool. I'm currently doing an evaluation as we plan to use it in several customer automation projects where ansible playbooks will be kicked from ansible tower using the tower API to launch the jobs from a high level workflow...and the whole platform runs on OpenShift4.x. So here is my wish list (some may already be available from u or others as I've not yet completely finalised my eval. and if not we'll come-up with our own implementation of the missing parts)
I'm actually listing here the features I think I can already get, just in case I've been too optimistic or wrong in my eval:
Finally, I'm not sure yet if we can get the following points out of the box (but there are not absolutely mandatory for us to decide/start) using ARA but would be nice to have:
Thx again for writing such great tools and sorry for the length of this post. |
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@fckbo Thanks for the excellent feedback and for telling us about your use case ! Please see answers in-line:
The project doesn't build and publish officially supported containers (yet?) but ara is packaged on both PyPi and Fedora which should hopefully make this relatively simple to do and maintain in the future. I've created an issue to track this: #105
This could be a good contribution to the project ! Maybe we could use the Ansible operator and use our existing roles and playbooks ? I've also created an issue for this: #106
Why would you need the HTTP client in a separate package ? There are two "packages" right now:
The
You mention python 2.7 but also needing it for python 3. Could you expand on this ?
ansible-playbook commands are recorded out of the box but there is an issue opened about documenting how to get it to work with AWX/Tower: #24
Yes, this is supported and integration tested.
Yes, this is supported. Note that there is currently a disparity in the level of information provided by ara-web and the interface built-in to the API server. See my comment above for more info.
In theory this is possible but it is not currently tested or documented. It would be a nice addition to the docs if you are able to get it working.
If you plan on aggregating data from multiple locations into a single instance of ARA, I think it would be a good idea to use labels to tag your playbooks in a way that makes it easier to search for them and filter results.
In theory this is possible since the API server state is kept in the database. I have not tested this myself and would love to hear back from users if they have.
A full blown granular RBAC is currently out of scope. ARA currently supports authentication and requiring authentication for reads or for writes across the entire instance. This gives you the ability to have read-only users and read-write users but doesn't have the concept of granularity to allow certain users (or groups of users) to access only certain playbooks based on different criteria.
Nothing to be sorry about, thanks again |
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David, thx for you comprehensive answer, I've been quite overwhelmed these days and will put back focus on this in the coming weeks. |
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@dmsimard I'm not sure if it will be recorded, I'm in the Ansible room, which is not one of the main rooms. But my sheets will be online, next week (after CfgMgmtCamp) at https;//speakerdeck.com/tonk NTW: On RHEL8/CentOS8 it works out of the box. Checked this last week. |
Hi !
In an effort to better understand what users are doing with ARA, I would be very grateful if you could answer the following questions:
The answers will be useful in determining the direction for future development.
Thank you !