Centralize your Automation Logs with Ansible Tower and Splunk Enterprise

For many IT teams, automation is a core component these days. But automation is not something on it’s own - it is a part of a puzzle and needs to interact with the surrounding IT. So one way to grade automation is how well it integrates with other tooling of the IT ecosystem - like the central logging infrastructure. After all, through the central logging the IT team can quickly survey what is happening, where, and what the state of it is.

The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a solution to build and operate automation at scale. As part of the platform, Ansible Tower integrates well with external logging solutions, such as Splunk, and it is easy to set that up. In this blog post we will demonstrate how to perform the necessary configurations in both Splunk and Ansible Tower to let them work well together.

Setup of Splunk

The first step is to get Splunk up and running. You can download a Splunk RPM after you register yourself at the Splunk home page.

After the registration, download the rpm and perform the installation:

$ rpm -ivh splunk-8.0.3-a6754d8441bf-linux-2.6-x86_64.rpm
warning: splunk-8.0.3-a6754d8441bf-linux-2.6-x86_64.rpm:  Continue reading

Red Hat Ansible Tower Monitoring: Using Prometheus + Node Exporter + Grafana

A crucial piece of automation is ensuring that it runs flawlessly. Automation Analytics can help by providing insight into health state and organizational statistics. However, there is often the need to monitor the current state of  Ansible Tower. Luckily, Ansible Tower does provide metrics via the API, and they can easily be fed into Grafana.

This blog post will outline how to monitor Ansible Tower environments by feeding Ansible Tower and operating system metrics into Grafana by using node_exporter & Prometheus.

To reach that goal we configure Ansible Tower metrics for Prometheus to be viewed via Grafana and we will use node_exporter to export the operating system metrics to an operating system (OS)  dashboard in Grafana. Note that we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as the OS running Ansible Tower here. The data flow is outlined below:

As you see, Grafana looks for data in Prometheus. Prometheus itself collects the data in its database by importing them from node_exporters and from the Ansible Tower APIs.

In this blog post we assume a cluster of three Ansible Tower instances and an external database. Also please note that this blog post assumes an already installed instance of Prometheus and Grafana.

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