ansible cmdb? Whats the recommended way to store facts for later retrieval?

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Hi,

I’m trying to set up a MySQL DB to hold all the ansible facts I produce from “ansible -m setup” (on lots of remote hosts), Store each .json file of each server in a directory but I’m having trouble finding a place to store them.

What do I want to do:
Well I’ve come from a puppet background, and one of the great things about puppet was puppetDB. I could query the DB for all sorts of facts (from facter including custom facts) and join them together. It was very powerful and I could get answers about my server estate quickly. So what I want is a way to setup the same thing in Ansible. Basically, to know how many of “something” I have in my estate (of 1000+ nodes) without having to use ansible to visit each one to find the answer.

What have I done so far:
I’ve played with https://github.com/fboender/ansible-cmdb
It’s a great tool and sort of does what I want but it doesn’t list out all the fields in the DB that are in the .json file.

I get these:

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Hi Dennis

Does it have to be MySQL? The reason I ask, is that there are various cache plugins available: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/plugins/cache.html#plugin-list
One such plugin is, for example, redis. You could use that and then the redis module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.5/plugins/lookup/redis.html in playbooks to retrieve facts.

BUT, if you are going to all this trouble, then I would start looking at AWX/Tower as that has inbuilt fact caching. Why reinvent the wheel.

Regards
Phil.

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Thanks for your reply Phil.

I tried the redis option for fact caching but I’m not able to query redis for the data, only use it in my playbooks.

I think you’re right though. Its alot of effort so I’ll probably try AWX and see if that fits the bill.

Cheers.