How about having Ansible return the setup file back to the manager, i.e.
to the machine invoking Ansible, storing it in a configurable directory,
a little bit like the FETCH module does? That would certainly fulfill
my needs nicely.
Running /usr/bin/ansible to invoke the setup module with the --tree option will do this, but it's not something play books do. May be good enough? Brings me to this point:
=== IDEA ==
I've been toying with the idea of making an optional (configurable) key/value store integration where we save those as they progress over time, as well as pass/fail results and things like that. The idea is ansible facts have a lot of interesting data where I want to view and do interesting things with that data as it changes over time. In some sense, it's monitoring, it other senses, it is inventory and trending.
I'd be curious what folks thought might be interesting/useful.
graphite seems to be popular though I'd also like things I can query and ask questions about (like Riak or Hadoop maybe).
I don't particularly want to write my own visualization web app, RRD implementation, or anything like that… and I'm definitely not adding any new required components. If this exists, it would probably look to see if /usr/bin/ansible-data-helper (a separate project) was installed and that program would have a configuration file, and have configurable plugins that spoke to multiple data storage endpoints.
So maybe graphite (carbon?) is one thing it can speak to, and maybe Riak or Hadoop is another, and we start with just one that gets us the most shiny things.
Riak is super easy to use from a REST API perspective and I also think we have some Basho folks interested in Ansible. Yet we also have some folks doing things with using Ansible with Hadoop!
I want to be able to answer questions like "which nodes have ever ran this version of this package", and things like that.
If done correctly, this tool might even be somewhat generic, allowing you to funnel data to it in a special format from multiple applications, so it is effectively a systems-management data-store abstraction layer.
I'm not trying to get enterprisey, really I'm not… but that seems like it would be an incredibly cool thing to have and Ansible has a lot of data it isn't making full use of yet.
--Michael