When are we going to be able to create Smart Inventories and keep the hosts grouped? It’s been nearly two years since this issue was opened:
https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/1999
We have a large inventory of 40k+ servers, all grouped by ownership, application, environment, function, etc… and it’s a critical requirement to be able to have dynamic Smart Inventories that can limit an inventory to a particular owner, but still retain the application, environment, and function groups. Without this functionality, Smart Inventories are useless for us, as it erases any ability Ansible has for orchestration.
I took a dive into the code (awx/main/models/inventory.py) and it’s clear that it’s a herculean task to retain groups in a Smart Inventory (although I was able to hack a partial workaround together based on the groups in the parent inventory determined by the host filter, but it’s incredibly brittle, because a Smart Inventory doesn’t necessarily reference any particular parent inventory.)
But the bottom line is, this is an essential feature of the platform that has been noted as missing for two years, and we don’t have any visibility on future developments in this area. Are there any AWX people here that can speak to a roadmap for this feature?
Hey Philip,
it’s clear that it’s a herculean task
Yep, it is that, and we’ve been busy working on many other herculean tasks in the meantime. There’s no current roadmap that I’m aware of for this feature - if any planning or progress is made on it, it’ll be communicated and tracked on the GitHub issue you referenced:
https://github.com/ansible/awx/issues/1999
Thank you SO MUCH Ryan!!! it’s good to get any response whether on a GitHub issue, or IRC, or here… (although IRC responses tend to drift into the past.) If I can be of any assistance on reaching a conclusion, please let me know. I’m an employee of a large company that is a RedHat partner (although we are currently using AWX, not Tower) and have a vested interest in reaching a solution.
Hello,
Just a suggestion, maybe you could have an inventory per owner. If the owners are teams and not too many, of course.
Nuno Jordão
Thanks Nuno, but that still doesn’t address the underlying issue. Even if the inventories were created for each owner, then they might still want to create a Smart Inventory for a particular fact, and then once again lose the ability to orchestrate across servers grouped by function.
For now, the only realistic solution (for us) is to automate the creation of multiple inventories as slices across several different dimensions.