Use Ansible to discover/document an environment

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1

I’m wondering if anyone has any existing playbooks and/or scripts to go through an environment and document the findings.

Basically a way to transform the results from the setup module into a useful CSV would be a good start, but also adding on other facets like lists of patches to be applied, etc would be very useful.

I’ve made use of the setup module to create a directory of hosts files showing the results in YAML, but transforming that into a useful report would take some work and I figure someone out there may have already done it.

2

I’ve done something like this to create an inventory tracking spreadsheet. Haven’t had the chance yet to improve it or convert it into a proper playbook.

The setup module allows you to output facts to a tree structure with a JSON file for each host:

`
$ ansible all -i inventory -u admin -m setup --tree hosts_facts

facts/
├── host_A
├── host_B
├── host_C
├── host_D
└── host_Z

`

I used a command-line utility called jq to parse the JSON. See here: http://xmodulo.com/how-to-parse-json-string-via-command-line-on-linux.html

Then, just had to create a bash script to go through each file and extract the facts that I needed into a csv:

$ cat facts/host_A | jq .ansible_facts.ansible_distribution

3

Hi Jon,

I’m also trying to achieve the same, can you please share if you have made any progress with documenting facts to csv.

4

This project might be a help for you:

https://github.com/fboender/ansible-cmdb

It generates a static site but you can specify your own templates (jinja2 so already familiar) so you could use that to generate different output.

Hope this helps,

jon

5

Yes,
https://github.com/fboender/ansible-cmdb

Is what I settled upon.

Going forward we’re looking at a process to dump the facts into a database that has a web fronted, but for now the ansible-cmdb does fine.

6

Thank you so much for your replies. I tried ansible-cmdb earlier. -t txt_table or -t csv is giving limited columns.
I’m having difficulty in customizing fact columns that show up, should I edit /usr/lib/ansible-cmdb/ansiblecmdb/data/tpl/csv.tpl or txt_table.tpl for customizing?
Sorry not much in to jinja2 templating, but I"ll look at it. Any hints / suggestions will be helpful on how to customize.