Event-Driven Ansible - ChatOps - From Chat to Action

Leo
Wed, 06 Sep 2023 15:28:02 +0000
Blog

September 1, 2023 by Nuno Martins

Like any well-rounded individual, in times of intense concentration, you will find me talking to myself in search of some hidden knowledge that I might have received in a dream, or perhaps quoting something from a fantasy novel about wizards and creatures in an attempt to fix a problem. Unfortunately, wearing a robe and shouting “Repairo Network!” while pointing my pen toward the device has yet to help in any situation.

At the 2023 AnsibleFest, as part of the main stage demonstration, I used the magic of Event-Driven Ansible to integrate ChatOps in our fictional infrastructure drama. ChatOps is not new, but I think it’s a pretty cool way to make changes or interact with your infrastructure.

We know that Event-Driven Ansible requires a source for events, a list of conditions which we call rulesets, and ultimately an action to match those conditions, which makes it perfect to use as a chatbot-type system.

For me to have a heart-to-heart with my beloved network, I will need to configure my chat as a source of events for Event-Driven Ansible, and to do this, I will use the webhook source plugin, which is part of the ansible.eda collection. Many enterprise chat platforms provide a method to send and receive webhooks to trigger words in the chat, which is perfect for what we want to do.

Event-Driven Ansible ChatOps mechanism

We will use an outgoing webhook from the chat application to Event-Driven Ansible.

Event-Driven Ansible will match the payload against its defined conditions.

Once a condition is met, the corresponding action will take place.

Feedback notification will be sent from the action as an incoming webhook to the chat.

Now that the fundamentals are done, let’s look at how we could use this. […]

Continue reading the article here:

redhat.com

Event-Driven Ansible - ChatOps - From Chat to Action

Implement Automated ChatOps: Learn how to use event-driven automation to take action from chat information.

You are welcome to reply to this topic to comment or discuss

2 posts - 2 participants

Read full topic