ansible.utils VS ara

We're happy to announce the following networking collection updates: * ansible.utils 2.8.0 has been released with new features (changelog) * cisco.iosxr 4.0.3 has been released with bugfixes (changelog) * cisco.nxos 4.0.1 has been released with bugfixes (changelog) * junipernetworks.junos 4.1.0 has been released with new features (changelog)

The ipaddr filters are broken in ansible.netcommon 2.6.0 release as we have recently migrated ipaddr filters from ansible.netcommon to ansible.utils. We have released utils 2.5.2 and netcommon 2.6.1 which fixed these two issues (ansible.netcommon#375, ansible.utils#148). For the FQDN issue, the ansible-core team has already merged the fix. This fix will be available in the March 28th release, which means that users of non fqdn ipaddr filters can use the old netcommon collection version 2.5.1 as a workaround until the next ansible-core release (March 28th) by the core-team. For fqdn ipaddr filters, users can use the latest versions of any of ansible.netcommon (2.6.1) or ansible.utils (2.5.2).

We hope you'll enjoy part1 and part2, and take a look at the collection and source repo where we'd love to hear your suggestions on how to improve the collection.

Also handy for this and other IP related tests, the Ansible.utils collection https://github.com/ansible-collections/ansible.utils /u/CertifiedKnowNothing

See: https://www.ansible.com/blog/using-new-ansible-utilities-for-operational-state-management-and-remediation https://github.com/ansible-collections/ansible.utils/blob/main/plugins/sub_plugins/cli_parser/ttp_parser.py

Also, I've not done it this way, but I believe this could be short-cut even further using: https://github.com/ansible-collections/ansible.utils/blob/main/plugins/sub_plugins/cli_parser/ttp_parser.py#L23-L28

Look into AWX as an alternative to Tower. If you just want better reporting on runs, check out ARA or callback plugins.

Also worth considering is ARA for playbook reporting, and then whatever you want for orchestration (Jenkins, Azure Devops, Rundeck, etc).

Why not use ara?

For general recording of playbook activity with a web dashboard, ARA works really well.

If you don’t want any UI / access control then you can also look at ARA - https://ara.recordsansible.org This works as a callback plugin to capture the job run data.

I'm not sure how to interpret running 100 debug messages (https://github.com/ansible-community/ara/blob/master/tests/integration/benchmark_tasks.yaml) into real life performance. Mitogen's Benchmark used either 100 times a "hostname" command on the target machine (https://github.com/mitogen-hq/mitogen/blob/master/tests/ansible/bench/loop-100-items.yml) or running the DebOps project (https://github.com/debops/debops-playbooks/blob/master/playbooks/common.yml) for some sorta real-world module usage.

Reach out on Mastodon or see this issue on GitHub.

There has been discussions about a prometheus exporter for monitoring, metrics and eventually fancy graphs in grafana but work on this has not started yet: https://github.com/ansible-community/ara/issues/177