ara VS ansible-job-report

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

If you want an example of this in action, I made an example that does what you are describing.

If you want custom feedback of job status, I have employed this method before. It's a little cumbersome for everyday use, but for big or important jobs it's one way to get a custom report of task output and host failures. Or if you're feeling extra, you can do the full version.

For RHEL servers, we use reposync to mirror patches locally, and then install them with yum. We drive the process with a series of Ansible playbooks. We have some optional host vars or group vars we can declare to tune the patching behavior per-host, or to handle custom patching scenarios. Our patching process generates a report similar to this one.

I uploaded a stripped-down version of it here, if you need ideas. More details and examples here.

I made something similar a while back to report on patch activity; try this example for some ideas.

To generate a patch report, one option is to use a jinja template to compile an HTML-formatted email. For a working example to play with, see this github.

You can generate a "pretty" HTML report using a Jinja template. This github example may be a little overkill for your needs, but it shows how you can assemble a report with per-host facts and task status using Jinja templates.

As you mentioned, using Jinja to generate HTML for job reports. When renovating our script-based patching process for Linux, we had to choose between Redhat Satellite and rolling our own. We found that Satellite was overkill for our needs, and not worth the maintenance fuss and licensing costs. The biggest draw of Satellite for management was reporting... so I tortured Jinja into making a pretty CSS-styled report at the end of our patching playbook. Everyone is happy, and we have one less tool to maintain!

For our patch reporting, we run the yum check-update command and put the output in an HTML template that is emailed to groups. The report we assemble is similar to this.