Parrots are smart dinosaurs

Once upon a time...

What was challenging

• Thousands of CI jobs across hundreds of projects
• Spread across multiple instances of jenkins and Zuul
• Searching through thousands of lines of console
• What's the problem ? Is it related to my patch ?
• Sharing specific tasks with others
• Onboarding new contributors

What we tried

• Increasing verbosity (ansible-playbook -vvv)
• Enabling the profile_tasks callback
• Adding the human_log callback (pretty printing JSON)
• A callback that wrote results in HTML tables

Ansible console output

Ansible console output (verbose)

Ansible console output (very verbose)

Spoiler

A bit less verbose

ARA Records Ansible playbooks and makes them easier to understand and troubleshoot.

It's another recursive acronym.

How does it work ?

Recording workflow

Ansible callback plugins

# https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/devel/lib/ansible/plugins/callback

def v2_on_any(self, *args, **kwargs):
def v2_runner_on_failed(self, result, ignore_errors=False):
def v2_runner_on_ok(self, result):
def v2_runner_on_skipped(self, result):
def v2_runner_on_unreachable(self, result):
def v2_playbook_on_start(self, playbook):
def v2_playbook_on_task_start(self, task, is_conditional):
def v2_playbook_on_handler_task_start(self, task):
def v2_playbook_on_play_start(self, play):
def v2_playbook_on_stats(self, stats):
def v2_playbook_on_include(self, included_file):

# [...]

Ansible callback plugins

def v2_playbook_on_start(self, playbook):
  path = os.path.abspath(playbook._file_name)

  # Potentially sanitize some user-specified keys
  for argument in self.ignored_arguments:
    if argument in cli_options:
      cli_options[argument] = "Not saved by ARA as configured by 'ignored_arguments'"

  # Create the playbook
  self.playbook = self.client.post("/api/v1/playbooks",
    ansible_version=ansible_version,
    arguments=cli_options,
    status="running",
    path=path
  )

Getting started

Offline with the default sqlite backend

# Install Ansible and ARA (with API server dependencies) for the current user
python3 -m pip install --user ansible "ara[server]"

# Configure Ansible to use the ARA callback plugin
export ANSIBLE_CALLBACK_PLUGINS="$(python3 -m ara.setup.callback_plugins)"

# Run an Ansible playbook
ansible-playbook playbook.yaml

# Use the CLI to see recorded playbooks
ara playbook list

# Start the built-in development server to browse recorded results
ara-manage runserver

Getting started

With a containerized API server

# Create a directory for a volume to store settings and a sqlite database
mkdir -p ~/.ara/server

# Start an API server with podman from the image on Quay.io:
podman run --detach --tty --name ara \
    --volume ~/.ara/server:/opt/ara:z \
    -p 8000:8000 \
    quay.io/recordsansible/ara-api:latest

# or with Docker and Docker Hub:
docker run --detach --tty --name ara \
    --volume ~/.ara/server:/opt/ara:z \
    -p 8000:8000 \
    docker.io/recordsansible/ara-api:latest

Getting started

Configuring the callback to send data to our server

# Install Ansible and ARA (without API server dependencies) for the current user
python3 -m pip install --user ansible ara

# Configure Ansible to use the ARA callback plugin
export ANSIBLE_CALLBACK_PLUGINS="$(python3 -m ara.setup.callback_plugins)"

# Set up the ARA callback to know where the API server is located
export ARA_API_CLIENT="http"
export ARA_API_SERVER="http://127.0.0.1:8000"

# Run an Ansible playbook
ansible-playbook playbook.yaml

# Browse http://127.0.0.1:8000 to view the reporting interface

Live demo

Recording an Ansible playbook from AWX

1. Deploy a kubernetes node with k3s-ansible
2. Run an ara server to receive results from AWX
3. Deploy AWX with awx-operator
4. Configure AWX to record results with ara
5. Run a playbook with AWX and see if it works

Another live demo

demo.recordsansible.org

Deployed with the ara Ansible collection with gunicorn, nginx and mariadb

The project could use your help

• https://github.com/ansible-community/ara
• https://github.com/ansible-community/ara-collection
• https://github.com/ansible-community/ara-infra
• https://github.com/ansible-community/ara-web (broken)
• https://ara.readthedocs.org