Feature Spotlight: System Tracking

October 8, 2015 by Tim Gerla

Ansible_Feature_Spotlight

During the second installment of our webinar series about Ansible Tower features, we highlighted system tracking, a functionality which was just added to Tower with our 2.2. release.

System Tracking was created to give administrators the necessary tools to audit and verify that machines are in compliance. Use the tool to see how a machine has changed over time, or compare machines in your cluster to see how they are different.

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For example, you may need to determine whether a set of machines had a security patch applied, or determine when a patch was applied. The System Tracking tools can help you do that. They can also help you evaluate your infrastructure for compliance against specific requirements, and periodically examine machines for unexpected changes.

When you run a scan, you’ll be able to see packages, services, and Ansible facts side-by-side for comparison. All differences in Ansible facts are highlighted in red for easy reference.

You can also expand this function by writing your own Ansible module that gathers the custom facts you want to see. Simply implement a module that returns the “ansible_facts” key, as described in the Ansible documentation.

Our goal with system tracking was to empower you to do something with all of the facts gathered by Tower. In future releases, we’ll be increasing its capabilities to make your work even more effective and efficient.

Missed the webinar? Watch it on demand now.


You can try System Tracking Features in a free Tower Trail.

Then mark your calendar for our upcoming webinars.

 

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Tim Gerla

Tim has more than 10 years of experience building and selling infrastructure software, including software engineering, architecture, and sales engineering. Most recently he led a team of solutions architects at Eucalyptus as the Director of Solutions Engineering. Tim holds a B.S. in Information Technology Management from the University of Minnesota.


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