Event-Driven Ansible

Use event-driven automation to reduce manual tasks, deliver more efficient IT operations, and free your teams to focus on innovation.

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As a part of Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform, Event-Driven Ansible provides the event-handling capability needed to automate time-consuming tasks and respond to changing conditions in any IT domain. 

Event-Driven Ansible can process events containing discrete intelligence about conditions in the IT environment, determine the appropriate response to the event, then execute automated actions to address or remediate the event. 

IT service management tasks—such as ticket enhancement, remediation, and user management—are ideal starting points, but Event-Driven Ansible is flexible enough to automate a variety of tasks across your IT environment. 

Introducing Event-Driven Ansible. Video duration: 1:22.

Features and benefits

Automate with a powerful, unified platform 

Use event-driven automation to work smarter and deliver IT services with precision. Choose the automation style—manual or automatic—needed for a particular action, all with a single, common platform.  

Empower innovation

Free teams to do their best and most critical work, so they can help deliver better value to the business from IT, whether it’s through applications, networks, the cloud, or the edge.


Boost speed and responsiveness 

Address problems rapidly, before they become urgent issues. Improve mean-time-to-resolution. Reduce time spent on low-level tasks to optimize the use of valuable resources for other priorities.

Implement with flexibility

Easily apply event-driven automation to diverse needs. Subscribe to many event sources. Use YAML to write conditional rules that implement actions in the ways you want—and even call existing playbooks or templates.

Adapt easily across IT

Automate repetitive tasks for networking, edge, infrastructure, DevOps, security, cloud, and more, with a single automation platform.

Ensure consistency

Codify team knowledge in Ansible Rulebooks to act in the same way every time. Minimize human errors that are often caused by high-volume repetitive tasks and tired staff. Address configuration drift as soon as it occurs.

Get started with Event-Driven Ansible

INTERACTIVE LABS

Take these self-paced, interactive labs to get familiar with Event-Driven Ansible so you can more easily apply it to your needs.
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EVENT-DRIVEN AUTOMATION STRATEGY 

How can event-driven automation help you meet stakeholder expectations and IT challenges? 
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IN-DEPTH WEBINAR 

Register for this free webinar to watch a detailed Event-Driven Ansible demonstration and learn how to get started.
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How does Event-Driven Ansible work?

Event-Driven Ansible connects sources of events with corresponding actions via rules. Ansible Rulebooks define the event source and explain—in the form of conditional “if-this-then-that” instructions—the action to take when the event occurs. Based on the rulebook you design, Event-Driven Ansible recognizes the specified event, matches it with the appropriate action, and automatically executes it. Actions can optionally  include executing existing Ansible Playbooks, templates, or modules to extend value from your trusted automation.

  

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Sources

All the sources of event data you want to see. 

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Rules

What you will create using Event-Driven Ansible.
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Actions

When a condition or event is met, the Ansible Rulebook executes.

 

Let’s consider an example. Your observability tool—the event source—is watching network routers and discovers that a router is not responding, recognizing this as an event. Event-Driven Ansible receives this event, finds the corresponding Ansible Rulebook, and matches the event with the desired action—which could be re-applying a configuration, resetting the router, or creating a service ticket. Event-Driven Ansible triggers the instructions in the rulebook and the router is reset, restoring it to normal function. What’s more, this can happen at any time—even at 2 AM, while the network engineer stays asleep.

 

Ansible Rulebook CLI

This command line interface runs Ansible Rulebooks. It monitors events and delegates the execution of playbooks to Ansible Automation Platform’s existing tooling.

Event-Driven Ansible controller

This tool offers the management, scaling, and observability functionality that enables Event-Driven Ansible to be used effectively in the cloud, on-premise, or across hybrid environments.

Event-Driven Ansible Content Collections

These content collections offer event-source plugin code for a number of provided event sources, as well as Ansible Rulebooks to get new event-driven automation projects started quickly. 
Get a quick breakdown of how you can use Event-Driven Ansible for server provisioning. Video duration: 3:12. 

FAQs

Event-Driven Ansible can help you:

  • Deliver more value with responsive IT services. 
  • Automate IT decision making.
  • Automate actions based on data from numerous sources of events. 
  • Streamline IT workflows, especially those that extend beyond normal working hours. 
  • Improve security and consistency, while reducing downtime.
  • Automate routine tasks to free your IT teams for high-value work.
  • Respond with speed and efficiency, while improving work-life balance.

Red Hat often recommends a “start small, think big” approach to automation, and Event-Driven Ansible is no exception. You can begin by using it to enhance tickets, then progress to completing some simple remediation steps or creating a notification when a certain condition is present in your environment. Then try it for basic user management tasks—like resetting a password—or create a simple self-service model. From there, you can try more advanced use cases: configuration behavior management, more advanced remediation, auto-triggering backups when a change takes place, self-service provisioning, or using an automated GitOps model.  

Red Hat and our partners have created—and are creating—Ansible Content Collections that can help you jumpstart new Event-Driven Ansible projects across your multivendor IT environment. As a subscriber, you can access this certified and supported content in the Ansible automation hub.

Resources 

TECHNICAL BLOG

Learn what’s new with Event-Driven Ansible

Read these blog posts to find more technical details, learn how to create event source plugins, access how-to guides, and get info about available integrations with partner tools.  

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VIDEOS

Event-Driven Ansible: rules and rulebooks

Watch this playlist to learn how to write Ansible Rulebooks, see a demo, understand server provisioning, use GitOps models, and get familiar with other basics.

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CHECKLIST

5 ways Event-Driven Ansible can help you achieve more, faster 

Learn more about some of the ways you can use Event-Driven Ansible to start streamlining IT processes and making work easier across your organization. 

Get the checklist→

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