Automic Automation / Ansible Tower Agent Integration

Ansible Tower is designed as a hub for your automation tasks. The main reasons for using Ansible Tower are the following:

  • Manage credentials.

  • Manage Ansible inventory management more intuitively using the GUI.

  • Manage job templates and job template workflows.

  • Remote execution of simple tasks (add users, restart malfunctioning services, reset passwords on any host or group of hosts in the inventory).

However, while Ansible Tower lets you configure, deploy, update and monitor software, it lacks the powerful orchestrating and scheduling capabilities that Automic Automation offers. With the Automic Automation / Ansible Tower Agent Integration you can manage thousands of servers and databases, pass parameters between playbooks, create Workflows that consists of multiple playbooks, and much more. Automic Automation does the JSON parsing and processing of these complex scenarios.

The Ansible Tower Agent Integration gives you full access to Automic Automation's powerful workload automation, scheduling and monitoring capabilities. You can create Automic Automation Start Template jobs that represent Ansible Tower job or workflow templates. You can then combine them with other Automic Automation objects and/or with other Agent integration Jobs to orchestrate processes in hybrid environments.

Once the Agent is installed, both the Agent and all necessary components are configured (Connection object, Jobs) and your Automic Automation Workflows are defined, you can start executing, working with and monitoring your cloud processes directly from Automic Automation. Automic Automation pulls the information from your Ansible Tower solution and knows which tasks are included in the Ansible Tower workflows. In Automic Automation's Process Monitoring perspective you can access the Workflow monitor, where all the tasks and their remote statuses are displayed. When the jobs and workflows end successfully in the cloud environment, the Workflow monitor shows this information too. Automic Automation also provides downloadable execution reports.

Architecture of the Automic Automation / Ansible Tower Agent Integration

The Ansible Tower Agent communicates with Automic Automation through the JCP, which is one type of Automic Automation server processes. The Ansible Tower Agent communicates with the cloud solution through Connection objects that contain all the necessary connection parameters (including credentials). This communication is based on the REST APIs provided by the cloud solution. The Agent can be installed on any machine in your environment or as a pod in Kubernetes or docker container.

For more information about the Automic Automation server processes, see Multi-Server Operations in the Automic Automation product documentation.

Release Cycles

The release cycles of the Ansible Tower Agent Integration are independent of the Automic Automation ones.

The Ansible Tower Agent Integration orchestrates processes across multiple cloud platforms. The release cycles for the integrations with each of those cloud platforms are also independent of one another.

For more information, see Compatibility Information.

Important Consideration

To be able to implement (install and configure) and work with the Agent Integration, a sound knowledge of Automic Automation is required. If you are new to Automic Automation, we strongly recommend that you take the following courses before beginning with this integration:

For all users:

For administrators:

For developers and object designers

 

This documentation describes how to set up the integration and how to work with Automic Automation Start Template Jobs: