Chapter 1. Automation controller overview

Automation controller enables you to watch playbooks run in real time, seeing each host as they check in. You can go back and explore the results for specific tasks and hosts in great detail, search for specific plays or hosts and see just those results, or locate errors that need to be corrected.

Automation controller enables you to access your favorite projects and re-trigger execution from the web interface. Automation controller asks for input variables, prompts for your credentials, starts and monitors jobs, and displays results and host history.

Automation controller enables you to:

Automation controller records the history of operations and who made them, including objects edited and jobs launched.

If you want to give any user or team permissions to use a job template, you can assign permissions directly on the job template. Credentials are full objects in the automation controller RBAC system, and can be assigned to multiple users or teams for use.

Automation controller includes an auditor type. A system-level auditor can see all aspects of the systems automation, but does not have permission to run or change automation. An auditor is useful for a service account that scrapes automation information from the REST API.

Automation controller includes a powerful optional provisioning callback feature that enables nodes to request configuration on demand. This is an ideal solution for a cloud auto-scaling scenario and includes the following features:

The automation controller REST API is the ideal RESTful API for a systems management application, with all resources fully discoverable, paginated, searchable, and well modeled. A styled API browser enables API exploration from the API root at http://<server name>/api/, showing off every resource and relation. Everything that can be done in the user interface can be done in the API.

Ansible Automation Platform can backup and restore your systems or systems, making it easy for you to backup and replicate your instance as required.

By including an Ansible Galaxy requirements.yml file in your project directory, automation controller automatically fetches the roles your playbook needs from Galaxy, GitHub, or your local source control. For more information, see Ansible Galaxy Support.

Dynamic inventory support is available for OpenStack. This enables you to target any of the virtual machines or images running in your OpenStack cloud.

For more information, see Openstack.

Use remote command execution to perform a simple tasks, such as adding a single user, updating a single security vulnerability, or restarting a failing service. Any task that you can describe as a single Ansible play can be run on a host or group of hosts in your inventory, enabling you to manage your systems quickly and easily. Because of an RBAC engine and detailed audit logging, you know which user has completed a specific task.

You can collect facts using the fact caching feature. For more information, see Fact Caching.

Keep track of the status of your automation.

You can configure the following notifications:

The following notification sources are supported:

You can also customize notification messages for each of the preceding notification types.

Automation controller supports the following integrations:

For more information, see Red Hat Satellite 6.

For more information, see Setting up Insights Remediations.

Custom Ansible environment support enables you to have different Ansible environments and specify custom paths for different teams and jobs.

Automation controller supports:

LDAP and SAML support enable you to integrate your enterprise account information in a more flexible manner.

Token-based authentication permits authentication of third-party tools and services with automation controller through integrated OAuth 2 token support.

Run-time management of cluster groups enables configurable scaling.

To model your complex provisioning, deployment, and orchestration workflows, you can use automation controller expanded workflows in several ways:

For more information, see Workflows in automation controller

Take a fact gathering or configuration job running across thousands of machines and divide it into slices that can be distributed across your automation controller cluster for increased reliability, faster job completion, and improved cluster use.

For example, you can change a parameter across 15,000 switches at scale, or gather information across your multi-thousand-node RHEL estate.

For more information, see Job Slicing.

Automation controller deploys and runs in restricted modes such as FIPS.

Many large organizations have instances shared among many organizations. To ensure that one organization cannot use all the licensed hosts, this feature enables superusers to set a specified upper limit on how many licensed hosts can be allocated to each organization. The automation controller algorithm factors changes in the limit for an organization and the number of total hosts across all organizations. Inventory updates fail if an inventory synchronization brings an organization out of compliance with the policy. Additionally, superusers are able to over-allocate their licenses, with a warning.

The following inventory plugins are used from upstream collections:

With a secret management system, external credentials are stored and supplied for use in automation controller so you need not provide them directly.