Chapter 4. Getting started as an automation operator

Procedure

1. From the navigation panel, select Automation Execution Templates.
2. Select a template to view its details. A default job template is created during your initial setup to help you get started, but you can also create your own.
3. From the Templates page, click the launch icon to run your job template.

Procedure

1. From the navigation panel, select Automation Execution Templates.
2. Select the job template you want to create a survey for.
3. From the Survey tab, click Create survey question.

4. A survey can consist of any number of questions. For each question, enter the following information:

   • Question: The question to ask the user.
   • Optional: Description: A description of what is being asked of the user.
   • Answer variable name: The Ansible variable name to store the user’s response in. This is the variable to be used by the playbook. Variable names cannot contain spaces.

   • Answer type: Choose from the following question types:

     • Text: A single line of text. You can set the minimum and maximum length (in characters) for this answer.
     • Textarea: A multi-line text field. You can set the minimum and maximum length (in characters) for this answer.
     • Password: Responses are treated as sensitive information, much like an actual password is treated. You can set the minimum and maximum length (in characters) for this answer.
     • Multiple Choice (single select): A list of options, of which only one can be selected at a time. Enter the options, one per line, in the Multiple Choice Options field.
     • Multiple Choice (multiple select): A list of options, any number of which can be selected at a time. Enter the options, one per line, in the Multiple Choice Options field.
     • Integer: An integer number. You can set the minimum and maximum length (in characters) for this answer.
     • Float: A decimal number. You can set the minimum and maximum length (in characters) for this answer.
   • Required: Whether or not an answer to this question is required from the user.
   • Minimum length and Maximum length: Specify if a certain length in the answer is required.
   • Default answer: The default answer to the question. This value is pre-filled in the interface and is used if the answer is not provided by the user.

5. Once you have entered the question information, click Create question to add the question.

   The survey question displays in the Survey list. For any question, you can click to edit it.

   Check the box next to each question and click Delete to delete the question, or use the toggle option in the menu bar to enable or disable the survey prompts.

   If you have more than one survey question, click Edit Order to rearrange the order of the questions by clicking and dragging on the grid icon.

6. To add more questions, click Add.

Procedure

1. From the navigation panel, select Automation Execution Infrastructure Inventories. The Inventories window displays a list of inventories that are currently available, along with the following information:

   • Name: The inventory name.

   • Status: The statuses are:

     • Success: The inventory sync completed successfully.
     • Disabled: No inventory source added to the inventory.
     • Error: The inventory source completed with error.
   • Type: Identifies whether the inventory is a standard inventory, a smart inventory, or a constructed inventory.
   • Organization: The organization to which the inventory belongs.
2. Select an inventory name to display the Details page for the inventory, including the inventory’s groups and hosts.

Procedure

1. From the navigation panel, select Automation Execution Jobs.

   The default view is collapsed (Compact) with the job name, status, job type, start, and finish times. You can click the arrow icon to expand and see more information. You can sort this list by various criteria, and perform a search to filter the jobs of interest.

2. From this screen, you can complete the following tasks:

   • View a job’s details and standard output.
   • Relaunch jobs.

   • Remove selected jobs.

     The relaunch operation only applies to relaunches of playbook runs and does not apply to project or inventory updates, system jobs, or workflow jobs.

Procedure

1. From the navigation panel, select Automation Execution Jobs.

2. Select a job. This takes you to the Output view for that job, where you can filter job output by these criteria:

   • The Search output option allows you to search by keyword.
   • The Event option enables you to filter by the events of interest, such as errors, host failures, host retries, and items skipped. You can include as many events in the filter as necessary.