15. Inventories¶

15.3.1. Add permissions¶

The Permissions tab allows you to review, grant, edit, and remove associated permissions for users as well as team members. To assign permissions to a particular user for this resource:

1. Click the Permissions tab.

2. Click the button to open the Add Users/Teams window.

3. Specify the users or teams that will have access then assign them specific roles:

1. Click to select one or multiple check boxes beside the name(s) of the user(s) or team(s) to select them.

Note

You can select multiple users and teams at the same time by navigating between the Users and Teams tabs without saving.

After selections are made, the window expands to allow you to select a role from the drop-down menu list for each user or team you chose.

The example above shows options associated with inventories. Different resources have different options available:

• Admin allows read, run, and edit privileges (applies to all resources)

• Use allows use of a resource in a job template (applies all resources except job templates)

• Update allows updating of project via the SCM Update (applies to projects and inventories)

• Ad Hoc allows use of Ad Hoc commands (applies to inventories)

• Execute allows launching of a job template (applies to job templates)

• Read allows view-only access (applies to all resources)

Tip

Use the Key button in the roles selection pane to display a description of each of the roles. For more information, refer to the Roles section of this guide.

2. Select the role to apply to the selected user or team.

Note

You can assign roles to multiple users and teams by navigating between the Users and Teams tabs without saving.

4. Review your role assignments for each user and team.

5. Click Save when done, and the Add Users/Teams window closes to display the updated roles assigned for each user and team.

   

To remove Permissions for a particular user, click the Disassociate (x) button next to its resource.

This launches a confirmation dialog, asking you to confirm the disassociation.

15.3.2. Add groups¶

Inventories are divided into groups, which may contain hosts and other groups, and hosts. Groups are only applicable to standard inventories and is not a configurable directly through a Smart Inventory. You can associate an existing group through host(s) that are used with standard inventories. There are several actions available for standard inventories:

• Create a new Group

• Create a new Host

• Run a command on the selected Inventory

• Edit Inventory properties

• View activity streams for Groups and Hosts

• Obtain help building your Inventory

To create a new group for an inventory:

1. Click the button to open the Create Group window.

2. Enter the appropriate details into the required and optional fields:

• Name: Required

• Description: Enter an arbitrary description as appropriate (optional)

• Variables: Enter definitions and values to be applied to all hosts in this group. Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two.

3. When done, click Save.

15.3.2.2. View or edit inventory groups¶

Starting in Ansible Tower 3.5, you can view all your inventory groups at once, or you can filter it to only display the root group(s). An inventory group is considered a root group if it is not a subset of another group.

You may be able to delete a subgroup without concern for dependencies, but if you want to delete a root group, Tower will look for dependencies such as any child groups or hosts. If the root group you want to delete has both, a confirmation dialog displays for you to choose whether to delete the root group and all of its subgroups and hosts; or promote the subgroup(s) so they become the top-level inventory group(s), along with their host(s).

If the root group has a subgroup that does not have any hosts, the confirmation dialog simply asks if you want to delete everything; or promote your group.

15.3.3. Add hosts¶

You can configure hosts for the inventory as well as for groups and groups within groups. To configure hosts:

1. Click the Hosts tab.

2. Click the button, and select whether to add a host that already exists in your configuration or create a new host.

3. If creating a new host, select the button to specify whether or not to include this host while running jobs.

4. Enter the appropriate details into the required and optional fields:

• Host Name: Required

• Description: Enter an arbitrary description as appropriate (optional)

• Variables: Enter definitions and values to be applied to all hosts in this group. Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two.

5. When done, click Save.

The Create Host window closes and the newly created host displays as an entry in the list of hosts associated with the group that it was created for.

If you chose to add an existing host, available hosts will appear in a separate selection window.

Once a host is selected, it displays as an entry in the list of hosts associated with the group.

6. To configure facts and additional groups for the host, click on the name of the host from the list of hosts.

This opens the Details tab of the selected host.

7. Click the Facts tab to input facts you want to gather. Refer to the Fact Caching section for more information about facts.

8. Click the Groups tab to configure groups for the host.

1. Click the button to associate the host with an existing group.

Available groups appear in a separate selection window.

2. Click to select the group(s) to associate with the host and click Save.

Once a group is associated, it displays as an entry in the list of groups associated with the host.

9. If a host was used to run a job, you can view details about those jobs in the Completed Jobs tab of the host and click Expanded to view details about each job.

15.3.4. Add source¶

Inventory sources are no longer associated with groups. Prior to Ansible Tower 3.2, spawned groups and hosts would be children of our inventory source group. Now, spawned groups are top-level. These groups may still have child groups, and all of these spawned groups may have hosts.

Adding a source to an inventory only applies to standard inventories. Smart inventories inherit their source from the standard inventories they are associated with. To configure the source for the inventory:

1. In the inventory you want to add a source, click the Sources tab.

2. Click the button.

This opens the Create Source window.

3. Enter the appropriate details into the required and optional fields:

• Name: Required

• Description: Enter an arbitrary description as appropriate (optional)

• Source: Choose a source for your inventory. Refer to the Inventory Sources section for more information about each source and details for entering the appropriate information. Starting with Ansible Tower version 3.2, support for Rackspace Cloud Servers was discontinued.

• Ansible Environment: This field is only present if custom virtual environments (venvs) are setup. Choose the venv with which you want to run your inventory imports. Refer to Using virtualenv with Ansible Tower for details on setting up a custom venvs.

4. After completing the required information for your chosen inventory source, you can configure the level of output on any inventory source’s update jobs by selecting the appropriate option from the Verbosity drop-down menu.

5. All cloud inventory sources have the following update options:

• Overwrite: If checked, any hosts and groups that were previously present on the external source but are now removed, will be removed from the Tower inventory. Hosts and groups that were not managed by the inventory source will be promoted to the next manually created group, or if there is no manually created group to promote them into, they will be left in the “all” default group for the inventory.

When not checked, local child hosts and groups not found on the external source will remain untouched by the inventory update process.

• Overwrite Variables: If checked, all variables for child groups and hosts will be removed and replaced by those found on the external source. When not checked, a merge will be performed, combining local variables with those found on the external source.

• Update on Launch: Each time a job runs using this inventory, refresh the inventory from the selected source before executing job tasks. To avoid job overflows if jobs are spawned faster than the inventory can sync, selecting this allows you to configure a Cache Timeout to cache prior inventory syncs for a certain number of seconds.

The “Update on Launch” setting refers to a dependency system for projects and inventory, and it will not specifically exclude two jobs from running at the same time. If a cache timeout is specified, then the dependencies for the second job is created and it uses the project and inventory update that the first job spawned. Both jobs then wait for that project and/or inventory update to finish before proceeding. If they are different job templates, they can then both start and run at the same time, if the system has the capacity to do so. If you intend to use Tower’s provisioning callback feature with a dynamic inventory source, “Update on Launch” should be set for the inventory group.

6. Review your entries and selections and click Save when done. This allows you to configure additional details, such as notifications and schedules.

Note

The Notifications tab is only present after you save the newly-created source.

7. To configure notifications for the source, click the Notifications tab.

1. If notifications are already set up, use the toggles to enable or disable the notifications to use with your particular source. For more detail, see Enable and Disable Notifications.

2. if notifications have not been set up, refer to Notifications for more information.

8. To configure schedules associated with this inventory source, click the Schedules tab.

1. If schedules are already set up; review, edit, or enable/disable your schedule preferences.

2. if schedules have not been set up, refer to Schedules for more information.

9. Review your entries and selections and click Save when done.

Once a source is defined, it displays as an entry in the list of sources associated with the inventory. From the Sources tab you can perform a sync on a single source, or sync all of them at once. You can also perform additional actions such as scheduling a sync process, and edit or delete the source.

15.3.4.1. Inventory Sources¶

Choose a source which matches the inventory type against which a host can be entered:

• Sourced from a Project

• Amazon Web Services EC2

• Google Compute Engine

• Microsoft Azure Resource Manager

• VMware vCenter

• Red Hat Satellite 6

• Red Hat CloudForms

• OpenStack

• Red Hat Virtualization

• Ansible Tower

• Custom Script

15.3.4.1.1. Sourced from a Project¶

An inventory that is sourced from a project means that is uses the SCM type from the project it is tied to. For example, if the project’s source is from GitHub, or a Red Hat Insights project, then the inventory will use the same source.

1. To configure a project-sourced inventory, select Sourced from a Project from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Optionally specify the credential to use for this source.

• Project: Required. Specify the project this inventory is using as its source. Click the button to choose from a list of projects. If the list is extensive, use the search to narrow the options.

• Inventory File: Required. Select an inventory file associated with the sourced project. If not already populated, you can type it into the text field within the drop down menu to filter the extraneous file types. In addition to a flat file inventory, you can point to a directory or an inventory script.

3. In addition to the update options available for cloud inventory sources, you can specify whether or not to update on project changes. Check the Update on Project Update option to refresh the inventory from the selected source after every project update where the SCM revision changes before executing job tasks. For more detail, refer to Update on Project Update in the Ansible Tower Administration Guide.

4. In order to pass to the custom inventory script, you can optionally set environment variables in the Environment Variables field.

Note

If you are executing a custom inventory script from SCM, please make sure you set the execution bit (i.e. chmod +x) on the script in your upstream source control. If you do not, Tower will throw a [Errno 13] Permission denied error upon execution.

15.3.4.1.2. Amazon Web Services EC2¶

1. To configure an AWS EC2-sourced inventory, select Amazon EC2 from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Optionally choose from an existing credential (for more information, refer to Credentials).

  If Tower is running on an EC2 instance with an assigned IAM Role, the credential may be omitted, and the security credentials from the instance metadata will be used instead. For more information on using IAM Roles, refer to the IAM_Roles_for_Amazon_EC2_documentation_at_Amazon.

• Regions: Click on the regions field to see a list of regions for your cloud provider. You can select multiple regions, or choose “All” to include all regions. Tower will only be updated with Hosts associated with the selected regions.

• Instance Filters: Rather than importing your entire Amazon EC2 inventory, filter the instances returned by the inventory script based on a variety of metadata. Hosts are imported if they match any of the filters entered here.

Examples:

• To limit to hosts having the tag TowerManaged: Enter tag-key=TowerManaged

• To limit to hosts using either the key-name staging or production: Enter key-name=staging, key-name=production

• To limit to hosts where the Name tag begins with test: Enter tag:Name=test*

For more information on the filters that can be used here, refer to the Describe Instances documentation at Amazon.

• Only Group By: By default, Tower creates groups based on the following Amazon EC2 parameters:

  • Availability Zones

  • Image ID

  • Instance ID

  • Instance Type

  • Key Name

  • Region

  • Security Group

  • Tags (by name)

  • VPC ID

  • Tag None

  If you do not want all these groups created, select from the dropdown the list of groups that you would like created by default. You can also select Instance ID to create groups based on the Instance ID of your instances.

3. Use the Source Variables field to override variables found in ec2.ini and used by the inventory update script. Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two. For a detailed description of these variables view ec2.ini in the Ansible Collections GitHub repo.

15.3.4.1.3. Google Compute Engine¶

1. To configure a Google-sourced inventory, select Google Compute Engine from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Required. Choose from an existing Credential. For more information, refer to Credentials.

• Regions: Click on the regions field to see a list of regions for your cloud provider. You can select multiple regions, or choose “All” to include all regions. Tower will only be updated with Hosts associated with the selected regions.

15.3.4.1.4. Microsoft Azure Resource Manager¶

1. To configure a Azure Resource Manager-sourced inventory, select Microsoft Azure Resource Manager from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Required. Choose from an existing Credential. For more information, refer to Credentials.

• Regions: Click on the regions field to see a list of regions for your cloud provider. You can select multiple regions, or choose “All” to include all regions. Tower will only be updated with Hosts associated with the selected regions.

15.3.4.1.5. VMware vCenter¶

1. To configure a VMWare-sourced inventory, select VMware vCenter from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Required. Choose from an existing credential (for more information, refer to Credentials).

• Instance Filters: Rather than importing your entire VMWare inventory, filter the instances returned by the inventory script based on a variety of metadata. Hosts are imported if they match any of the filters entered here.

For more information on the filters that can be used here, refer to the Quick Filters Available for vSphere Objects documentation at VMware.

• Only Group By: By default, Tower creates groups based on user-specified VMWare parameters. For example, enter Instance ID to create groups based on the Instance ID of your instances.

3. Use the Source Variables field to override variables found in vmware_inventory.ini and used by the inventory update script. Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two. For a detailed description of these variables, view the vmware_inventory.ini file in the Ansible GitHub repo.

Note

The inventory script for VMware was updated in Ansible Tower 3.1.2 to allow configuration of the host_filters or groupby_patterns parameter. Specify those values in the Source Variables text field of the Create Group screen or Edit Group screen. For example:

15.3.4.1.6. Red Hat Satellite 6¶

1. To configure a Red Hat Satellite-sourced inventory, select Red Hat Satellite from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields.

• Credential: Required. Choose from an existing credential (for more information, refer to Credentials).

• Use the Source Variables field to override variables found in foreman.ini and used by the inventory update script.

Note

The variable want_facts from foreman.ini is hard-coded to True and cannot be overridden at this time. If you want to set the group_patterns, group_prefix, or want_hostcollections variables, prefix them with satellite6, e.g.: satellite6_group_prefix: myprefix

Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two. For a detailed description of these variables view foreman.ini in the Ansible Collections GitHub repo.

15.3.4.1.7. Red Hat CloudForms¶

1. To configure a Red Hat CloudForms-sourced inventory, select Red Hat CloudForms from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Required. Choose from an existing credential (for more information, refer to Credentials).

• Use the Source Variables field to override variables found in cloudforms.ini and used by the inventory update script. Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two. For a detailed description of these variables view cloudforms.ini in the Ansible Collections GitHub repo.

15.3.4.1.8. OpenStack¶

1. To configure an OpenStack-sourced inventory, select OpenStack from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Required. Choose from an existing credential (for more information, refer to Credentials).

• Use the Source Variables field to override variables found in openstack.yml and used by the inventory update script. Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two. For a detailed description of these variables view openstack.yml in the Ansible GitHub repo.

15.3.4.1.9. Red Hat Virtualization¶

1. To configure a Red Hat Virtualization-sourced inventory, select Red Hat Virtualization from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. The Credential is required. Choose from an existing credential (for more information, refer to Credentials).

15.3.4.1.10. Ansible Tower¶

1. To configure a Ansible Tower-sourced inventory, select Ansible Tower from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: Required. Choose from an existing credential (for more information, refer to Credentials).

• Instance Filters: Rather than importing your entire Tower inventory, filter the instances by an inventory ID/name; then the inventory script would return that inventory from the other Tower instance.

15.3.4.1.11. Custom Script¶

Tower allows you to use a custom dynamic inventory script, if your administrator has added one.

1. To configure a Custom Script-sourced inventory, select Custom Script from the Source field.

2. The Create Source window expands with additional fields. Enter the following details:

• Credential: You can optionally provide a credential for custom sources. The kind of credential is limited to cloud and network. Refer to Custom Credential Types for more information.

• Custom Inventory Script: Required. Choose from an existing Inventory Script (for more information, refer to Custom Inventory Scripts).

• Environment Variables: Set variables in the environment to be used by the inventory update script. The variables would be specific to the script that you have written. Enter variables using either JSON or YAML syntax. Use the radio button to toggle between the two.

For more information on syncing or using custom inventory scripts, refer to Custom Inventory Scripts in the Ansible Tower Administration Guide.

15.3.5. View completed jobs¶

If an inventory was used to run a job, you can view details about those jobs in the Completed Jobs tab of the inventory and click Expanded to view details about each job.

/api/v2/hosts/?host_filter=name=localhost
/api/v2/hosts/?host_filter=ansible_facts__ansible_date_time__weekday_number="3"
/api/v2/hosts/?host_filter=ansible_facts__ansible_processor[]="GenuineIntel"
/api/v2/hosts/?host_filter=ansible_facts__ansible_lo__ipv6[]__scope="host"
/api/v2/hosts/?host_filter=ansible_facts__ansible_processor_vcpus=8
/api/v2/hosts/?host_filter=ansible_facts__ansible_env__PYTHONUNBUFFERED="true"
/api/v2/hosts/?host_filter=(name=localhost or name=database) and (groups__name=east or groups__name="west coast") and ansible_facts__an

groups.name:groupA

ansible_facts.ansible_fips:false

host_filter=name=my_host

host_filter=ansible_facts__packages__dnsmasq[]__version="2.66"