Ansible Tower Test

Red Hat® Ansible® Tower helps you scale IT automation, manage complex deployments and speed productivity. Ansible Tower also helps you keep the inventories and projects in sync. The Tower is centered around the idea of organizing Projects (which run your playbooks via Jobs) and Inventories (which describe the servers on which your playbooks should be run) inside of Organizations.

In Tower automated environments, the jobs play a vital role in performing various operations on the Tower such as updating and synchronizing the inventories and projects, performing system upgrades, updating applications delivered via Tower, etc. Therefore, to ensure peak performance of the Tower, it is important for administrators to continuously track job health of the Tower. If, for any reason, job health deteriorates on the Tower, then the overall performance, data synchronization, reliability and data integrity of the Tower will also deteriorate. To avoid such anomalies, administrators can use the Ansible Tower test to proactively detect the job health of the Tower before anything untoward happens.

This test continuously monitors the Ansible tower, and proactively reveals the number of hosts that failed while executing the jobs, and the number of jobs that failed. These statistics help administrators to find out how well/badly the jobs are performed on the Tower. In addition, this test also reports the synchronization failures among the inventories/projects while launching the jobs. This helps administrators to detect the issues in the synchronization, if any, and take remedial actions immediately.

Target of the test : Ansible Tower

Agent deploying the test : A remote agent

Outputs of the test : One set of the results for the Ansible Tower being monitored.

Configurable parameters for the test

Parameter	Description
Test Period	How often should the test be executed. By default, this is set to 5 minutes.
Host	The IP address of the host for which this test is to be configured.
Port	The port at which the specified host listens. By default, this is 443
Username and Password	The eG agent makes REST API calls for pulling out performance metrics from the Ansible Tower. For this purpose, the eG agent should be allowed to connect to Ansible Tower's REST API. To enable this connection, administrators need to configure the valid credentials of a user who has administrator privileges on the Ansible Tower against these parameters.
Confirm Password	Confirm the password by retyping it here.
SSL	By default, the Ansible Tower is SSL-enabled. Accordingly, the SSL flag is set to True by default. This indicates that the eG agent will communicate with the Ansible Tower via HTTPS, by default.
DD Frequency	Refers to the frequency with which detailed diagnosis measures are to be generated for this test. The default is 1:1. This indicates that, by default, detailed measures will be generated every time this test runs, and also every time the test detects a problem. You can modify this frequency, if you so desire. Also, if you intend to disable the detailed diagnosis capability for this test, you can do so by specifying none against DD frequency.
Detailed Diagnosis	To make diagnosis more efficient and accurate, the eG Enterprise embeds an optional detailed diagnostic capability. With this capability, the eG agents can be configured to run detailed, more elaborate tests as and when specific problems are detected. To enable the detailed diagnosis capability of this test for a particular server, choose the On option. To disable the capability, click on the Off option. The option to selectively enable/disable the detailed diagnosis capability will be available only if the following conditions are fulfilled: The eG manager license should allow the detailed diagnosis capability Both the normal and abnormal frequencies configured for the detailed diagnosis measures should not be 0.

Measurements made by the test

Measurement	Description	Measurement Unit	Interpretation
Total hosts	Indicates the total number of hosts in the Tower.	Number
Successful hosts	Indicates the number of hosts that are successfully performing the jobs.	Number
Failed hosts	Indicates the number of hosts that failed to perform the jobs.	Number
Jobs health	Indicates the percentage of jobs that is successfully performed on the Tower.	Percent	Ideally, the value of this measure is should be high.
Total jobs	Indicates the total number of jobs launched on the Tower.	Number	This measure is good indicators of the workload on the Tower.
Successful jobs	Indicates the number of jobs that are completed successfully on the Tower.	Number	A high value is desired for this measure.
Failed jobs	Indicates the number of jobs that failed on the Tower.	Number	The value of this measure should be zero. A non-zero value indicates that one/more jobs failed; this is a cause for concern and requires investigation.
Total projects	Indicates the total number of projects in the Tower.	Number
Project sync failures	Indicates the number of times the project syncing process failed during job execution.	Number	Ideally, the value of this measure should be zero. A non-zero value for this measure may lead to serious synchronization issues, and is a cause for concern.
Credentials	Indicates the number of credentials available on the Tower.	Number
Inventories	Indicates the total number of inventories in the Tower.	Number
Inventory sync failures	Indicates the number of times the inventory syncing process failed during job execution.	Number	Ideally, the value of this measure should be zero. A non-zero value for this measure is a cause for concern.