How to Monitor Ansible Tower Using eG Enterprise?

eG Enterprise can monitor Ansible Tower in an agent-based or an agentless manner. In case of the agentless approach, the remote agent used to monitor the Ansible Tower should be deployed on a remote Windows host in the environment.

Regardless of the approach (agent-based or agentless), the eG agent makes RESTful API calls to the Ansible Tower to pull the performance metrics of interest. To enable this connection, each test that the eG agent runs on the Ansible Tower should be configured with the credentials of a user who has administrator privileges on the Ansible Tower.

To start monitoring the Ansible Tower, first manage the Ansible Tower component using eG admin interface. The steps for achieving it are explained in the sections below.

Managing Ansible Tower

eG Enterprise cannot automatically discover the Ansible Tower. This implies that you need to manually add the component for monitoring. To manage an Ansible Tower component, do the following:

  1. Log into the eG admin interface.
  2. Follow the Components -> Add/Modify menu sequence in the Infrastructure tile of the Admin menu.
  3. In the Components page that appears next, select Ansible Tower as the Component type. Then, click the Add New Component button. This will invoke Figure 1.

    refig1

    Figure 1 : Adding Ansible Tower in an agent-based manner

  4. Specify the Host Name and Nick name for the Ansible Tower component.
  5. The Port number will be set as 443 by default. If the Ansible Tower is listening on a different port in your environment, then override this default setting.
  6. In case you are monitoring a Ansible Tower in an agent-based manner, just pick an external agent from an the External agents list box and click the Add button to add the component for monitoring.
  7. On the other hand, if you want to monitor an Ansible Tower in an agentless manner, then do the following:

    • Select the Agentless check box in Figure 1. This will list the additional options, as shown in Figure 2.

      Figure 2 : Managing Ansible Tower in an agentless manner

    • Next, select Other as the OS.
    • Set the Mode to Other.
    • Select the Remote agent that will be monitoring the Ansible Tower. Note that the remote agent you choose should run on a Windows host.
    • Choose an external agent for the Ansible Tower by picking an option from the External agents list box.
    • Finally, click the Add button to add the Ansible Tower for monitoring.

Configuring Tests

After adding the component, try to sign out of the eG admin interface, a LIST OF UNCONFIGURED TESTS page will appear, revealing the list of tests mapped to the Ansible Tower that require manual configuration:

Figure 3 : The list of unconfigured tests requiring manual configuration

To know how to configure the Ansible Tower, Job Templates and Organizations tests, refer to Monitoring Ansible Tower chapter. Refer to Monitoring Unix and Windows Servers document to know how to configure the Processes and Application Process tests.