ara/doc/source/ara-record.rst

Recording arbitrary data in playbooks

ARA comes with a built-in Ansible action plugin called ara_record.

This module can be used as an action for a task in your Ansible playbooks in order to register whatever you'd like in a key/value format, for example:

- name: Test playbook
  hosts: localhost
  tasks:
    - name: Get git version of playbooks
      command: git rev-parse HEAD
      register: git_version

    - name: Record git version
      ara_record:
        key: "git_version"
        value: "{{ git_version.stdout }}"
      register: version

    - name: Print recorded data
      debug:
        msg: "{{ version.playbook_id }} - {{ version.key }}: {{ version.value }}

It also supports different types of data which will have an impact on how a value might later be parsed or displayed:

- name: Record different things
  ara_record:
    key: "{{ item.key }}"
    value: "{{ item.value }}"
    type: "{{ item.type }}"
  loop:
    - { key: "log", value: "error", type: "text" }
    - { key: "website", value: "http://domain.tld", type: "url" }
    - { key: "data", value: '{ "key": "value" }', type: "json" }
    - { key: "somelist", value: ['one', 'two'], type: "list" }
    - { key: "somedict", value: {'key': 'value' }, type: "dict" }

Recording data for playbooks after completion

It is possible to run an ara_record task on a specific playbook that might already be completed by specifying a playbook. This is particularly useful for recording data that might only be available or computed after your playbook run has been completed:

---
# Write data to a specific (previously run) playbook
- ara_record:
    playbook: 14
    key: logs
    value: "{{ lookup('file', '/var/log/ansible.log') }}"
    type: text

Or as an ad-hoc command:

ansible localhost -m ara_record \
        -a "playbook=14 key=logs value={{ lookup('file', '/var/log/ansible.log') }}"

This data will be recorded inside ARA's database and associated with the particular playbook run that was executed.

These records can later be retrieved through the API or through a web interface.