Ansible and Zabbix Rushikesh Prabhune (Software Technical Consultant) Swapnil Gupta (Manager) PTC Software

Abstract In the world of DevOps culture and Continuous delivery model, the resources which get used in the system becomes very critical. Any downtime or performance degradation in the used resources can be very costly and will add to delays in the timely delivery of the product. Keeping the importance of these resources in mind, it becomes very important to monitor these resources for any issues or errors and fix those quickly to ensure the smooth running of the systems. In addition it is also important to ensure the proper configuration for the systems which get used in automation runs.   In our day to day activities, we have used below two monitoring and deployment tools quite efficiently. Zabbix: Zabbix is the ultimate enterprise-level software designed for real-time monitoring of millions of metrics collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines and network devices.It is an open source, scalable software supporting most of the platforms and variety of monitoring options. Ansible: Ansible delivers simple IT automation that ends repetitive tasks and frees up DevOps teams for more strategic work.Ansible is used for App deployment, configuration management and orchestration - all from one system.

Ansible Ansible works by connecting to your nodes and pushing out small programs, called "Ansible modules" to them. These programs are written to be resource models of the desired state of the system. Ansible then executes these modules (over SSH by default), and removes them when finished. Ansible can be used on UNIX and Windows nodes

Ansible Playbooks Playbooks are a completely different way to use ansible than in adhoc task execution mode, and are particularly powerful. Playbooks are expressed in YAML format and have a minimum of syntax, which intentionally tries to not be a programming language or script, but rather a model of a configuration or a process. Each playbook is composed of one or more ‘plays’ in a list.

Ansible Playbook example --- - hosts: webservers vars: http_port: 80 max_clients: 200 remote_user: root tasks: - name: ensure apache is at the latest version yum: name=httpd state=latest - name: write the apache config file template: src=/srv/httpd.j2 dest=/etc/httpd.conf notify: - restart apache - name: ensure apache is running (and enable it at boot) service: name=httpd state=started enabled=yes handlers: - name: restart apache service: name=httpd state=restarted

Zabbix Zabbix is the ultimate enterprise-level software designed for real-time monitoring of millions of metrics collected from tens of thousands of servers, virtual machines and network devices. Zabbix is Open Source and comes at no cost.

Zabbix UI

Zabbix capable of monitoring UNIX as well as Windows

Sample Windows Template Different Template for UNIX and Windows Triggers can be defined as per requirement Each trigger can have its own severity

Different Media types for informing the trigger

Graphs for monitoring in detail

Additional Zabbix features Different host groups can be created. Various aspects like RAM usage, Network etc. can be monitored in detail using graphs. Scripts can be executed to take preventive failure action when a trigger happens. Various reports can be generated on the basis of requirement.

References & Appendix https://www.zabbix.com/ https://www.ansible.com/

Author Biography Rushikesh Prabhune Working as QA Technical Consultant @ PTC Software Work experience 10+ years in QA Currently leading Automation Infrastructure Team Swapnil Gupta Working as QA Manager @ PTC Software Work experience 12+ years in QA Currently leading Enterprise Upgrade, Migration and Cross Product Services Team

Thank You!!!