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Demo: Chocolatey Features Config
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Table of Contents
Objective
Demostrate how Anisble can be used to enable or disable features in Chocolatey
What business problem is solved?
- Operational Efficiency: Ansible provides the ability to save dozen to hundreds of hours of reconfiguration work by systems admins through the configuration automation
- Increase Compliance: Ansible provides the means to get and stay in compliance throughout all your systems
Features show cased
- Configuration as code
- Self Service IT - Surveys
For description of these and other features of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform please refer to the features README
Guide
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Login to Ansible Platform UX
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Navigate to Templates
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Click the rocket next to INFRASTRUCTURE / Chocolatey Features Config to launch the Job
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The survey will prompt you for what feature to enable or disable.
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Choose a feature and press NEXT
Explain to audience what is happening here depending on audience persona
Persona A: Technical audience that has written Ansible Playbooks before: Surveys create variables that the Job can use within Ansible Playbooks. This gives you the ability to create one playbook that can be used to enable or disable any feature instead of having to create or maintain many job templates. The survey also gives you the ability to select if the feature will be enabled or disabled. Again saving you time and effort to write seperate playbooks for each use case. In the screenshot you will see the variables are named feature and state with values of virusCheck and enabled
Persona B: Decision maker audience, IT manager or above: reiterate business values above. This allows a systems admin to automate the reconfiguration of Chocolatey in a low risk repeatable manner. This will free up IT staff for larger more mission critical projects all while reducing risk to your production operations. In the event that your IT process does not allow the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to be the front end, it has a rich and powerful API that can work with existing workflows such as ServiceNow.
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Execute the job by pressing the green LAUNCH button
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Explain what is happening:
- Job has started executed in the background. The user can navigate off this page and the job will continue to execute.
- On the left is the Job Details Pane labeled simply with DETAILS. This information is logged and tells you who, what, when and how.
- who - who launched the job, in this example is the admin user
- what - the project and Ansible Playbook used, and which credential to login to the infrastructure
- when - time stamps for start, end and duration of the job run.
- how - the job status (pass, fail), enviornment and execution node
- The larger window on the right is the Standard Out Pane. This provides the same console output the user would be used to on the command-line for troubleshooting purposes. Some important takeways to showcase are:
- aggregate info is at the top including the amount of Plays, tasks, hosts and time duration.
- this pane can be expanded to take up entire browser window
- Ansible Playbook can be downloaded for troubleshooting purposes
- click on task output to show them task-by-task JSON output that can be used for troubleshooting or just getting additional information
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Circle back and summarize
You need to circle back what has been showcased to the business reasons listed above. You are welcome to verify on the Windows hosts that the feature was actually enabled or disabled but unless you have a very technical audience you are going to start losing folks. The real business solution here is automating away the mundane and repetative.
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