FAQ

What is Steampunk Spotter?

Steampunk Spotter is an Ansible Playbook Platform that increases reliability, security, and trust of your automation while reducing development and test time and outages. Spotter analyses your Ansible Playbooks, provides recommendations on how to improve them to avoid unwanted results, and helps you understand what happens when you run them to identify potential issues before they are executed. Use it to reduce risk, speed up, and simplify your automation.

Who is it for and what are the use cases?

Development, Quality Assurance, Operations and Security teams will find Steampunk Spotter as an invaluable tool for assisted playbook writing, simplified Ansible upgrades, and achieving reliable and secure execution of automation.

Ansible Playbook Developers can identify potential issues, verify playbook templates or examples, check Ansible core and Collection versions compatibility, and understand the implications of Ansible upgrades.

QA teams can understand what will happen when they run the playbook, run QA automations without errors, and understand best practices and what-if scenarios for their tests.

Operations teams can identify potential vulnerabilities, receive quality reports and recommendations for improvements, and achieve reliable execution of automation, leading to minimized service disruptions and costs. Security teams can prevent misconfigurations and security breaches, ensure corporate standards of compliance, and achieve secure execution of automation.

What's the difference between Spotter and Ansible Lint?

It's not about how both tools differ, but how they complement each other. Spotter picks up where Ansible Lint leaves off. While Ansible Lint catches programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and suspicious constructs, Spotter goes beyond syntax check. Spotter forays into the Ansible content itself and surpasses general rules by applying suggestions specific to a particular module, user environment setup, etc. It spots hard-to-catch issues, automatically fixes some of them, and saves you time with convenience features such as generating requirements.yml file or pointing you to the module documentation of a specific version.

Using both tools is a winning combination, especially for Ansible upgrades, where Spotter really shows all its power. It checks if your existing playbooks are compatible with a specific Ansible version and identifies all the issues you need to resolve when upgrading to a new Ansible version. While Ansible Lint can tell you that your playbook will fail when upgrading to newer Ansible version, Spotter lets you determine the target version of Ansible and retrieves the source version from your system, so you can always be sure which version you're upgrading from and to, and adjust fixes accordingly.

Incorporating Steampunk Spotter and Ansible Lint in your workflow guarantees you will achieve reliable automation you can trust. Learn more here.

Can this tool really help me write better playbooks?

We know it sounds too good to be true, but yes, Spotter really does help improve the quality of Ansible Playbooks. Encapsulating our extensive automation knowledge and years of experience with writing Ansible Playbooks, it provides thorough guidance in your playbook writing process. You will find yourself spending less time sifting through the documentation and guessing how to tackle your specific problems. You will also notice significantly less executions of Ansible, minimizing trial-and-error. Still not convinced? Go ahead, start free trial.

Can this tool really help me save time?

You need some numbers, we know. Just some flashy words won’t do. Agreed! With the help of our Time Savings Calculator, you can see exactly how much time you'll save for development, maintenance and upgrading of your Ansible Playbooks based on various factors such as their complexity and your team’s size. Check it out and start saving time today!

Can I track the results of my scans and collaborate with my team?

Yes, Spotter app offers an intuitive dashboard, allowing you to keep up with your scan history, frequency of failed playbook executions, most common errors, and your progress over time. By inviting members into your organization, you can cultivate a shared workspace to track progress and data on shared projects and collaborate with teams more efficiently to speed up automation processes.

This allows you to bring diverse types of users in the automation chain closer together. Understanding how and when the automation is run lets you focus on delivering the results you want to achieve, address your pain points and find solutions faster, easier, and more transparently.

What’s the deal with data sharing?

We know data protection and security are not to be taken lightly. That's why you are in charge of how much data you share with Spotter. To get the most in-depth and valuable scan reports, Spotter collects values and metadata when checking the quality of your playbooks. But don’t worry, all secrets are automatically detected and replaced with null values to increase security.

If you are still concerned about data sharing, you can always choose to exclude such data from your scan by simply running --exclude-values or --exclude-metadata arguments. Just keep in mind this will result in a less insightful scan, but rest assured, it will still be efficient. You can extract the data locally before submitting it, allowing you to review the data, edit it, and then push it for scanning.

You can also choose the on-prem deployment option and avoid any data-sharing concerns you might have.

Is Spotter open source?

We're very active in the open source community and firm believers in giving back and sharing our knowledge.

The CLI tool, which extracts data from your playbooks and shares this information with us, is completely open source, you can find it here. This allows you to check how we extract the data and how we send it over the network. You are welcome to review the code and help us improve it.

On the other hand, the knowledge base of the Spotter isn’t open source due to privacy and legal responsibilities to our customers, who share some of their private information with us.

But what we do give back is years of knowledge and experience in Ansible which Steampunk Spotter users can benefit from.

Is Spotter just for Ansible?

Currently, yes, but we're working on extending support to other IaC tools, such as Terraform and Pulumi in the future.

How do I install and use Spotter?

Getting started with Spotter is easy. Head over to the registration page, sign up for an account, and start scanning. You can scan playbooks via CLI, via the Spotter app or via GitHub, GitLab and VS Code integrations. Find out more in this Getting started guide.

Why do you require registration?

With registration, we avoid unauthenticated requests and reduce malicious load on the API, while still making it as accessible as possible.

Who are you?

Glad you’ve asked! At XLAB Steampunk, we are specialists for IT automation with Ansible and leading experts in building Enterprise Ansible Collections, so we know a thing or two about Ansible Playbooks. We design, develop, maintain and support high-quality Ansible Collections (such as ServiceNow, Sensu Go, SAP HANA, AWS, and NGINX Unit), and guide companies on their automation with Ansible journey.

As Red Hat Advanced Business and Technology partners and Ansible Certified Partner, we collaborate closely with the Ansible product team, and we’re also highly active in the Ansible community, so we have a deep knowledge of Ansible.

Our experience in building high-quality Ansible Collections allows us to understand available collections and assess their quality. Our experience in using Ansible for automation allows us to understand common patterns, anti-patterns, and best practices. We have incorporated this extensive and unique know-how in the Steampunk Spotter to help Ansible users write their playbooks with confidence