Accelerate Your Migration to Ansible Automation Platform 2
Steampunk Spotter checks if your playbooks are compatible with the latest Ansible version, predicts issues they might cause, and gives advice on how to prevent downtime and ease migrations.
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Upgrade your playbook in minutes instead of hours
Use Spotter to check:
Best practices
Structure your playbooks for readability, collaboration and ease of use, and avoid common playbook anti-patterns.
Errors
Rely on the assistant that will guide you through hidden obstacles causing hard-to-catch and time-consuming errors.
Modules
Identify name changes and redirects, check for fully qualified names, and ensure you are using only certified and approved modules.
Parameters
Make sure you are using correct parameters, considering their relationships, and quickly identify invalid configurations.
Save time with convenience features
Fix issues automatically
Rewrite your Ansible content with suggested changes and fix all FQCNs in a flash using rewrite feature.
Get direct links to module documentation
Suggestions are equipped with links to module documentation of a specific version, freeing you from tedious browsing.
Generate missing requirements files
Requirements.yml with all the collections you need for the installation is generated automatically, based on the latest versions of the collections.
Spotter works where you work
Scan playbooks from command-line
Simply install the steampunk-spotter CLI tool as a Python package.
Scan using GitHub Actions and GitLab
Integrate your Steampunk Spotter with GitHub and GitLab to scan content within CI/CD workflows.
Scan using Visual Studio Code
Analyze and get recommendations for your playbooks right in your favorite code editor.
FAQ
What is Steampunk Spotter?
Steampunk Spotter is an Assisted Ansible Playbook Writing tool 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 and Operations 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.
What happens if I don’t upgrade Playbooks before September 2023?
Support for Ansible Automation Platform 1.2 ends and your
Ansible content is exposed to:
Security risks
Ansible updates include multiple
security fixes that will make your deployment more secure and reliable. As Ansible is a crucial part of
your infrastructure management practice, a security breach can have severe and harmful implications.
Usability issues
There is a risk that Ansible Automation Platform 1 may no longer be
compatible with newer technologies and systems. Additionally, you will miss out on new features that will
help you to maximize your Ansible possibilities.
Costly maintenance
You’ll lose the
support needed to resolve issues quickly. Making it more difficult and time-consuming to resolve any
problems you encounter.
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.
Using both tools is a winning combination and 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! Our Spotter team did some testing and simulated Ansible upgrade from version 2.4 to 2.14. Fixing the playbook manually took 2 hours (and remember, our Steampunks knew exactly where to look for the documentation they needed, otherwise it would have taken even longer), but using Steampunk Spotter, all it took was 20 minutes! See for yourself.
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.
Is my data being stored anywhere?
Don’t worry, we value privacy as much as the next person. Your
playbook is not stored anywhere and is not transmitted to us. Steampunk Spotter is designed to collect as
little data as possible to still provide an efficient scan of your content. By default, Spotter uses only
module names and the names of parameters used in your playbooks. Using additional command line options,
you can allow Spotter to also collect data such as task names, parameter values, and filenames used.
Spotter allows you to extract the data locally before submitting it to our servers. This allows
you to review the data, edit it, and then push it for scanning.
The extent of the scan report
depends on the amount of data you decide to share with Spotter.
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 Quickstart 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 in 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.