Trustable Automation
Ansible Playbook Scanning Tool that analyzes and offers recommendations for your playbooks.
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Reduce risks and speed up automation
Optimize your automation with improved playbooks that guarantee reliable execution. Create and maintain Ansible Playbooks with ease while ensuring they are always up-to-date and secure.
- identify hard-to-catch and time-consuming errors
- improve quality, reliability and security of playbooks
- reduce development and test time
- follow automation best practices
’’Spotter is a game-changing tool that will revolutionize the way you manage your Ansible Playbooks. It's like having a personal playbook advisor!’’
Sam, Pythoholic
’’Spotter allows me to write perfect Ansible code without missing all the necessary arguments and delivers on the promise of helping with Ansible version upgrades. It's perfect for getting comprehensive code.’’
Stéphane Robert, DevOps Consultant
’’Spotter seems like a very good addition to existing tools like ansible-lint and ansible-test. Especially the tips and hints to migrate from older Ansible versions to current versions as well as the function to fix found errors are great!’’
Sebastian, System Engineer
’’Spotter has allowed me to easily convert an Ansible role and many playbooks to be able to run on the latest Ansible versions. It clearly showed me all the changes I needed to make, and I'm excited to share this tool with my team and my company. Thanks so much for the great tool!’’
Matt, Senior Infrastructure Engineer
Easily upgrade to the latest Ansible version
Check if your playbooks are compatible with a specific Ansible version, identify issues you need to resolve, get advice on how to ease migrations, and upgrade playbooks in minutes instead of hours.
️Prevent downtime and simplify migrations across different versions.
Identify name changes and redirects in collections, modules and parameters and default value changes.
Detect deprecated modules and their parameters.
Check for fully qualified collection names.
- Prevent downtime and simplify migrations across different versions.
- Identify name changes and redirects in collections, modules and parameters and default value changes.
- Detect deprecated modules and their parameters.
- Check for fully qualified collection names.
Achieve secure playbook execution
Add an extra layer of security. Understand what will happen when you run the playbooks and follow security best practices to minimize security risks, downtime, and costs.
- prevent misconfigurations, security vulnerabilities or policy violations
- proactively evaluate runtime security threats and prevent security breaches
- ensure compliance with security standards
- include custom policies to ensure automation meets your specific security requirements
Define your custom rules and policies
Add your own rules and policies to ensure all playbooks meet your specific needs, requirements and use cases.
- ensure you follow organizational or industry-specific regulations, standards, or compliance requirements
- further specify playbook standards, allowed modules and collections
- define specific naming conventions and limit required values on specific modules and entities
Spotter check types
Best practice checks
Structure your playbooks for readability, collaboration and ease of use.
Validation checks
Verify that modules, parameters, and parameter values within playbooks are correct and accurate.
Upgrade checks
Check if playbooks are compatible and supported with the latest versions of Ansible and Ansible Collections.
Custom checks
Customize rules and policies to meet specific organizational, industry and security requirements.
Security checks
Check for security misconfiguration within playbooks and assure compliance with security best practices.
Spotter check types
Best practice checks
Structure your playbooks for readability, collaboration and ease of use.
Validation checks
Verify that modules, parameters, and parameter values within playbooks are correct and accurate.
Upgrade checks
Check if playbooks are compatible and supported with the latest versions of Ansible and Ansible Collections.
Custom checks
Customize rules and policies to meet specific organizational, industry and security requirements.
Security checks
Check for security misconfiguration within playbooks and assure compliance with security best practices.
Save time with convenience features
Fix issues automatically
Rewrite your Ansible content with suggested changes in a flash.
Get instant help with module documentation
Suggestions are equipped with direct links to module documentation of a specific version.
Generate missing requirements files
Requirements.yml with all the collections you need for the installation is generated automatically.
Gain insights for your scans
Analyze scan data, spot trends, monitor progress, and create custom reports with the intuitive reporting feature. Focus on delivering results and make data-driven decisions.
Spotter works where you work
Scan playbooks from command line
Simply install the steampunk-spotter CLI tool as a Python package.
Scan Git repositories from web
Use Spotter app to check the quality of public Git repositories.
Scan from CI/CD
Integrate Spotter with GitHub Actions and GitLab to scan content within CI/CD workflows.
Scan from your favorite code editor
Analyze and get recommendations for your playbooks directly in Visual Studio Code.
- Scan playbooks from CLI
- Scan Git repositories from web
- Scan in GitHub Actions
- Scan in GitLab
- Scan in Visual Studio Code
Windows compatible
Spotter is fully compatible with Windows operating systems, allowing seamless integration with other Windows applications to help you streamline your workflow.
Who is it for?
Development
As a Playbook Developer, you come across different challenges. Documentation is lacking, there's no clear guidance on what's approved, and it's hard to keep up with what's new and best practices.
Use Spotter to:
verify playbook templates or examples,
check Ansible core and Collection versions compatibility,
understand the implications of Ansible upgrades.
Quality Assurance
As a Quality Assurance Manager, you often wonder what the playbook will really do, especially when there's no documentation available. Will there be a rollback? Will it break something in production?
Use Spotter to:
understand what will happen when you run the playbook,
run QA automations without errors,
understand best practices and what-if scenarios for your tests.
Operations
As an Operations Manager, you want to anticipate potential issues, but how to do that if you don't know what will happen in case of errors in the playbooks? Or what will happen to them when a new Ansible version pops up?
Use Spotter to:
identify potential vulnerabilities,
receive quality reports and recommendations for improvements,
achieve reliable execution of automation.
Security
As IT's infrastructure continues to evolve and become more complex, it's nearly impossible for security specialists to keep it secure at all times without the help of reliable tools.
Use Spotter to:
prevent misconfigurations and security breaches,
ensure corporate standards of compliance,
achieve secure execution of automation.
Development
As a Playbook Developer, you come across different challenges. Documentation is lacking, there's no clear guidance on what's approved, and it's hard to keep up with what's new and best practices.
Use Spotter to:
verify playbook templates or examples,
check Ansible core and Collection versions compatibility,
understand the implications of Ansible upgrades.
Quality Assurance
As a Quality Assurance Manager, you often wonder what the playbook will really do, especially when there's no documentation available. Will there be a rollback? Will it break something in production?
Use Spotter to:
understand what will happen when you run the playbook,
run QA automations without errors,
understand best practices and what-if scenarios for your tests.
Operations
As an Operations Manager, you want to anticipate potential issues, but how to do that if you don't know what will happen in case of errors in the playbooks? Or what will happen to them when a new Ansible version pops up?
Use Spotter to:
identify potential vulnerabilities,
receive quality reports and recommendations for improvements,
achieve reliable execution of automation.
Security
As IT's infrastructure continues to evolve and become more complex, it's nearly impossible for security specialists to keep it secure at all times without the help of reliable tools.
Use Spotter to:
prevent misconfigurations and security breaches,
ensure corporate standards of compliance,
achieve secure execution of automation.
Why we made the Spotter
’’Having written countless playbooks and collections, we have unique experience in both sides of the Ansible story and we are very familiar with the challenges Ansible users face. We have incorporated this extensive know-how in the Steampunk Spotter to support you on your automation journey and help you automate with confidence.’’
Gregor Berginc, CEO & Head of XLAB Steampunk, XLAB
Latest news
Explore Spotter getting started guides, how to-s, upcoming releases, and tips on witting high-quality Ansible Playbooks.
Visit our blog
June 1, 2023
Steampunk Spotter: What's new in 2.0?
We’re excited to announce that Spotter 2.0 is here, bigger and better, ready to conquer all of your automation challenges!
May 9, 2023
How Spotter helps Systems Architects reach trustable …
We talked with Sebastian Gumprich, a Systems Architect and DevOps enthusiast, who was one of the first early adopters of Steampunk Spotter and provided us with …
April 14, 2023
Custom policies: Spotter takes you on a customizable …
To achieve corporate standards and security compliance of your Ansible Playbooks, we integrated an OPA-compliant policy definition engine, generating OPA-based …
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