One of the takeaways I hope you get from this book is that automation is great—it is not only a real-time saver, but using tools like the ones we covered in the previous chapter, Ansible Tower and Ansible AWX, can enable people who are not sys-admins or developers to execute their playbooks from a friendly web interface.
The modules we have covered in this section allow you take your automation to the next level by not only allowing you to record the results, but to also automatically do some housekeeping during your playbook run and have it notify your users itself.
Let's say, for example, you need to deploy a new configuration to your server. Your service desk raises a change for you to action the work within your ServiceNow installation. Your playbook could be written in such a way that before the change is actioned, it uses the fetch module to copy the configuration file to your Ansible Controller. The playbook could then use the snow_record module attach a copy of the existing configuration file to the change request, proceed to make the changes, and then automatically update the change request with the results.
You can find details on the services mentioned in this part of the chapter at the following URLs:
- Slack: https://slack.com/
- Campfire: https://basecamp.com/
- Cisco Webex Teams (Cisco Spark): https://www.webex.com/products/teams/
- CA Flowdock: https://www.flowdock.com/
- Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/
- ServiceNow: https://www.servicenow.com/
- Twilio: https://twilio.com/