Integration

Use Rudder inventory in other tools

Rudder centralizes the information about your managed systems, and you can use this information in other tools, mainly through the API. We well here give a few examples.

Export to a spreadsheet

You can export the list of your nodes to a spreadsheet file (xls format) by using a tool available in the rudder-tools repository.

Simple follow the installation instructions, and run it against your Rudder server. You will get a file containing:

spreadsheet list nodes

You can easily modify the script to add other information.

Existing third party integration

Rundeck

Rundeck is a tool that helps automating infrastructures, by defining jobs that can be run manually or automatically. There is a plugin for Rundeck that allows using Rudder inventory data in Rundeck.

With that plugin, you can execute commands on nodes registered in Rudder, taking advantage of the groups defined for you policies.

Ansible

There is an inventory plugin for Ansible that makes possible to use Rudder inventory (including groups, nodes, group ids, node ids, and node properties) as inventory for Ansible, for example for orchestration tasks on your platform. An inventory in Ansible is the list of managed nodes, their groups and some pre-defined variables.

The Rudder inventory plugin is also part of the Community General Collection, installable with ansible-galaxy collection install community.general

You need to download the rudder.py and rudder.ini files, then you have to edit rudder.ini to fill (at least):

  • Your Rudder server URL

  • A valid API read-only token. It only needs to be able to read groups and nodes inventory data.

To specify the path of the configuration to the plugin, you can either:

  • Put the rudder.ini next to the rudder.py file

  • Define the RUDDER_INI_PATH environment variable with export RUDDER_INI_PATH=/path/to/my_rudder.ini before executing the ansible commands

Then you can start using it with the -i rudder.py option (to the Ansible command-line). The plugin defines:

  • An Ansible group for each Rudder group, with a group variable named rudder_group_id that contains the uuid of the group

  • An host variable named rudder_node_id that contains the uuid of the node

  • Host variables containing the Rudder node properties

You can then use them in the configuration, for example:

# To execute the hostname command evewhere and get the result
ansible -i rudder.py All_classic_Nodes -a "hostname"
# To use Rudder node id, group id and node properties inside ansible commands or playbooks
ansible -i rudder.py All_classic_Nodes -a "echo {{rudder_node_id}} {{rudder_group_id}} {{node_property}} {{node_property2.key}}"

Will try to connect over SSH to all nodes managed by your Rudder server and display the given information.

You can defined the ansible_host, ansible_user and ansible_port node properties to control the way Ansible connects to the nodes.

iTop

iTop is an Open Source CMDB solution. It allows to describe you IT services and analyse impact of problems.

There is a prototype integration of iTop and Rudder which allows iTop to Rudder as a source of information about the server content (inventory) and current compliance level. With that integration, you can see in real time in your CMDB when a server managed by Rudder is drifting away from its expecting configuration, and use iTop to understand the impact of such a drift for your IT services.

Integrate Rudder thanks to its APIs

All the above plugins are using Rudder APIs under the hood to operate or get data from Rudders. Rudder APIs are as powerful as the UI, and anything that can be done through the main graphical interface can also be scripted away with the APIs.

The documentation provided on APIs is exhaustive, but here comes a summary of what can be done with them:

  • accept, delete a node and manage its parameters,

  • get information with a parametrizable depth about node inventories,

  • search for nodes,

  • manage (create, update, delete) groups, directives, rules and parameters,

  • interact with the Techniques library,

  • get compliance details about a node or a rule, with a parameterized depth of information,

  • manage change requests.

And of course, any plugin can provide new API endpoints, as is doing the data source plugin.

These API can also be used to automate Rudder action, like node acceptation or compliance export and archiving for nodes.


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