Remediating Configuration Issues Using Advisor and Ansible Playbooks

Red Hat Insights 2023

Create playbooks in the advisor service to run with your Ansible workflow

Red Hat Customer Content Services

Abstract

Create Ansible Playbooks to automate remediation of issues identified by the advisor service.
Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. We are beginning with these four terms: master, slave, blacklist, and whitelist. Because of the enormity of this endeavor, these changes will be implemented gradually over several upcoming releases. For more details, see our CTO Chris Wright's message.

Chapter 1. Overview of Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux advisor service remediations

The advisor service helps you resolve issues on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems by providing resolution steps for each recommendation, tailored to each system. You can then remediate issues manually or create Ansible Playbooks to automate resolution procedures.

Chapter 2. Manually remediating advisor recommendations

The advisor service provides users with the steps to resolve issues manually for each rule/system pairing.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux > Advisor > Systems page and log in if necessary.
  2. Locate and select the system on which to resolve the recommendations.
  3. Locate and select the recommendation to resolve.
  4. Expand the description, scroll past Detected issues, and view the specific Steps to resolve the recommendation on that system.
  5. Follow the Steps to resolve to remediate the issue on the system.

Chapter 3. Creating Ansible Playbooks to automate remediations

Users of the advisor service can create Ansible Playbooks to automate the remediation of recommendations.

Note

Look for an Ansible icon, which indicates whether there is a playbook available for a specific rule + system pairing. A blue Ansible icon indicates that a playbook is available. A grey icon with a line through it indicates that a playbook is not available.

The following procedure creates a playbook to remediate an individual recommendation on systems impacted by it.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux > Advisor > Recommendations and log in if necessary.
  2. Locate and click on the recommendation to resolve.
  3. In the Affected systems list, check the box next to each system you want to add to the playbook.
  4. Click Remediate.

  5. Select whether to add the remediations to an existing or new playbook and take the following action:

    1. Click Existing Playbook and select the desired playbook from the dropdown list, OR
    2. Click Create new Playbook and add a playbook name.
    3. Click Next.

  6. Review the information in the summary.

    1. Scroll to the bottom of the summary and toggle Auto Reboot if available and desired.
    2. Click Create.

Verification steps

  1. Select Remediations in the Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux services menu.
  2. Locate the playbook you just created and check the box next to it.
  3. Download the playbook using the Download playbook link.

3.1. Creating Ansible Playbooks to remediation multiple recommendations on an individual system

Users of the advisor service can create Ansible Playbooks to automate the remediation of recommendations.

Note

Look for an Ansible icon, which indicates whether there is a playbook available for a specific rule + system pairing. A blue Ansible icon indicates that a playbook is available. A grey icon with a line through it indicates that a playbook is not available.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux > Advisor > Systems and log in if necessary.
  2. Locate and select the system for which to create the playbook.
  3. Click the check box next to each recommendation you want to resolve.
  4. Click Remediate.

  5. Select whether to add the remediations to an existing or new playbook and take the following action:

    1. Click Existing Playbook and select the desired playbook from the dropdown list, OR
    2. Click Create new Playbook and add a playbook name.
    3. Click Next.

  6. Review the information in the summary.

    1. Scroll to the bottom of the summary and toggle Auto Reboot if available and desired.
    2. Click Create.

Chapter 4. Reference materials

To learn more about the advisor service, see the following resources:

Providing feedback on Red Hat documentation

We appreciate your feedback on our documentation. To provide feedback, highlight text in a document and add comments.

Prerequisites

  • You are logged in to the Red Hat Customer Portal.
  • In the Red Hat Customer Portal, the document is in the Multi-page HTML viewing format.

Procedure

To provide your feedback, perform the following steps:

  1. Click the Feedback button in the top-right corner of the document to see existing feedback.

    Note

    The feedback feature is enabled only in the Multi-page HTML format.

  2. Highlight the section of the document where you want to provide feedback.

  3. Click the Add Feedback pop-up that appears near the highlighted text.

    A text box appears in the feedback section on the right side of the page.

  4. Enter your feedback in the text box and click Submit.

    A documentation issue is created.

  5. To view the issue, click the issue link in the feedback view.

Legal Notice

Copyright © 2023 Red Hat, Inc.
The text of and illustrations in this document are licensed by Red Hat under a Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license ("CC-BY-SA"). An explanation of CC-BY-SA is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. In accordance with CC-BY-SA, if you distribute this document or an adaptation of it, you must provide the URL for the original version.
Red Hat, as the licensor of this document, waives the right to enforce, and agrees not to assert, Section 4d of CC-BY-SA to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.
Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, the Red Hat logo, JBoss, OpenShift, Fedora, the Infinity logo, and RHCE are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries.
Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States and other countries.
Java® is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
XFS® is a trademark of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries.
MySQL® is a registered trademark of MySQL AB in the United States, the European Union and other countries.
Node.js® is an official trademark of Joyent. Red Hat is not formally related to or endorsed by the official Joyent Node.js open source or commercial project.
The OpenStack® Word Mark and OpenStack logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation's permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.