Turning Automation into Insights: Ansible’s metrics-utility

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In today’s enterprise IT landscape, automation isn’t just about reducing friction—it’s about creating measurable business value. At Red Hat we have customers asking:

"How do we count our automations with greater accuracy and visibility?"

That question sparked the creation of a small but powerful tool: metrics-utility

This CLI tool shipped within your Ansible Automation Platform (2.4 and 2.5) provides usage data into actionable, reportable business insights. Whether you're in IT Ops, platform engineering, finance, or the executive suite, the metrics-utility exports the raw data to be consumed in a manageable way and can even generate spreadsheets with rolled up data.

Why We Built It

We built metrics-utility with three goals in mind:

1. Make automation measurable
First and foremost we need ALL customers to be able to benefit from accurate host/node counting and report generation
2. Work for any customer on or offline
Whether the customer is connected to the internet or not, the reporting should work for all customers. Ansible does have the Ansible Analytics Cloud Based service at console.redhat.com but you have to be internet connected to benefit from this.
3. Quantifying Operational Impact for Financial Value
Not just technically, but financially. You need to quantify jobs run, hosts/nodes touched, and inventories managed over time—and tie those metrics to value creation.
4. Help customers stay in compliance
Whether you're on a Red Hat subscription, using CCSP (Certified Cloud and Service Provider) billing, or doing internal chargebacks—our tool provides the data to support clean, auditable reports.

What It Does

At its core, metrics-utility is a command-line application that interacts with your Ansible Automation Platform Controller and:

  • Exports job execution data—number of runs, duration, hosts affected, inventory used, etc.
  • Packages this data into structured reports (e.g., for CCSP, CCSPv2, renewal guidance).
  • Availability, shipped in both AAP 2.4 and AAP 2.5. You can benefit from a wealth of the utilities capabilities, more so on AAP 2.5.

You can schedule it to run as often as needed—hourly, daily, monthly—and it’s container-friendly, OpenShift supported, and traditional RPM install capable.

Enabling Business Insights

Here’s where things get interesting.
Once data is exported, it is now cleaned, and formatted into digestible CSV, you can:

  • Feed it into BI tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Grafana to show automation adoption trends over time.
  • Align with internal KPIs like cost savings, job success rates, or MTTR improvements.
  • Support budgeting and capacity planning, using actual automation utilization to guide investment decisions.

And because all reports are standardized, this creates a consistent language between technical teams and business stakeholders.

Real-World Example 1: Business Unit Reporting

Imagine you’re a global retailer with multiple departments using Ansible. Each team automates different workflows—from SAP system patching to CI/CD deployments.
With metrics-utility, you can:

  • Track automation usage per inventory or organization
  • Compare usage growth month-over-month
  • Identify under-utilized capacity or automation “power users”
  • Map job execution to cost centers for chargeback

All with a few CLI commands—or automated cron jobs.

sample dashboard
* Example dashboard built from metrics-utility data *

Real-World Example 2: CCSP Reporting

Imagine you’re a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider providing Ansible Automation Platform to your customers, automation usage by customer or organisation is key to your compliance;
With metrics-utility, you can:

  • Remove all the friction you currently have in generating your CCSP spreadsheet.
  • Track automation usage per customer or organization
  • Identify cross-sell opportunities by identifying automation by vendor
  • Have visibility beyond the API endpoint being automated

All with a few CLI commands—or automated cron jobs.

Built for Flexibility

We designed the tool to be:

  • Iterate Fast – We deliver this using agile processes and can iterate fast
  • Controller-integrated – already shipped with AAP if you’re using Red Hat Automation Platform
  • BI-ready – outputs structured data that can plug into your favorite analytics stack
  • Spreadsheet at Minimum - If you don't have BI we can produce a spreadsheet for you.

What’s Next?

The future of the metrics-utility is to mature from a tactical solution to our strategic initiative that is a platform service, integrated with RBAC, Logging and highly available like many services within the Ansible Automation Platform.
When metrics-service is first previewed we expect it to have parity with existing capabilities of the metrics-utility as well as;

  • Local database for storing metrics
  • Export to CSV, console.redhat.com and spreadsheet.
  • API support so BI can connect directly

Your feedback drives our roadmap, and we encourage you to engage with the GitHub project, submit issues and evolve with us the metrics-utility.

Official Red Hat Documentation : metrics-utility

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