Creating Inventory, and Other Inventory Pieces
Inventories describe what is being acted upon in the Automation controller. Job templates target hosts and groups that reside in inventories. Almost every company has a different way of storing the source of truth (SOT) when it comes to an inventory of devices. This chapter will go into the details of managing inventories, from adding them from files to interacting with outside services to populate the host and groups that the controller references.
In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following topics related to inventories:
- Creating an inventory
- Using inventory sources
- Using base Ansible inventory plugins
- Using built-in automation controller inventory plugins
- Using other popular inventory plugins
- Writing your own inventory plugin