Collecting data and generating recurring system reports are essential tasks for any system administrator, and automating these tasks can help us to discover issues early on, in order to provide solutions for them. In this chapter, we will see some proven methods for automating data collection from servers and generating that data into formal reports. We will learn how to manage new and existing users, using Python and Ansible. Also, we will dive into log analysis and monitoring the system Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). You can schedule the monitoring scripts to run on a regular basis.
The following topics will be covered in this chapter:
- Collecting data from Linux
- Managing users in Ansible