Administering Ascender Deployments

Learn how to administer Ascender deployments through custom scripts, management jobs, and DevOps workflows. This guide assumes at least basic understanding of the systems that you manage and maintain with Ascender.

This guide applies to the latest version of Ascender only. The content in this guide is updated frequently and might contain functionality that is not available in previous versions. Likewise content in this guide can be removed or replaced if it applies to functionality that is no longer available in the latest version.

• Administering Ascender Deployments
• 1. Starting, Stopping, and Restarting Ascender
• 2. Custom Inventory Scripts
• 3. Inventory File Importing
  • 3.1. Custom Dynamic Inventory Scripts
  • 3.2. SCM Inventory Source Fields
• 4. Multi-Credential Assignment
  • 4.1. Important Changes
  • 4.2. Launch Time Considerations
  • 4.3. Multi-Vault Credentials
• 5. Management Jobs
  • 5.1. Removing Old Activity Stream Data
  • 5.2. Cleanup Expired OAuth2 Tokens
  • 5.3. Cleanup Expired Sessions
  • 5.4. Removing Old Job History
• 6. Clustering
  • 6.1. Setup Considerations
  • 6.2. Scaling the Web and Task pods independently
  • 6.3. Assigning Ascender pods to specific nodes
  • 6.4. Status and Monitoring via Browser API
  • 6.5. Instance Services and Failure Behavior
  • 6.6. Job Runtime Behavior
• 7. Container and Instance Groups
  • 7.1. Instance Groups
  • 7.2. Container Groups
• 8. Managing Capacity With Instances
  • 8.1. Prerequisites
  • 8.2. Common topologies
  • 8.3. Add an instance
  • 8.4. Manage instances
  • 8.5. Using a custom Receptor CA
  • 8.6. Using a private image for the default EE
  • 8.7. Troubleshooting
• 9. Topology Viewer
• 10. Ascender Logfiles
• 11. Logging and Aggregation
  • 11.1. Loggers
  • 11.2. Set Up Logging
  • 11.3. Troubleshoot Logging
• 12. Metrics
  • 12.1. Set up Prometheus
• 13. Improving Ascender Performance
  • 13.1. Performance improvements
  • 13.2. Capacity Planning
  • 13.3. Monitoring Ascender
  • 13.4. Database Settings
  • 13.5. Additional Resources
• 14. Secret handling and connection security
  • 14.1. Secret Handling
  • 14.2. Connection Security
• 15. Security Best Practices
  • 15.1. Understand the architecture of Ansible and Ascender
  • 15.2. Granting access
  • 15.3. Available resources
• 16. The awx-manage Utility
  • 16.1. Inventory Import
  • 16.2. Cleanup of old data
  • 16.3. Cluster management
  • 16.4. Token and session management
  • 16.5. Analytics gathering
• 17. Ascender Configuration
  • 17.1. Authentication
  • 17.2. Jobs
  • 17.3. System
  • 17.4. User Interface
• 18. Isolation functionality and variables
• 19. Token-Based Authentication
  • 19.1. Managing OAuth 2 Applications and Tokens
  • 19.2. Using OAuth 2 Token System for Personal Access Tokens (PAT)
  • 19.3. Application Functions
  • 19.4. Application Token Functions
• 20. Setting up Social Authentication
  • 20.1. GitHub settings
  • 20.2. Google OAuth2 settings
  • 20.3. Organization and Team Mapping
• 21. Setting up Enterprise Authentication
  • 21.1. Azure AD settings
  • 21.2. LDAP Authentication
  • 21.3. RADIUS settings
  • 21.4. SAML settings
  • 21.5. TACACS+ settings
  • 21.6. Generic OIDC settings
• 22. Setting up LDAP Authentication
  • 22.1. LDAP Organization and Team Mapping
  • 22.2. Enabling Logging for LDAP
  • 22.3. Referrals
  • 22.4. LDAP authentication performance tips
• 23. Changing the Default Timeout for Authentication
• 24. User Authentication with Kerberos
  • 24.1. AD and Kerberos Credentials
  • 24.2. Working with Kerberos Tickets
• 25. Working with Session Limits
• 26. Using Custom Logos in Ascender
• 27. Troubleshooting Ascender
  • 27.1. Error logging and extra settings
  • 27.2. sosreport
  • 27.3. Problems connecting to your host
  • 27.4. Unable to login to Ascender via HTTP
  • 27.5. WebSockets port for live events not working
  • 27.6. Problems running a playbook
  • 27.7. Problems when running a job
  • 27.8. Playbooks aren’t showing up in the “Job Template” drop-down
  • 27.9. Playbook stays in pending
  • 27.10. Cancel an Ascender job
  • 27.11. Reusing an external database causes installations to fail
  • 27.12. Private EC2 VPC Instances in the Ascender Inventory
  • 27.13. Troubleshooting “Error: provided hosts list is empty”
• 28. Ascender Tips and Tricks
  • 28.1. Using the Ascender CLI Tool
  • 28.2. Changing the Ascender Admin Password
  • 28.3. Creating an Ascender Admin from the commandline
  • 28.4. Setting up a jump host to use with Ascender
  • 28.5. View Ansible outputs for JSON commands when using Ascender
  • 28.6. Locate and configure the Ansible configuration file
  • 28.7. View a listing of all ansible_ variables
  • 28.8. The ALLOW_JINJA_IN_EXTRA_VARS variable
  • 28.9. Using execution environments
  • 28.10. Configuring the awxhost hostname for notifications
  • 28.11. Launching Jobs with curl
  • 28.12. Dynamic Inventory and private IP addresses
  • 28.13. Filtering instances returned by the dynamic inventory sources in Ascender
  • 28.14. Using an unreleased module from Ansible source with Ascender
  • 28.15. Using callback plugins with Ascender
  • 28.16. Connecting to Windows with winrm
  • 28.17. Importing existing inventory files and host/group vars into Ascender