Event-Driven Ansible

Rulebooks reacting to alerts for self-healing automation.

7 min readAnsible AutomationProvision

What Is Event-Driven Ansible?

Event-Driven Ansible (EDA) watches for events — alerts, webhooks, log entries, API calls — and triggers automated responses based on rules. Instead of polling for problems, EDA reacts to them in real time.

EDA Rulebooks

rulebook.yml


---
- name: Restart service on alert
  hosts: localhost
  sources:
    - name: webhook_alert
      webhook:
        host: 0.0.0.0
        port: 5000
        payload_events:
          - key: alert_type
            value: service_down
  rules:
    - name: Service down alert
      condition: event.alert_type == "service_down"
      action:
        run_playbook:
          name: playbooks/restart-service.yml
          extra_vars:
            service_name: "{{ event.service_name }}"
            affected_host: "{{ event.host }}"

Rulebooks define event sources, conditions, and actions. When an event matches a condition, the action executes automatically.

Event Sources

Source	Type	Use Case
webhook	Pull	Prometheus Alertmanager, Grafana alerts
kafka	Pull	High-throughput event streams
prometheus	Pull	Prometheus alert rules
cloudwatch	Pull	AWS CloudWatch alarms
azure_service_bus	Pull	Azure event streams
file	Pull	Log file monitoring
range	Pull	Scheduled polling of APIs

EDA Actions

EDA action types


# Run a playbook
rules:
  - name: Restart on alert
    condition: event.type == "service_down"
    action:
      run_playbook:
        name: playbooks/restart.yml

# Run a module
rules:
  - name: Notify on alert
    condition: event.severity == "critical"
    action:
      run_module:
        name: ansible.builtin.debug
        module_args:
          msg: "Critical alert: {{ event.message }}"

# Send to a webhook
rules:
  - name: Forward alert
    condition: event.type == "alert"
    action:
      post_webhook:
        url: "https://slack.example.com/webhook"
        headers:
          Content-Type: "application/json"
        payload:
          text: "Alert: {{ event.message }}"

EDA supports running playbooks, modules, or webhook calls as actions. Choose the right action for each use case.

Self-Healing Patterns

Self-healing rulebook


---
- name: Self-healing automation
  hosts: localhost
  sources:
    - name: alertmanager
      webhook:
        host: 0.0.0.0
        port: 5001
  rules:
    - name: Restart failed service
      condition: event.alertname == "ServiceDown"
      action:
        run_playbook:
          name: playbooks/restart-service.yml
          extra_vars:
            service_name: "{{ event.labels.service }}"
            target_host: "{{ event.labels.instance }}"

    - name: Scale up on high CPU
      condition: event.alertname == "HighCPU" and event.labels.severity == "warning"
      action:
        run_playbook:
          name: playbooks/scale-instance.yml
          extra_vars:
            instance_group: "{{ event.labels.group }}"

    - name: Rollback on deploy failure
      condition: event.alertname == "DeployFailed"
      action:
        run_playbook:
          name: playbooks/rollback.yml
          extra_vars:
            version: "{{ event.annotations.previous_version }}"

Self-healing automation detects problems and fixes them automatically. The system recovers without human intervention.

EDA enables autonomous operations

EDA transforms Ansible from a push-based tool into a reactive automation platform. Combined with monitoring, it creates self-healing infrastructure.

Test self-healing carefully

Automated remediation can cause cascading failures if the root cause is misidentified. Start with notifications, then add automated fixes for well-understood problems only.

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Stage 4 · Provision

Testing, AWX & CI/CD