Ansible : how to create roles and install prometheus, grafana and node-exporter

How to learn ansible ? Many people begin with this infrastructure as code and many companies adopt it.

Ansible is a great tool because you can do many things with it… and it’s very easy to begin with it. When you try it, you adopt it.

As a practical exercise I’ suggest you to install a monitoring stack like prometheus, grafana and node-exporter. Because that allow you to practice different and standard modules with a little or a large scale.

To begin define an inventory

Before to code your ansible roles, I prefer to begin with the inventory file. In this file, we describe our inrfastructure.

In our case, with use a simple yaml format like it 00_inventory.yaml :

all:
  children:
    monitor:
      hosts:
        172.17.0.2
    others:
      hosts:
        172.17.0.5:
        172.17.0.4:
        172.17.0.3:

Easy ? we have only two groups :

• monitor : for our monitoring stack (prometheus and grafana)
• others : for all other servers
• and of course the all group which merge…