Back in the forgotten age of December 2019, when people still walked the earth, I talked about the horrors of configuring the Dynamics 365 API, but at the time I was still pretty new to actually working with the API and little did I know it would get uglier the deeper you go and this problem compounds even deeper when we reach the point of trying to create custom integrations . . .
A useful function nested within Ansible is the ability to query remote REST APIs, return the JSON data, parse it and perform subsequent actions based on the data that your get back. When we make the subsequent action sending to a remote Webhook we can then make the function even more powerful (most of the time that is going to be sending a notification to a remote system to let . . .
Previously I’ve looked in detail at the uses of two of Hashicorp’s offering’s; Terraform and Vault. Predictably, the union of these two platforms allows for some ideal ways to further streamline the process of cloud provisioning, in this case by securely handling the myriad secrets needed for cloud shaping and configuration. In this post I’ll be looking at a fairly simple configuration to get started. The sample code for this . . .
In my recent posts I’ve covered the hardened setup of Vault and covered the basics of using the REST API. As we’ve seen so far, Vault is primarily designed for programmatic interactions from external systems via the API, so lets take a look a favourite of mine, Ansible Tower, which is a prime candidate as a third party system which often has a requirement to call secrets from external systems. . . .
In my last post I covered the setup and hardening of Hashicorp’s Vault platform, in this post I’ll be looking at getting to grips with REST API and the Token authentication method. Tokens are core to the Vault authentication system, the platform is at it’s heart designed to be interacted with programmatically by external systems over the API and the UI exists only to make the platform less bewildering for . . .
The power of leveraging Ansible Tower against Dynatrace problem detection first dawned on me after reading a post from the excellent Wolfgang Beer. He talks about the solution in the abstract and gives a pretty concise guide on how to leverage APM to use event driven metrics to launch a Playbook, but I ran in to issues almost instantly. The problem isn’t obvious straight away, most people run Dynatrace as . . .
Ansible Tower and Netbox are two of the greatest tools in the DevOps toolchain, and the integration is seemingly painless on the surface (and really it isn’t all that bad) but there is a little nuance to it. Both application stacks provide a RESTful API so sending data between the two should be as simple as firing some JSON between them right? Even with Ansible being a YAML focused platform . . .
In the immortal words of the Notepad++ User Manual: Documentation is like sex, when it’s good, it’s very, very good; when it’s bad, it’s better than nothing. https://npp-user-manual.org/ This has never in my life been more apparent than working with the Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations APIs. Providing some truly dreadful documentation and a smattering of documents that lay out the high level framework of how authentication all ties together . . .