Last week I checked out the Spark for Developers portal and used the Spark learning lab #1 to develop an Ansible module to manage Spark rooms, members and messages from an Ansible playbook. Ansible has an existing extras module, mail, to send email from a playbook. Sending an email is a common way to notify people in a team that a playbook has been run or to request additional tasks in a workflow.
In many organizations, collaboration tools like Spark, are being used instead of email to streamline workflow and help teams improve the way they work with colleagues . In this example, I extend the APIC-EM and Ansible integration modules to include an Ansible module I wrote to create a Spark room, add members, and to send a message based on the facts gathered about the network from APIC-EM.
The sample playbook is available on GitHub. It queries APIC-EM for a list of discovered devices, creates a Spark room, adds members to the room, and sends a message to the room requesting an upgrade of several Cisco 2911 routers running a specific release of IOS. The following is a screen snapshot of the Spark room with the output of the Ansible playbook.
At World Wide Technology, we are demonstrating an integration of ServiceNow and Spark to manage the WWT customer proof of concepts. This illustration of Ansible, APIC-EM and Spark, is another example of how tools can be easily combined via their REST APIs to provide a more robust collaboration experience and improve network agility.
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