A talk I gave at the London Splunk User Group in July of 2014. A brief overview of why choose Ansible over the other options, then some live demos of configuring certain bits of Splunk with Ansible. Intended to be a taster of what's possible. All the Ansible playbooks are shared on Github, the link to which is in the presentation.

1. Automating Splunk
Configuration
Mark Phillips

2. Topics
• Which tool?
• Demo: Configuration storage
• Demo: Enabling forwarding
• Demo: Installing and managing forwarders
• Demo: Maintaining apps

3. About Me
• Linux tinkerer since 1992
• Automating stuff since 1993
• “Done time” in small organisations through to
Investment Banks
• I’m lazy

4. –Albert Einstein
“Make everything as simple as
possible, but not simpler”

5. Infrastructure as code

6. Ansible
• Agent less
• SSH for transport
• Common language - YAML
• Easy to learn quickly

7. Learn More
• Slides from DevOps Cardif (Puppet vs Chef vs Ansible)
• Blog post I wrote last year
• Splunk's recent blog on Splunk + Ansible
• Get started with Ansible

9. El Reg: "Are your servers PETS or CATTLE?"

10. (The Splunk GUI is fine for managing a small estate)

11. (But as you get larger, really you need more help: automation)

12. Demos
Github repo used to build the demos:
http://github.com/phips/splunkbox/tree/jldemo

13. Ansible Tower
http://www.ansible.com/tower

14. Mark Phillips
mark@vntx.cc
@vntxuk
Blog: probably.co.uk