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Vetting

Vetting plugins are used during the host discovery process to identify facts for target systems. These are simple executables that live in either plugins/vetting/ontarget or plugins/vetting/remote. The vetting plugins located within the ontarget directory are copied to the monitored host and executed. Plugins located within the remote directory are executed remotely from the Automatron instance.

Much like other plugins within Automatron these plugins are language agnostic. The only requirement for these executables is that they return a JSON structure with the identified facts specified.

The below example shows a simple ping status vetting plugin.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
## Ping server then return true or false JSON

if [ -z $1 ]
then
    exit 1
fi

/bin/ping -c 1 $1 > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ $? -eq 0 ]
then
    echo '{"ping": true}'
else
    echo '{"ping": false}'
fi

This plugin is designed to live within the plugins/vetting/remote path, as such it accepts a single argument $1 which will be either the IP or Hostname of the desired target. All plugins in the remote directory are executed with this single argument, whereas plugins in the ontarget path are executed with no arguments.

This plugin will produce a single fact that is accessible as {{ facts['ping'] }}.

Tip

Another, more complex example vetting plugin can be found with the system_info.py plugin.