Lab: Configuring Workflow Job Templates, Surveys, and Notifications

[Ravi_Shanker]

The values in the question are reversed to what is achieved in the workflow and shown in the solution.

https://rol.redhat.com/rol/app/courses/do467-2.2/pages/ch12s07

If everything worked, the MOTD should be updated to System has been customized to improve network performance., the net.core.netdev_max_backlog kernel parameter should have a value of 600, and the net.core.netdev_budget kernel parameter should have a value of 10000.

[root@servera ~]# sysctl net.core.netdev_max_backlog net.core.netdev_budget net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 10000 net.core.netdev_budget = 600

[Chetan_Tiwary_ · Accepted solution]

Hello @Ravi_Shanker !

Thanks for reaching out! 

Let me check and revert to you. 

[Chetan_Tiwary_ · Accepted solution]

Ok @Ravi_Shanker Yes you are right !

Thanks for taking out your time and reporting this to us. I will report this to the concerned team to have this corrected at the earliest. 

[Wasim_Raja]

@Ravi_Shanker Thank you for reporting.

[Ravi_Shanker]

In my opinion the correct workflow for the lab exercise should be as below from a practical viewpoint.

Reason being the Performance Improve JD does not have any inventory and does not confirm job template has run on the Dev inventory with success. Only when a solution is implemented successfully on Dev inventory and verified should it be approved for implemention on Prod inventory. Just my thoughts. In practical scenario approver should anyhow manually verify the implementation on Dev inventory before approving.

[Travis]

@Ravi_Shanker -

You aren't wrong in some of the thinking, but all Job Templates (JT) have inventories. The picture in the book is somewhat misleading since there are two things happening on "success".  I updates the message of the day and kicks off the "Approval Node". The task that is being approved by the "Approvers" is the "Performance Improve" JT which is performed on the DEV inventory. So a failure there means the "Approval Node" is never reached.However, the MOTD is still updated with the failure message.

In your workflow, the "Approval" isn't actual on the "Performance Improve" JT but is instead given after the successful update of the MOTD. So a failure for the update of MOTD would just end. Again, these are small differences, but in the example in the book, the Approval would kickoff upon "Performance Improve" JT  and the MOTD JT would not impact the items going to production as it could potentially fail due to other reasons.

The inventory is specified for each JT and you should notice that the DEV inventories are used for each JT prior to the approval node. After the approval node, JTs are using the PROD inventories. Keep in mind, you can't create a JT node without an inventory.

What would be better is that the Performance Improve playbook had "Tests" to show that performance was actually improved, but unfortunately, we are assuming that because a playbook was successful, the desired outcomes have been met.  So an improvement to make things a little more real would be updates to the playbook to use the FAIL module to perform some tests and generate failures if we don't reach the intended outcomes.

Hope that helps.

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

Thank you @Travis for your detailed explanation !

[Ravi_Shanker]

My bad.. Only the workflow job template is without inventory. You are correct on the inventory part and yes the network performance settings triggers the MOTD update. Doing the same exercise again sometimes miss reading the finer points which are important to understand the basics. The MOTD update for network settings using survery happens only after the network performace settings are successfully updated on the previous job. Approval after the MOTD success would never happen without the network settings update. From an exam perspective I was wondering if a different perspective to solve such problem will be seen as unresolved problem and would get no marks unless the question explicitly asks to solve in a particular way as in the lab exercise ?

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@Ravi_Shanker I dont think exam wants you to solve a question in a particular way or using a fixed method/command/ tool  unless it is explicilty mentioned in the question or instruction.

[Ravi_Shanker]

Thank you @Chetan_Tiwary_ . I had my second attempt for the exam today. As I see, have solved all tasks. Long wait for the results now.