Ansible: get list of services by specified users

Question

For my lab I would like to check services on multiple servers for specific users. Ideally to have following data

• user
• status
• service name

Unfortunately, there is no native way to accomplish this with Ansible. With bash it's possible: ps -u user1,user2,user3 -xco user,stat,command which works as intended.

But PS is not that simple. It will not check services for users if one user does not exists. Could you please direct me in the right way, maybe I'm making things harder here.

Answer 1

I understand your question that you are not for looking for how to get services in specific status, but the state of processes running under specific users.

You could use the following approach to gather all available local users

---
- hosts: localhost
  become: yes
  gather_facts: false

  vars:
    SERVICES_IN_INTEREST: # here Ansible Tower only
      - "nginx"
      - "awx"

  tasks:

  - name: Gather available local users
    getent:
      database: passwd

  # Debugging output to get familar with the data structure

  - name: Show all gathered local user information
    debug:
      var: getent_passwd

  - name: Show gathered local user names only
    debug:
      msg: "{{ item }}"
    loop: "{{ getent_passwd.keys() | list }}"

Since one may not interested in all processes running under root or other users but specific services, a list of services in interest is introduced.

  - name: Get list of processes of all available local users
    shell:
      cmd: "ps -u {{ item }} -o user,stat,command --no-header | sort | uniq"
    loop: "{{ getent_passwd.keys() | list }}" # all local users
    when: item in SERVICES_IN_INTEREST
    register: result
    changed_when: false

  - name: Show result
    debug:
      msg: "{{ item.stdout }}"
    with_items: "{{ result.results }}"
    when: item.item in SERVICES_IN_INTEREST

The behavior could also be change to users in interest if necessary.