Remove ASG Instances From Ansible Tower Inventories

Background

There have been several incidents with Ansible Tower where production changes cannot be made because Tower has run out of licenses. When checking Tower inventories Site-Infra found that several inventories include instances that are part of Auto Scaling Group (ASG). ASG instances should not be added to Tower Inventory since software release is done via AMI baking, while troubleshooting can be done via Session Manager. We need your help to remove the ASG Instances from tower inventory. To remove ASG instances from Tower inventories here are some step you need to do:

For production Inventories

In the Instance Filters field append ,tag:TowerManaged=true to your current filter. E.g: if your current instance filter is tag:Cluster=tsidata-app then change it to tag:Cluster=tsidata-app,tag:TowerManaged=true
Add stack_filters: true to Source Variables text field
Sync your inventory

For TVLK-dev INVENTORIES

On non-ASG instances add new tag TowerManaged with value true.
On Instance Filters field append ,tag:TowerManaged=true to your current filter. E.g: if your current instance filter is tag:Cluster=tsidata-app then change it to tag:Cluster=tsidata-app,tag:TowerManaged=true
Add stack_filters: true to Source Variables text field
Sync your inventory

References

For further details you can follow How to Create Ansible Inventory documentation

FAQ

Q : I need to access ASG EC2 instance
A : Please follow Access EC2 instances with SSM Session Manager
Q: I need to access my database cluster
A: Please use DB Bastion

If you face problems you can contact Site-Infra in #site-infra-channel