Overview

Rundeck is runbook automation. Give anyone self-service access to the operations capabilities that previously only your subject matter experts could perform. Popular use cases include incident management, business continuity, service requests, or just spreading the operational load among your colleagues.

Automation Frontend

Automation frontends come into play between writing scripts and automated remediation and/or orchestration. This tool is for running scripts and CLI commands.

Essential Concepts

Several fundamental concepts underlie and drive the Rundeck system. If you are a new user, knowing about them will help you use or integrate Rundeck into your environment.

• Projects: A project is a place to separate management activity. All Rundeck activities occur within the context of a project. Multiple projects can be maintained on the same Rundeck server.

• Jobs : A job encapsulates a sequence of steps, job options and nodes where the steps execute.

• Nodes: A node is a resource that is either a physical or virtual instance of a network accessible host. A resource model is a representation of Nodes in a project.

• Commands: A command is a single executable string executed on a Node. Rundeck invokes commands on nodes via a node executor, which evaluates the command string and executes it.

• Executions: An execution is a representation of the activity of a running or completed command or job. The data about the execution is used in rundeck to monitor the progress of a job or command, and later for reporting about what happened.

• Role-based Access Control Policies: A Rundeck access control policy grants users and user groups certain privileges to perform actions against rundeck resources like projects, jobs, nodes, commands and API.

• Plugins: Extending Rundeck functionality is done through plugins. Plugins exist to execute commands on nodes, perform steps in a job, send a notification about job status, gather information about the hosts in your network, copy a file to a remote server, store and stream logs, talk to a user directory, and so much more.

Interfaces

There are several different way to interact with Rundeck's functionality:

• Web GUI: Most Rundeck navigation is done using the navigation bar on the left side of the page. Using the left navigation bar you can choose between available projects and, once inside a project, you can switch to the project's Dashboard, Jobs, Nodes, Commands and Activity pages. Project administrators will also be able to access the Project Settings pages.
• CLI: Rundeck includes a number of shell tools to dispatch commands, load and run Job definitions, and interact with the dispatcher's queue. These command line tools are an alternative to functions accessible in the graphical console.
• API: You can also use the Web API to interface with all aspects of Node and Job execution.