Ansible vs osquery

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

osquery

Stacks28

Followers61

Votes0

Ansible vs osquery: What are the differences?

Introduction

Key differences between Ansible and osquery are as follows:

Architecture: Ansible is an automation tool that uses agentless architecture, where commands are executed over SSH or WinRM, enabling remote management of machines. In contrast, osquery is an open-source endpoint visibility tool that deploys lightweight agents to collect and query data from systems, providing deeper insights into endpoint security and performance.
Use Case: Ansible is primarily used for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation across multiple servers. On the other hand, osquery is more focused on security and allows users to query system-level information, monitor changes, and investigate security incidents, making it advantageous for threat hunting and incident response.
Language: Ansible uses YAML-based playbooks to define the tasks and workflows, making it easy to read and write automation scripts. In contrast, osquery utilizes SQL-like queries to retrieve data from the system, allowing users with SQL knowledge to quickly analyze and extract information from the endpoints.
Community Support: Ansible has a large and active community of users and contributors, providing extensive documentation, modules, and playbooks for various use cases, making it easier to adopt and scale automation tasks. Meanwhile, osquery also has a supportive community but is more specialized towards security professionals and researchers interested in endpoint visibility and monitoring.
Target Audience: Ansible is suitable for system administrators, DevOps engineers, and IT operations teams looking to automate tasks, streamline workflows, and standardize configurations across the infrastructure. Conversely, osquery is more tailored towards security analysts, incident responders, and threat hunters who need real-time visibility into endpoint activities, configuration changes, and potential security threats.
Integration: Ansible can integrate with a wide range of third-party tools, cloud platforms, and infrastructure providers, enabling seamless automation and orchestration of IT processes. In contrast, osquery can be integrated with security information and event management (SIEM) systems, threat intelligence platforms, and security operations tools to enhance visibility, detection, and response capabilities in cybersecurity operations.

In Summary, the key differences between Ansible and osquery lie in their architecture, use case, language, community support, target audience, and integration capabilities.

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Advice on Ansible, osquery

Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

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Detailed Comparison

Ansible	osquery
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.	osquery exposes an operating system as a high-performance relational database. This allows you to write SQL-based queries to explore operating system data. With osquery, SQL tables represent abstract concepts such as running processes, loaded kernel modules, open network connections, browser plugins, hardware events or file hashes.
Ansible's natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.;Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate "managing the management", and reclaim CPU cycles.;Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 28
Followers 15.6K	Followers 61
Votes 1.3K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Doesn't Run on Windows 3 Backward compatibility 3 Bloated	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Ansible, osquery?

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs osquery: What are the differences?

Introduction

Key differences between Ansible and osquery are as follows:

Architecture: Ansible is an automation tool that uses agentless architecture, where commands are executed over SSH or WinRM, enabling remote management of machines. In contrast, osquery is an open-source endpoint visibility tool that deploys lightweight agents to collect and query data from systems, providing deeper insights into endpoint security and performance.
Use Case: Ansible is primarily used for configuration management, application deployment, and task automation across multiple servers. On the other hand, osquery is more focused on security and allows users to query system-level information, monitor changes, and investigate security incidents, making it advantageous for threat hunting and incident response.
Language: Ansible uses YAML-based playbooks to define the tasks and workflows, making it easy to read and write automation scripts. In contrast, osquery utilizes SQL-like queries to retrieve data from the system, allowing users with SQL knowledge to quickly analyze and extract information from the endpoints.
Community Support: Ansible has a large and active community of users and contributors, providing extensive documentation, modules, and playbooks for various use cases, making it easier to adopt and scale automation tasks. Meanwhile, osquery also has a supportive community but is more specialized towards security professionals and researchers interested in endpoint visibility and monitoring.
Target Audience: Ansible is suitable for system administrators, DevOps engineers, and IT operations teams looking to automate tasks, streamline workflows, and standardize configurations across the infrastructure. Conversely, osquery is more tailored towards security analysts, incident responders, and threat hunters who need real-time visibility into endpoint activities, configuration changes, and potential security threats.
Integration: Ansible can integrate with a wide range of third-party tools, cloud platforms, and infrastructure providers, enabling seamless automation and orchestration of IT processes. In contrast, osquery can be integrated with security information and event management (SIEM) systems, threat intelligence platforms, and security operations tools to enhance visibility, detection, and response capabilities in cybersecurity operations.

In Summary, the key differences between Ansible and osquery lie in their architecture, use case, language, community support, target audience, and integration capabilities.

Ansible vs osquery

Overview

Ansible vs osquery: What are the differences?