The Playbook editor page is your main tool to author Playbooks. 


Playbooks enable users to fetch information from and take actions on various systems and services via Connectors. 


Connectors provide a way for us to communicate with these systems and services. E.g. A connector may help run a query against a database, or start virtual machines, or page an individual, or send a message to slack etc.


Various nodes in the Playbooks can fetch information, filter it and take actions via a versatile Playbooks Rules Configuration.


The main parts of the Playbook editor page are below:






The Header: 




The Palettes:

  • Clicking the Palette  tab, displays the Standard and Custom Palettes. 

  • The Standard Palette only has the Start, End and a Blank Node. The Start and End nodes are typically not needed unless you delete the pre-existing Start End nodes.

  • The Custom Palette includes nodes you may have already configured and likely used in other playbooks. Nodes shared by other users with you will also show up here. If you are just starting out you may not have any nodes in the custom palette. Please drag and drop a blank node from the standard palette to get started.


Creating Playbook Using Visual Editor:

Lets understand how to authoring a playbook, by actually building a playbook step-by-step, that fetches a list of all your EC2 instances from AWS.

1. Click on the  button to start a new playbook.


2. Drag-n-drop the blank node from the standard palette into the drawing canvas




3. Click on the dropped in node to select it




4. This should bring up a list of connectors on the Palette / Configuration Pane




5. Search for “ec2” and select the AWS EC2 Connector



6. Each connector typically supports several commands. For example the EC2 Connector could help you fetch a list of your EC2 instances, or could even help you start or stop these instances. 

7. For this playbook we only need the connector to describe all EC2 instances. Select the aws-ec2-describe-instances command.



8. Once selected, the Node in the visual editor would look like this




9. The left side panel will have three options to further configure the Node



10. AWS EC2 connector needs the region, access key and secret_key for your AWS account. The keys can reference the secure stash to avoid pasting credentials into the various forms. Click “Next” to move to the command configuration.




11. The Command Configuration for the aws-ec2-describe instances only requires the same region information.



12. Next name the node and click update, and you have configured your connector! Your node should look something like this




13. Now connect the nodes and your first playbook should look like this. You may use the Tidy-layout button to let the tool make it pretty for you. 



14. Give the playbook a name and description, the click button to save your playbook.


15. The new playbook should now be in the list of playbooks viewable by clicking 

Run a Playbook:

You may now choose to run your new playbook by clicking 

The output from the playbook should appear along the right hand side of the canvas 





Note that with the EC2 List node configured, it should now be available for reuse in the custom Palette.