Ansible event driven capacity
I can't say that I've used SaltStack, but I have a good deal of experience with Ansible.  The two are different approaches.  Event based use is not hidden, it is just not there by itself.

Ansible is agent-less (no minions), and as such it relies on a management system to be able to control.  This adds flexibility on how to manage events, where they come from, how they are raised and what to do in an automated fashion.  This means that it can be used for provisioning through CI/CD, fixing faults through a monitoring system, combined with a server agent like Telegraf.

The questions I think that should be asked is: what would trigger the tool, where it should run and what should be performed.  The rest is just getting the right tools to link up.  Generally, it will involve a CI/CD system, but there are plenty of those.

Some example uses cases:


detecting a flake in a build on a bare-metal server in a pipeline, triggering to re-provision the server.
a trigger coming from the PR system, to start a build to update test servers.
Telegraf detects a disk issue, which triggers an alert which can then start a build to resize the disk or provision a larger server and transfer services there.


Except for the Telegraf use case, the events are likely coming from sources other than the agent running.  And then with the Telegraf case, the option of provisioning a different server would be outside the scope of SaltStack.

To answer your last question of even to use a event-driven model, it's a matter of necessity and choice depending on the use cases.