Comment by mdaniel

At the very grave risk of scope creep, I'll point out that the GP's yaml is very close to an Ansible inventory file so rather than just making up a new structure one could leverage any existing muscle memory (and create helpful defaults for folks who have not yet seen Ansible but have seen your tool)

https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/11/collections/ansible/buil...

e.g.

  all:
    children:
      mygroup:
        hosts:
          myhost-01:
            hostname: actualhost1.com
            port: 1234
            user: myuser
          myhost-02:
            hostname: actualhost2.com
            port: 7890
            user: myuser
          myhost-03:
            hostname: actualhost3.com
            port: 8888
            user: myuser
        vars:
          files:
          - /var/log/syslog
          - /var/log/foo
          - /var/log/bar

That first "children" key is because in ansible's world one can have "vars" and "hosts" that exist at the very top, too; the top-level "vars" would propagate down to all hosts which one can view as "not necessary" in the GP's example, or "useful" if those files are always the same for every single host in the whole collection. Same-same for the "user:" but I wasn't trying to get bogged down in the DRY for this exercise