Announcing Ansible-Trace: understand task duration and playbook critical paths

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1

Hi there,

I have some slow Ansible playbooks, and I was wondering where the time goes. So I made a Callback Plugin that outputs Chrome’s “Trace Event Format” for visualising the parallel execution and critical path in https://ui.perfetto.dev/. I hope this will be generally useful, so I’m sharing it.

Pictures are worth 1000 words, so here’s a playbook executing with strategy: free:

ansible-trace-marked-up.png
ansible-trace-marked-up.png1036×832 137 KB

Here’s the same playbook executing with the default strategy: linear:

ansible-trace-lockstep.png
ansible-trace-lockstep.png1036×832 107 KB

Please try ansible-trace. It can help you understand your playbook and where to optimise. Please reply with your feedback if you find it useful, or find it could be improved.

Instructions are on GitHub - mhansen/ansible-trace: Visualise Ansible execution time across playbooks, tasks, and hosts..

I’d like to contribute this to Ansible core, if there is interest.

Thanks,
Mark

2

Very cool thanks for sharing.

If anyone else is interested, there’s a loads of good discussion happening in https://www.reddit.com/r/ansible/comments/q49h2d/ansibletrace_visualise_execution_time_of_ansible/

Kind regards,
John “gundalow” Barker
Manager, Ansible Community
Red Hat