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

**URL:** <https://forum.ansible.com/t/announcing-ansible-trace-understand-task-duration-and-playbook-critical-paths/35839>\
**Category:** Ansible Project\
**Created:** [October 8, 2021, 9:16pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/announcing-ansible-trace-understand-task-duration-and-playbook-critical-paths/35839 "2021-10-08T21:16:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Mark\_Hansen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9fc29f/32.png) [@Mark\_Hansen](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Mark_Hansen)\
**Post date:** [October 8, 2021, 9:16pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/announcing-ansible-trace-understand-task-duration-and-playbook-critical-paths/35839/1 "2021-10-08T21:16:02Z")

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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/](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](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/original/2X/f/f541d705013f3c6c3343194455c3392f45b34d0d.png)

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

 ![ansible-trace-lockstep.png](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/original/2X/b/bc86a64a9cd47d7c3ad112190ac17c912708369f.png)

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.](https://github.com/mhansen/ansible-trace).

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

Thanks,  
Mark

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**Author:** ![gundalow](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/ansible/user_avatar/forum.ansible.com/gundalow/32/99_2.png) [@gundalow](https://forum.ansible.com/u/gundalow)\
**Post date:** [October 11, 2021, 12:21pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/announcing-ansible-trace-understand-task-duration-and-playbook-critical-paths/35839/2 "2021-10-11T12:21:47Z")

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Very cool thanks for sharing.

If anyone else is interested, there’s a loads of good discussion happening in [Reddit - The heart of the internet](https://www.reddit.com/r/ansible/comments/q49h2d/ansibletrace_visualise_execution_time_of_ansible/)

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