# Only show output for changed things? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ansible Project\ **Created:** [September 4, 2014, 7:59pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/only-show-output-for-changed-things/16120 "2014-09-04T19:59:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Josh\_Smift1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/bcef8e/32.png) [@Josh\_Smift1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Josh_Smift1)\ **Post date:** [September 4, 2014, 7:59pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/only-show-output-for-changed-things/16120/1 "2014-09-04T19:59:43Z")
Is there a way to tell Ansible to only show output for things that have changed? We've got playbooks that include roles and run dozens of tasks, and often want to check to see what's going to happen before we actually run them (because we share some common code between a couple of sites, each of which has its own Ansible servers, so things sometimes drift over time), and that'd be easier to do if the output wasn't full of "ok:" reports. (It also seems nicely consistent with the Unix principle that silence == success, which isn't always what you want, but which is nice to be able to get when it \*is\* what you want.)                                       -Josh (jbs@care.com) This email is intended for the person(s) to whom it is addressed and may contain information that is PRIVILEGED or CONFIDENTIAL. Any unauthorized use, distribution, copying, or disclosure by any person other than the addressee(s) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately by return email and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2014, 1:30am UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/only-show-output-for-changed-things/16120/2 "2014-09-05T01:30:56Z")
Ansible will print everything, because it’s important to know when things come back. If you want a good way to skim status for changed, not changed, and filter, etc, sometimes a command line can break down and not be the best fit. Ansible Tower, particularly in version 2.0, provides a very nice UI for exploring that kind of info, for those interested - [http://ansible.com/tower](http://ansible.com/tower). Otherwise, no, there’s not a way to shut it off. I am hesitant to provide it because I think knowing when hosts return is important. ---
**Author:** ![Josh\_Smift1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/bcef8e/32.png) [@Josh\_Smift1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Josh_Smift1)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2014, 5:15pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/only-show-output-for-changed-things/16120/3 "2014-09-05T17:15:31Z")
> Ansible will print everything, because it's important to know when > things come back. In our usage, we frequently don't care at all when things come back: We have a playbook that we know is going to take several minutes to run (dozens of tasks on dozens of hosts), so we fire it off, go do something else, and check back a while later to see what it did. If the recap at the bottom looks like we expect, that's great; if it doesn't, it'd be really useful to just see the failures, so we could quickly see what went wrong. (This is for things like system configuration management, the "make sure everything on this system is configured like it's supposed to be" sort of playbook.)                                       -Josh (jbs@care.com) This email is intended for the person(s) to whom it is addressed and may contain information that is PRIVILEGED or CONFIDENTIAL. Any unauthorized use, distribution, copying, or disclosure by any person other than the addressee(s) is strictly prohibited. If you have received this email in error, please notify the sender immediately by return email and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---
**Author:** ![Michael\_DeHaan1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@Michael\_DeHaan1](https://forum.ansible.com/u/Michael_DeHaan1)\ **Post date:** [September 5, 2014, 7:34pm UTC](https://forum.ansible.com/t/only-show-output-for-changed-things/16120/4 "2014-09-05T19:34:14Z")
You might want to consider using Tower. It makes it easy to delve in to specific results and the 2.0 version has a very very nice view for this. You can quickly ignore things you don't care about. CLI output is great -- we don't hamstring it, but somethings are hard to dig through. I do not think making a way to turn off non-changed server info coming back is a good idea - if something didn't come back, you would not easily know. You could also consider using callback plugins to form up your own alternative log.