Chapter 9: Troubleshooting Ansible

Ansible is beautifully simple, yet incredibly powerful. The simplicity of Ansible means that its operation is easy to understand and follow. However, even with the simplest and most user-friendly of systems, things do go wrong from time to time—perhaps as we are learning to write our own code (playbooks, roles, modules, or otherwise) and need to debug it, or, more rarely, when we might have found a bug in a released version of a collection or ansible-core.

Being able to understand and follow the operation of Ansible is critically important when debugging unexpected behavior, wherever it may arise. Ansible provides a number of options and tools to help you troubleshoot the operation of its core components, as well as your own playbook code. We will explore these in detail in this chapter, with the goal of empowering you to troubleshoot your own Ansible work with confidence.

Specifically, in this chapter, we will look at the following...