Ansible playbook shell output

Question

I would like to quickly monitor some hosts using commands like ps,dstat etc using ansible-playbook. The ansible command itself perfectly does what I want, for i

Answer 1

I found using the minimal stdout_callback with ansible-playbook gave similar output to using ad-hoc ansible.

In your ansible.cfg (Note that I'm on OS X so modify the callback_plugins path to suit your install)

stdout_callback     = minimal
callback_plugins    = /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ansible/plugins/callback

So that a ansible-playbook task like yours

---
-
  hosts: example
  gather_facts: no
  tasks:
    - shell: ps -eo pcpu,user,args | sort -r -k1 | head -n5

Gives output like this, like an ad-hoc command would

example | SUCCESS | rc=0 >>
%CPU USER     COMMAND
 0.2 root     sshd: root@pts/3
 0.1 root     /usr/sbin/CROND -n
 0.0 root     [xfs-reclaim/vda]
 0.0 root     [xfs_mru_cache]

I'm using ansible-playbook 2.2.1.0