One of the risks of running Ansible on the command line is that once a particular task has been run, its output is lost forever. It is, of course, possible to turn on logging for Ansible; but in an enterprise, this would need to be enforced, and this would be difficult with lots of operators having root access to a given Ansible machine, be it their own laptop or a server somewhere. Thankfully, as we saw in our earlier example, AWX stores not only the details of who ran what tasks and when, but also stores all the output from the ansible-playbook tasks. In this way, compliance and auditability are achieved for enterprises wishing to use Ansible.

Simply navigate to the Jobs menu item, and a list of all previously run jobs (that the user has permission to see) will be shown. It is even possible to repeat previously completed jobs directly from this screen simply by clicking on the rocket-ship icon next to the job in question. Note that this immediately launches the job with the same parameters it was launched with last time!

The following screenshot shows the job history for our demo AWX instance being used for this book:

The previous screenshot shows an example of the jobs screen, taken from a recently-configured AWX instance built for this book. In the screenshot, you can clearly see the job that was run previously.