Ansible is simple, but powerful. The simplicity of Ansible means that its operation is easy to understand and follow. Being able to understand and follow this is critically important when debugging unexpected behavior. In this chapter, we will explore the various methods that can be employed to examine, introspect, modify, and otherwise debug the operation of Ansible. In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

• Playbook logging and verbosity
• Variable introspection
• Playbook debugging
• Ansible console
• Debugging local code execution
• Debugging remote code execution