When running complex Ansible playbooks, skipped tasks can flood your output with unnecessary noise. This makes it difficult to spot actual changes or failures in your automation workflows. The default behavior displays both the task name and "skipping" status for every conditional that evaluates to false.

Ansible provides several ways to manage this output:

# Method 1: Global configuration in ansible.cfg
[defaults]
display_skipped_hosts = False

# Method 2: Environment variable
export ANSIBLE_DISPLAY_SKIPPED_HOSTS=False

# Method 3: Command-line flag
ansible-playbook playbook.yml --display-skipped=False

While suppressing skipped tasks cleans up output, be aware that:

• The task name will still appear in the output
• This affects all playbooks run with these settings
• Might make debugging conditional logic harder

For more granular control, consider using tags:

- name: Conditional task example
  debug:
    msg: "This only runs when needed"
  tags:
    - important
  when: some_condition

Then run with:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --tags important

Here's how to modify your original playbook for cleaner output:

- name: Stopping Puppet Agent
  service: 
    name: pe-puppet 
    state: stopped
  ignore_errors: true
  register: result
  tags: always_run

- name: Rollback operations
  include_tasks: rollback/restart-pe-puppet.yml
  when: result|failed
  tags: rollback

Now execute with:

ansible-playbook playbook.yml --tags always_run --skip-tags rollback

When working with conditional includes or complex playbooks, Ansible's default behavior of displaying all skipped tasks can create significant noise in your execution logs. While the display_skipped_hosts setting helps somewhat, it still leaves task headers visible.

Here are three effective approaches to clean up your output:

# Option 1: Global ansible.cfg configuration
[defaults]
display_skipped_hosts = no

# Option 2: Environment variable
export ANSIBLE_DISPLAY_SKIPPED_HOSTS=false

# Option 3: Per-playbook callback plugin (requires Ansible 2.0+)
- name: Custom output example
  hosts: all
  gather_facts: no
  callback_whitelist: minimal

For finer control, create a custom callback plugin:

from ansible.plugins.callback import CallbackBase

class CallbackModule(CallbackBase):
    CALLBACK_VERSION = 2.0
    CALLBACK_TYPE = 'stdout'
    CALLBACK_NAME = 'quiet_skips'

    def v2_runner_on_skipped(self, result):
        pass  # Completely suppresses skipped task output

Consider this optimized version of your original playbook:

- name: Manage Puppet Service
  hosts: all
  vars:
    suppress_skips: true
  tasks:
    - name: Stop Puppet Agent
      ansible.builtin.service:
        name: pe-puppet
        state: stopped
      ignore_errors: true
      register: puppet_stop_result
      no_log: "{{ suppress_skips }}"
    
    - name: Include rollback tasks
      ansible.builtin.include_tasks: rollback/restart-pe-puppet.yml
      when: puppet_stop_result is failed

This combination of no_log and proper task organization significantly reduces output clutter while maintaining all critical information.

While suppressing output improves readability, remember that:

• Task headers still consume some processing overhead
• Debugging becomes slightly harder without full context
• Consider maintaining verbose logs in CI/CD pipelines while suppressing them in production runs