Chapter 1. About the Job Explorer

The Job Explorer provides a detailed view of jobs run on Ansible Tower clusters across your organizations. You can access the Job Explorer by directly clicking on the navigation tab or using the drill-down view available across each of the application’s charts.

Using the Job Explorer you can:

  • Filter the types of jobs running in a cluster or organization;
  • Directly link out to templates on your Ansible Tower for further assessment;
  • Identify and review job failures;
  • View more details for top templates running on a cluster;
  • Filter out nested workflows and jobs.

You can review the features and details of the Job Explorer in the following sections.

1.1. Creating a filtered and sorted view of jobs

You can view a list of jobs, filtered by attributes you choose, using the Job Explorer.

Filter options include:

  • Status
  • Job
  • Cluster
  • Organization
  • Template

You can sort results by a set of parameters by using the Sort by options from the filter toolbar.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Insights → Job Explorer.
  2. In the filter toolbar, click the Filter by drop-down menu and select Job.
  3. In that same toolbar, select a time range. Job Explorer will now display jobs within that time range.
  4. To further refine results, return to the filter toolbar and select a different attribute to filter results by, including job status, cluster, or organization.

The Job Explorer view will update and present a list of jobs based on the attributes you selected.

1.1.1. Viewing more information about an individual job

You can click on the arrow icon next to the job Id/Name column to view more details related to that job.

1.1.2. Reviewing job details on Ansible Tower

Click the job in the Id/Name column to view the job itself on the Ansible Tower job details page. For more information on viewing job details on Ansible Tower, see Jobs in the Ansible Tower User Guide.

1.2. Drilling down into cluster data

You can drill down into cluster data to review more detailed information about successful or failed jobs. The detailed view, presented on the Job Explorer page, provides information on the cluster, organization, template, and job type. Filters you select on the Clusters view carry over to the Job Explorer page.

Details on those job templates will appear in the Job Explorer view, modified by any filters you selected in the Clusters view.

For example, you can drill down to review details for failed jobs in a cluster. See below to learn more.

1.2.1. Example: Reviewing failed jobs

You can view more detail about failed jobs across your organization by drilling down on the graph on the Cluster view and using the Job Explorer to refine results. Clicking on a specific portion in a graph will open that information in the Job Explorer, preserving contextual information created when using filters on the Clusters view.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Insights → Clusters.
  2. In the filter toolbar, apply filters for clusters and time range of your choosing.
  3. Click on a segment on the graph.

You will redirected to the Job Explorer view, which will present a list of successful and failed jobs corresponding to that day on the bar graph.

To view only failed jobs:

  1. Click the Filter by drop-down menu and select Status.
  2. Select the Failed filter.

The view will update to show only failed jobs run on that day.

Add additional context to the view by applying additional filters and selecting attributes to sort results by. Link out and review more information for failed jobs on the Ansible Tower job details page.

1.3. Viewing top templates job details for a specific cluster

You can view job instances for top templates in a cluster to learn more about individual job runs associated with that template or to apply filters to further drill down into the data.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to Clusters.
  2. Select a cluster from the clusters drop-down list. The view will update with that cluster’s data.
  3. Click on a template name in Top Templates.
  4. Click View all jobs in the modal that appears.

The Job Explorer will display all jobs on the chosen cluster associated with that template. The view presented will preserve the contextual information of the template based on the parameters selected in the Clusters view.

1.4. Ignoring nested workflows and jobs

Use the toggle switch on the Job Explorer view to ignore nested workflows and job. Select this option to filter out duplicate workflow and job templates entries and exclude those items from overall totals.

Note

About nested workflows

Nested workflows allow you to create workflow job templates that call other workflow job templates. Nested workflows promotes reuse, as modular components, of workflows that include existing business logic and organizational requirements in automating complex processes and operations.

To learn more about nested workflows, see Workflows in the Ansible Tower User Guide.