How to inspect a json response from Ansible URI call

As per documentation at https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/uri_module.html

Whether or not to return the body of the response as a "content" key in the dictionary result. Independently of this option, if the reported Content-type is "application/json", then the JSON is always loaded into a key called json in the dictionary results.

---
- name: Example of JSON body parsing with uri module
  connection: local
  gather_facts: true
  hosts: localhost
  tasks:

    - name: Example of JSON body parsing with uri module
      uri: 
        url: https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users
        method: GET
        return_content: yes
        status_code: 200
        body_format: json
      register: data
      # failed_when: <optional condition based on JSON returned content>

    - name: Print returned json dictionary
      debug:
        var: data.json

    - name: Print certain element
      debug:
        var: data.json[0].address.city

This works for me.

- name: check sonar web is up
uri:
  url: http://sonarhost:9000/sonar/api/system/status
  method: GET
  return_content: yes
  status_code: 200
  body_format: json
register: result
until: result.json.status == "UP"
retries: 10
delay: 30

Notice that result is a ansible dictionary and when you set return_content=yes the response is added to this dictionary and is accessible using json key

Also ensure you have indented the task properly as shown above.

You've made the right first step by saving the output into a variable.

The next step is to use either when: or failed_when: statement in your next task, which will then switch based on the contents of the variable. There are a whole powerful set of statements for use in these, the Jinja2 builtin filters, but they are not really linked well into the Ansible documentation, or summarised nicely.

I use super explicitly named output variables, so they make sense to me later in the playbook :) I would probably write yours something like:

- name: check sonar web is up
  uri:
    url: http://sonarhost:9000/sonar/api/system/status
    method: GET
    return_content: yes
    status_code: 200
    body_format: json
  register: sonar_web_api_status_output

- name: do this thing if it is NOT up
  shell: echo "OMG it's not working!"
  when: sonar_web_api_status_output.stdout.find('UP') == -1

That is, the text "UP" is not found in the variable's stdout.

Other Jinja2 builtin filters I've used are:

• changed_when: "'<some text>' not in your_variable_name.stderr"
• when: some_number_of_files_changed.stdout|int > 0

The Ansible "Conditionals" docs page has some of this info. This blog post was also very informative.