drf-flex-fields VS ara

You could use a HyperLinked model serializer (also check this) and add expandable fields so with one call you can choose if you want the tags field to be detailed (expanded) or not. E.g. /product//?expand=tags

You can use drf-flex-fields or copy its implementation. It has exactly what you need, ctrl + f "?fields=".

This library helps me reuse serializers a lot more https://github.com/rsinger86/drf-flex-fields

Look into AWX as an alternative to Tower. If you just want better reporting on runs, check out ARA or callback plugins.

Also worth considering is ARA for playbook reporting, and then whatever you want for orchestration (Jenkins, Azure Devops, Rundeck, etc).

Why not use ara?

For general recording of playbook activity with a web dashboard, ARA works really well.

If you don’t want any UI / access control then you can also look at ARA - https://ara.recordsansible.org This works as a callback plugin to capture the job run data.

I'm not sure how to interpret running 100 debug messages (https://github.com/ansible-community/ara/blob/master/tests/integration/benchmark_tasks.yaml) into real life performance. Mitogen's Benchmark used either 100 times a "hostname" command on the target machine (https://github.com/mitogen-hq/mitogen/blob/master/tests/ansible/bench/loop-100-items.yml) or running the DebOps project (https://github.com/debops/debops-playbooks/blob/master/playbooks/common.yml) for some sorta real-world module usage.

Reach out on Mastodon or see this issue on GitHub.

There has been discussions about a prometheus exporter for monitoring, metrics and eventually fancy graphs in grafana but work on this has not started yet: https://github.com/ansible-community/ara/issues/177