Ansible unable to find `zabbix-api`

Problem

In this scenario Ansible is unable to locate Zabbix API. Ansible spits out the following error when running a playbook that calls the zabbix-api module:

msg: 'Missing required zabbix-api module (check docs or install with: pip install zabbix-api)'

Environment

The control node, running Ubuntu 18.04, contains multiple python interpreters (2.7/3.6/3.7). Zabbix API has been installed on the control node using pip (pip install zabbix-api) for python2.7 in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/. This can be observed after running the following:

import imp
imp.find_module('zabbix_api')

which outputs:

(<open file '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zabbix_api.py', mode 'U' at 0x7f102e990540>, '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/zabbix_api.py', ('.py', 'U', 1)

Checks

I have made sure that:

Ansible loads the correct Python interpreter: ansible_python_interpreter=/usr/bin/python
PATH contains the path to the interpreter's site-packages or dist-packages
the interpreter can load the zabbix_api library: python -c "import zabbix_api"
zabbix_api.py permissions are correct
sys.path contains the path to zabbix_api dir:

import sys
print '\n'.join(sys.path)

Which outputs:

    /usr/lib/python2.7
    /usr/lib/python2.7/plat-x86_64-linux-gnu
    /usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk
    /usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old
    /usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload
    /home/peter/.local/lib/python2.7/site-packages
    /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
    /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages

What am I missing here? Are there any other factors to take into account?

Solution

The cause of this issue was a misconfiguration of the hosts file: Ansible was targeting the wrong server. After ensuring that the playbook was executed on the localhost the issue was resolved.