Reports help you understand when things go wrong. Using some of the built-in report types, it's possible to alert your admins of Puppet failures. The two GUIs outlined here, Foreman and Dashboard, allow you to review Puppet run logs. Both GUIs have more advanced features, and each can be used as an ENC. Of the two, Foreman has the most polished feel and makes it easier to link directly to reports and search for reports. Dashboard was produced by Puppet Labs and is the predecessor of the Puppet console used in the enterprise product line. mcollective is an orchestration utility that allows you to actively query and modify all the nodes in an organized manner interactively via a message broker.

In the next chapter, we will be installing puppetdb and creating exported resources.