If you're managing a lot of machines, Puppet's reporting facility can give you some valuable information on what's actually happening out there.
To enable reports, just add this to a client's puppet.conf: within the [main] or [agent] sections:
report = true
With reporting enabled, Puppet will generate a report file, containing data such as:
Date and time of the run
Total time for the run
Log messages output during the run
List of all the resources in the client's manifest
Whether Puppet changed any resources, and how many
Whether the run succeeded or failed
By default, these reports are stored on the node at /var/lib/puppet/reports in a directory named after the hostname, but you can specify a different destination using the reportdir option. You can create your own scripts to process these reports (which are in the standard YAML format). When we run puppet agent...