Some tools can be enormously tedious to set up for reporting, normally making you wade through many different configuration files, wrestle with obscure settings, and make you lose the will to live, generally. Fortunately, Puppet is a sensible product when it comes to its initial configuration; out of the box, it will take very little tweaking to get it to report to the Puppet master. This is not to say that there aren't plenty of options to keep power users happy, it's just that you generally do not need to use them.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following topics: