You should now be aware of which dashboards are available for Puppet and what features they can offer you. As you can see, they can add a fantastic insight into the running of your Puppet infrastructure without needing to expend much effort. Using these dashboards gives you quick and easy access to both your Puppet reports and gathered data from your hosts via Facter, and they can be used to easily track changes over time. There are problems, though. First of all, you need to use these panels as an ENC to leverage their full power. Without this, you can use the majority of the reporting features, but they will still be missing certain elements. They are also inflexible, with almost no opportunity to customize the reports to suit your purposes, and in some cases, their development is lagging.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to create your own report processors. Report processors form a key part of Puppet reporting and will start you on the way to producing your own reports...