At its most basic, a Puppet report processor is a piece of Ruby code that is triggered every time a Puppet agent passes a report to the Puppet master. This piece of code is passed as a Ruby object that contains both the client report and metrics. Although the data is sent in a wire format, such as YAML or PSON, by the time a report processor is triggered, this data is turned into an object by Puppet. This code can simply provide reports, but we're not limited to that.

With a little imagination, we can use Puppet report processors for everything from alerts through to the orchestration of events. For instance, using a report processor and a suitable SMS provider would make it easy for Puppet to send you an SMS alert every time a run fails, or alternatively, using a report processor, you could analyze the data to reveal trends in your changes and update a change management console. The best way to think of a report processor is that it is a means to trigger...