We have spent quite a bit of time looking at the basics of the Puppet reporting system and learned a fair bit about its underlying mechanisms and data formats. Now, it is time to turn our attention to PuppetDB. PuppetDB is an extremely fast data storage service that Puppet is able to utilize in preference to storing the reports elsewhere, and it offers a rich API for data discovery.
In this chapter, we're going to cover the following topics:
A brief tour of PuppetDB and its uses
Backend data storage options for PuppetDB
Configuring your Puppet masters to use PuppetDB
By the end of this chapter, you should be comfortable both with what PuppetDB is used for and how to install and configure it.