Puppet can generate data about what happens during a run, and we can gather this data in reports. They contain the output of what is executed on the client, details on every action taken during the execution, and performance metrics.

Needless to say that we can also extend Puppet reports and deliver them to a variety of destinations: logging systems, database backends, e-mail, chat roots, notification and alerting systems, trouble ticketing software, and web dashboards.

Reports may contain the whole output of a Puppet run, a part of it (for example, just the list of resources that failed), or just the metrics (as it happens with the rrd report that graphs key metrics such as Puppet compilation and run times).

We can distribute our custom report handlers via the pluginsync functionality too. We just need to place them in the lib/puppet/reports/<report_name>.rb path so that the file name matches the handler name.