Reports return all the log messages from the Puppet nodes to the master. In addition to log messages, reports send other useful metrics such as timing (time spent performing different operations) and statistical information (counts of resources and number of failed resources). With reports, you can know when your Puppet runs fail and most importantly, why. In this chapter, we will cover the following reporting mechanisms.

In addition to reporting, we will configure the marionette collective (mcollective) system to allow for orchestration tasks. In the course of configuring reporting, we will show different methods of signing and transferring SSL keys for systems that are subordinate to our master, puppet.example.com.