The audit meta-parameter is a weird fit in the Puppet world. Puppet is about defining the state of your machines, and the audit parameter doesn't do that. Over its lifespan of several years, it has been fairly controversial. Based on the discussion happening on the mailing list as well as comments on the blog post announcing the feature, some users felt that the idea was good, but having it in the manifest was a bad idea.

Audit was a key part of the Puppet Compliance dashboard, which existed in Puppet Enterprise. This dashboard provided a GUI around running audit and also allowed you to convert the rules to baseline Puppet manifests. This made compliance a breeze under light workloads.

In Puppet Enterprise 3.0, the Compliance dashboard, which relied on this technology, was deprecated and removed from Puppet Enterprise. A page at https://docs.puppetlabs.com/pe/latest/compliance_alt.html suggests that a noop approach be used instead, which we'll cover in a later section...