By now, we've been over a lot of use cases involving using Puppet for security. However, we have a recurring theme. We've gathered data, written manifests, and created facts. However, what do we do to turn this into proven security and compliance information?
We need to take the data and information from our runs and turn it into reports. Puppet has a comprehensive system to store data, and we'll use this to create reports showing the state of our system and to show compliance.
In this chapter, we plan to cover the following topics:
Basic reporting in Puppet
Using PuppetDB to create reports
Reporting on compliance
We'll use several examples to show how these topics will help us on our security journey. By the end of this chapter, you should be comfortable creating reports using the basic Puppet data, as well as reporting via PuppetDB. There are additional resources that we'll then direct you, to expand your skills.