When running your Chef client as a daemon on your nodes, you usually have no idea whether everything works as expected. Chef comes with a feature named Handler, which helps you to find out what's going on during your Chef client runs.
There are a host of community handlers available, for example, to report Chef client run results to IRC, via email, to Campfire, Nagios, or Graphite. You name it.
In this section, we'll see how to install an IRC handler as an example. The same method is applicable to all other available handlers.
Note
For a full list of available community handlers, go to http://docs.chef.io/community_plugin_report_handler.html
In order to install community exception and report handlers, you need to add the chef_handler cookbook to your Berksfile first:
mma@laptop:~/chef-repo $ subl Berksfile
cookbook 'chef_handler'