Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By : Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor
Book Image

Extending Puppet - Second Edition

By: Alessandro Franceschi, Jaime Soriano Pastor

Overview of this book

Puppet has changed the way we manage our systems, but Puppet itself is changing and evolving, and so are the ways we are using it. To tackle our IT infrastructure challenges and avoid common errors when designing our architectures, an up-to-date, practical, and focused view of the current and future Puppet evolution is what we need. With Puppet, you define the state of your IT infrastructure, and it automatically enforces the desired state. This book will be your guide to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture. It will help you utilize Puppet to manage your IT infrastructure. Get to grips with Hiera and learn how to install and configure it, before learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code. You will also be able to explore the latest features of Puppet 4, before executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. As you progress, Extending Puppet takes you through higher abstraction modules, along with tips for effective code workflow management. Finally, you will learn how to develop plugins for Puppet - as well as some useful techniques that can help you to avoid common errors and overcome everyday challenges.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Extending Puppet Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Custom report handlers


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 and details on any 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 frontends.

Reports may contain the whole output of a Puppet run, a part of them (for example, just the 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.

James Turnbull, the author of the most popular Puppet books...