Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By : Thomas Uphill
Book Image

Mastering Puppet - Second Edition

By: Thomas Uphill

Overview of this book

Puppet is a configuration management system and a language. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Mastering Puppet deals with the issues faced when scaling out Puppet to handle large numbers of nodes. It will show you how to fit Puppet into your enterprise and allow many developers to work on your Puppet code simultaneously. In addition, you will learn to write custom facts and roll your own modules to solve problems. Next, popular options for performing reporting and orchestration tasks will be introduced in this book. Moving over to troubleshooting techniques, which will be very useful. The concepts presented are useful to any size organization. By the end of the book, you will know how to deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Chapter 7. Reporting and Orchestration

Reports return all the log messages from 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 the 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:

  • Syslog

  • Store (YAML)

  • IRC

  • Foreman

  • Puppet Dashboard

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.