Most of the time you'll probably be happy for Puppet to just run and do its job. In some situations, however, it can be very useful to have Puppet record information about exactly what it did and when it did it. This facility in Puppet is called reporting.
For example, if something is not working as you expected, you can look at Puppet's reports and get a very detailed picture of what's going on. Or you might want to monitor what Puppet is doing across your whole network and record performance information over time. You can also see if Puppet runs are failing, and diagnose the reason.
You can get a quick overview of what Puppet is doing on a given run by using the --summarize
flag to puppet apply
. It will report some overall statistics on timing and resources changed:
ubuntu@demo:~/puppet$ papply --summarize Notice: /Stage[main]//Node[demo]/File[/tmp/test]/ensure: defined content as '{md5}5d41402abc4b2a76b9719d911017c592' Notice: Finished catalog run in 0.06 seconds...