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

Dashboards


PuppetDB ecosystem provides web dashboards that definitely help user interaction:

  • PuppetDB comes with an integrated performance dashboard

  • Puppetboard is a web frontend that allows easy and direct access to PuppetDB data

PuppetDB performance dashboard

PuppetDB integrates a performance dashboard out of the box; we can use it to check how the software is working in real time. It can be accessed via HTTP at the URL http://puppetdb.server:8080/pdb/dashboard/index.html if you set host = 0.0.0.0 on the PuppetDB configuration. Remember that you should limit HTTP access to unauthorized clients only, either by firewalling the host's port or setting host = localhost and having a local reverse proxy where you can manage access lists or authentication:

The PuppetDB performance dashboard

From the previous picture, the most interesting metrics are as follows:

  • JVM Heap memory usage: It drops when the JVM runs a garbage collection.

  • Nodes: The total number of nodes whose information is stored on PuppetDB...