After reading this chapter, you should now appreciate how Puppet goes about its reporting. We explored the Puppet configuration file and observed how both Puppet Enterprise and Puppet Open Source are configured for simple reporting by default. We explored the interaction between the Puppet master and the Puppet agent and looked at how Puppet and Facter work together to create detailed reports of both the activity and state. We also observed that custom facts can be added to any report. We briefly covered scalability by noting that you can use a separate Puppet master to act as a dedicated report server, and we looked at some of the reasons as to why you might want to do this.

In the next chapter, we're going to take a look at some of the dashboards that can be used with Puppet and take a whistle-stop tour of some of the major features that each of them has. You'll see how these dashboards can offer some quick and easy reporting options but also have see of the limitations of using them.