The Foreman is an open source project that is, in its own words, a life cycle management tool. Rather than being limited to acting as an ENC for Puppet, The Foreman can also provide unattended installation facilities for kickstart, jumpstart, and preseed-based systems. This essentially means that The Foreman is able to create our system from its initial boot, through first configuration, and then manage its state for the rest of its life cycle. This dashboard is shown in the following screenshot:

From the point of view of reporting, The Foreman offers much the same as Puppet Dashboard, including the ability to view individual host details and reports. However, it also has some of its own interesting tricks. The Foreman has put an awful lot of thought behind reporting and has two standout features: trends and audits. These offer a unique view of our Puppet-managed infrastructure and are exceptionally powerful reporting tools.