You should now have a good idea of what a report processor is, what it can be used for, and how to install new ones from Puppet Forge. In this chapter, we have examined some of the basic elements of a report processor and discovered that a report processor is a piece of Ruby code that is called every time a Puppet agent reports a transaction. We have found that report processors are easy to install, especially if they are distributed as a Puppet module, but some of the more complex report processors may need to have additional components installed to support them. We also found that you can have multiple report processors configured at once to allow you greater flexibility when processing your data. Finally, we looked at some interesting third-party report processors and used them to interact with products such as PagerDuty and Twitter.

In the next chapter, we are going to look at how to create our own report processors and how we can use our own code to create custom alerts and reports...