If there is one technology that you're almost guaranteed to find in most companies, it is SQL. One of the enormous advantages of Puppet is that it can make change activities hugely transparent, and this is an enormously rich piece of data that can complement existing reports exceptionally well. For instance, your organization may already have reports noting how many transactions have taken place over a certain time period, and when looking at any sudden gains or losses to the average, it's fantastic to be able to add in change activity. Suddenly, you will see that the drop in user transactions coincides with the web server that is pushing out a new version of nginx, or the jump in sales happened just after the new version of the sales application was pushed by Puppet.

This is valuable data, but to get the most out of it, it needs to be available to the people who construct these reports. For many organizations, this means that the data will be held in a SQL database; not...