Metrics can give you a good feel of how your Puppet-managed infrastructure is performing and how rapidly your configuration items are changing. Combined with the Puppet report, the metrics and events can add a wealth of data to your reports. This is where MySQL can shine, as it gives you several different ways to represent this information and offers you the chance to use SQL to create your own reports. As the data will be available in one place, there is no need to crawl through multiple files to build up historical data or join data using the JOIN statement.

The Puppet metrics are carried inside the Puppet transaction report and are encapsulated within the Puppet::Util::Metric object. The metric data is split up between resources, events, and changes, and each category has its own timings for its various elements. For instance, within the resources category, we are able to see metrics for how many resources are in the failed, out of sync, or changed state...