There's one final example we're going to look at before I leave you to experiment on your own, and that's how to automatically raise issues with Atlassian JIRA. This is worthwhile on two fronts: firstly, JIRA is a fantastic tool for bug and issue tracking, and secondly, it will give you a sense of how to integrate Puppet with third-party tools.

Atlassian JIRA has been around since 2002, and in this time, has become one of the most popular forms of issue-tracking software on the market, in use by an estimated 25,000 organizations. Part of the appeal of JIRA is that it is a web-based product, and it is very easy to install and maintain. Recently, Atlassian has offered JIRA to its users in the form of a Software as a Service package, which has lowered the barrier to entry for running JIRA even further. One of the things that set JIRA apart fairly early on was its excellent API, as it allowed people to create products and services that would easily be able to integrate...