By now, you have a good idea of what you can do with the Puppet report processor. We've taken a look at the very basics of a report processor and explored the simple steps required to create a new one. We've also investigated ways to parse the data that Puppet sends in its transaction reports and noted how the majority of the code in a report processor is generally business logic that deals with data rather than low-level connectivity code. The example code in this chapter demonstrated how there is generally a library available that can ease the development of report processors by taking care of common tasks such as connecting to databases and third-party applications.

In this chapter, we've covered how to send e-mails, export data to MySQL, and log to JIRA using existing libraries to lighten the load. We've explored different ways in which we can use the data and hopefully encouraged you to think about your own report processors.

In the next chapter, we're going to take a look at...