Puppet is possibly the fastest growing configuration management tool on the planet, and this is in no small part due to its combination of power and accessibility. From small five-node installations through to hugely complex cloud infrastructures that number thousands of nodes, Puppet has proven its ability to deliver on the promise of infrastructure as code. There have been a number of titles that cover its ability to create idempotent resources, manage services, and ensure that systems are configured correctly and maintained with little or no effort. Yet, none of these titles spend more than a chapter discussing its reporting features.
This is a shame; Puppet's reporting capability is one of its most overlooked yet powerful features. If used correctly, its built-in reporting abilities can give you stunning levels of detail about your infrastructure, from the amount of hardware used and networking details to details about how and when resources were changed. However, this is just the beginning. In this book, we are going to cover techniques that are simple to learn and that will allow you to use Puppet as a key part of your alerting systems, letting it bring your attention to important changes and even forming a simple-to-implement tripwire system. We're going to explore PuppetDB and learn why this is a fantastic source of information that you can use to not only explore the changes being applied to your systems, but also create an end-to-end repository of knowledge about your infrastructure. We're going to build custom dashboards to make this data accessible, and finally, we will look at the ways by which you can make Puppet not only report the changes, but also drive them.
Chapter 1, Setting Up Puppet for Reporting, will guide you through the simple steps to take your existing Puppet installation and make it report.
Chapter 2, Viewing Data in Dashboards, takes a look at the existing dashboards available for Puppet and how you can use them to report on your data.
Chapter 3, Introducing Report Processors, acquaints you with the engine that drives much of the Puppet reporting process—the report processor.
Chapter 4, Creating Your Own Report Processor, deals with creating your own report processor with custom e-mail alerts, MySQL storage, and integration with third-party products.
Chapter 5, Exploring PuppetDB, introduces PuppetDB, a fantastic and powerful system for report storage and analysis. In this chapter, we look at what PuppetDB is, how it's configured, and finally, how you can set it up in your own infrastructure.
Chapter 6, Retrieving Data with the PuppetDB API, explores the fantastically powerful API of PuppetDB; the API allows you to query your reports in a number of different ways. We're going to explore this API for functions that range from basic queries to advanced data integration.
Chapter 7, Writing Custom Reports with PuppetDB, deals with creating easy-to-use custom report applications.
Chapter 8, Creating Your Own Custom Dashboard, deals with creating an attractive and detailed custom dashboard using Dashing and PuppetDB.
Chapter 9, Looking Back and Looking Forward, takes a look at some of the more advanced ways in which you can use Puppet reporting to do everything from alerting to the orchestration of your infrastructure.
The code and examples in this book have been designed for use with the following software:
Puppet 3.0 and higher versions
Ruby 1.9 and higher versions
This book is designed for anyone who wants to learn more about the fundamental components of Puppet reporting. To get the most out of this book, you should already be familiar with Puppet and be comfortable with its major components such as the Puppet master and Puppet agent. You should also be comfortable with reading code, and in particular, you should be at least passingly familiar with Ruby. Finally, you should be happy working on the command line in the Linux/Unix flavor of your choice.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
include puppet
Puppet::Reports::register_report(:myfirstreport) do
desc "My very first report!"
def process
if self.status == 'failed'
msg = "failed puppet run for #{self.host} #{self.status}
File.open('./tmp/puppetpanic.txt', 'w') { | f | f.write(msg)}
end
end
endWhen we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
metric_vals = {} self.metrics.each { |metric, data| data.values.each { |val| name = "#{val[1]} #{metric}" value = val[2] metric_vals[name] = value } }
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
puppet module generate <username>-<modulename>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "The Facts view is particularly useful as it not only lists each node with the associated fact value, but also presents it neatly in the form of a graph."
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