Dashboards

The PuppetDB ecosystem provides web dashboards that definitively help user interaction:

• PuppetDB comes with an integrated performance dashboard
• Puppetboard is a web frontend that allows easy and direct access to PuppetDB data

PuppetDB performance dashboard

PuppetDB integrates a performance dashboard out of the box; we can use it to check how the software is working in real time. It can be accessed via HTTP at http://puppetdb.server:8080/dashboard/ (if we've set host = 0.0.0.0 on the PuppetDB configuration). Remember that we should limit HTTP access to authorized clients only, either by firewalling the host's port or setting host = localhost and having a local reverse proxy where you can manage access lists or authentication.

The PuppetDB performance dashboard

From the previous screenshot, the most interesting metrics are as follows:

• JVM Heap memory usage: This metric drops when the JVM runs a garbage collection.
• Nodes: The total number of nodes whose information is stored on...