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Puppet Reporting and Monitoring
Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

Puppet Reporting and Monitoring: Create insightful reports for your server infrastructure using Puppet

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Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

Chapter 2. Viewing Data in Dashboards

In the previous chapter, we found out how easy it is to make Puppet expose a rich seam of information from the hosts; however, at this point in time, we have no easy way of mining it. In the next few chapters, we are going to look at some of the ways in which we can both extract and interact with the data that Puppet provides, but in the meantime, we will spend a little time going over the tools that are already available. These tools provide a quick and easy out-of-the-box experience, and in the case of Puppet Enterprise and The Foreman, also form a central part of the management tool chain.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following:

  • A brief introduction to dashboards

  • A quick tour of Puppet Dashboard and Puppet Enterprise Console

  • A brief look at The Foreman

  • An introduction to PuppetBoard

Why use a dashboard?


One of the advantages of using Puppet to manage your infrastructure is that it allows you to simplify the management and organization of your nodes and impose order on even the largest pool of resources. This is only one part of the picture, however, and an important element to any kind of system, such as Puppet, is being able to visualize what you manage. A dashboard is shown in the following screenshot:

Puppet now has several dashboards available for use, and most of these offer capabilities above and beyond simply reporting data. Most dashboards can also act as External Node Classifiers (ENCs), and in some cases, can drive actions by integrating with MCollective and even form a key part of the server build process if you use The Foreman. Even without utilizing these features, you will find that a dashboard can offer both your users and you a valuable insight into what is happening within your Puppet-managed infrastructure, and will allow you to interrogate the facts...

The Puppet Dashboard feature list


In the following screenshot, we will identify the feature list available and understand the availability of these features in different dashboards:

  • ENC: This denotes that this dashboard can be utilized as an external node classifier

  • Reporting: This dashboard can produce reports on a Puppet agent's activity

  • Class Discovery: This dashboard can examine installed Puppet modules and extract class names for allocation in the ENC

  • PuppetDB Integration: This dashboard can use PuppetDB as a data source

  • MCollective Integration: This denotes that this dashboard can use MCollective to orchestrate actions against nodes

Understanding Puppet Dashboard


Puppet Dashboard is the original dashboard that was shipped with Puppet and was designed to provide a graphical ENC and reporting console. Since the advent of Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Labs no longer directly supports the open source version of the dashboard and it is now maintained by the open source community.

Puppet Dashboard fulfills the role of both an ENC and an end point for Puppet reporting. As an ENC, Puppet Dashboard is capable and will allow you to both define classes and assign them to nodes. Note, though, that classes are defined manually, so if you do use Puppet Dashboard as an ENC, you will need to add some new classes to the dashboard if you want to add a new module.

Puppet Dashboard was designed to be simple enough to be read at a glance, and the front page will immediately allow you to see both the number of Puppet agents and which state they reported last in a time series graph along the top of the dashboard. The panel to the left of the graph...

Exploring Puppet Enterprise Console


Puppet Labs have focused their time on improving Puppet Dashboard in the enterprise release of Puppet, and to start to differentiate it from the previous dashboard, they have renamed it Puppet Enterprise Console. Although superficially similar to each other, the two projects have very different offerings. Puppet Enterprise Console offers integration with MCollective, and PuppetDB offers out-of-the-box, enhanced features such as Event Inspector and Live Management. Puppet Enterprise Console forms the core of the enterprise product and offers a central place of management and a solid reporting tool, and increasingly, is the place to orchestrate your infrastructure. This dashboard is shown in the following screenshot:

In terms of layout and basic reporting capabilities, Puppet Enterprise Console is very similar to the open source Puppet Dashboard, and if you are migrating from Puppet Dashboard to Puppet Enterprise Console, you should find yourself at home...

Using The Foreman


The Foreman is an open source project that is, in its own words, a life cycle management tool. Rather than being limited to acting as an ENC for Puppet, The Foreman can also provide unattended installation facilities for kickstart, jumpstart, and preseed-based systems. This essentially means that The Foreman is able to create our system from its initial boot, through first configuration, and then manage its state for the rest of its life cycle. This dashboard is shown in the following screenshot:

From the point of view of reporting, The Foreman offers much the same as Puppet Dashboard, including the ability to view individual host details and reports. However, it also has some of its own interesting tricks. The Foreman has put an awful lot of thought behind reporting and has two standout features: trends and audits. These offer a unique view of our Puppet-managed infrastructure and are exceptionally powerful reporting tools.

Reporting with The Foreman

Reporting forms a very...

Discovering PuppetBoard


PuppetBoard is a relatively young product, and as such, may have a few rough edges; however, despite its youth, it already offers an excellent interface for reporting. PuppetBoard uses PuppetDB as its data source, and aside from Puppet Enterprise Console, it is the only product to do so. PuppetBoard eschews any ambition of forming part of the management layer, and instead, it focuses on providing a clear and easy-to-use reporting feature. This dashboard is shown in the following screenshot:

Since PuppetBoard is based around PuppetDB, it allows access to all data within it, such as facts and Puppet agent reports and metrics. It allows you to explore this data intuitively using an easy-to-use interface. PuppetBoard allows you to explore the data held in PuppetDB from the point of view of nodes, facts, and reports, and it also allows you to drill through each element to explore further details. For instance, by drilling into a node, you are able to see its connected facts...

Summary


You should now be aware of which dashboards are available for Puppet and what features they can offer you. As you can see, they can add a fantastic insight into the running of your Puppet infrastructure without needing to expend much effort. Using these dashboards gives you quick and easy access to both your Puppet reports and gathered data from your hosts via Facter, and they can be used to easily track changes over time. There are problems, though. First of all, you need to use these panels as an ENC to leverage their full power. Without this, you can use the majority of the reporting features, but they will still be missing certain elements. They are also inflexible, with almost no opportunity to customize the reports to suit your purposes, and in some cases, their development is lagging.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to create your own report processors. Report processors form a key part of Puppet reporting and will start you on the way to producing your own reports...

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Publication date : Jun 17, 2014
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Publication date : Jun 17, 2014
Length: 186 pages
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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
Setting Up Puppet for Reporting Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Viewing Data in Dashboards Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Introducing Report Processors Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating Your Own Report Processor Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Exploring PuppetDB Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Retrieving Data with the PuppetDB API Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Writing Custom Reports with PuppetDB Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Creating Your Own Custom Dashboard Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Looking Back and Looking Forward Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon 4.4
(5 Ratings)
5 star 40%
4 star 60%
3 star 0%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Josh Miller Jul 11, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I just finished reading "Puppet Reporting and Monitoring" and must say I gained quite a bit from reading this book and will change the way that I work with Puppet to use techniques that I've learned here. I have traditionally used Puppet and other configuration management tools as a simple configuration tool and haven't expected much back from them beyond failure/sucess email. Michael Duffy reveals his fantastic knowledge of Puppet and this topic throughout as he explains how to setup and obtain useful information from Puppet using built in and freely available tools.The first few chapters cover basic report setup, existing dashboard options, and report processors. This is good information and prepares the beginning to intermediate Puppet administrator with the required back ground to really take advantage of what comes over the rest of the book with custom report processing, PuppetDB and the associated API, as well as custom reports and dashboards.Michael gives quite a few examples, clearly explaining how to write basic reports in ruby, using readily available gems and frameworks which can be immediately useful to the reader in retrieving and displaying data about the managed environment. While there is significant emphasis on using PuppetDB and the associated API which might not benefit those with heavy investments in other ENCs; Michael makes a great case for use of PuppetDB through his examples and reports that might convince the otherwise protesting reader to use it.Overall, I would highly recommend this book. There is insufficient emphasis placed on reporting and monitoring in the configuration management space and I applaud the efforts of Michael Duffy in getting this book out and taking the time to share his expertise.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
P. Wilkins Jun 27, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
So the Packt book (Puppet Reporting and Monitoring) focuses down on a couple of aspects of the Puppet Toolset, as a result this is a relatively short book with only a couple hundred pages. As an enterprise architect I am no expert Puppet practitioner, my knowledge of Ruby is high level (part of the reason I reviewed this book is I wanted to better understand the art of the possible in these areas). But despite this the book does an exceptionally good job defining a context and then explaining and showing what could be done, down to code examples. In doing so, the author Michael Duffy introduces a number of open source libraries that can be leveraged to provide dashboard views, presentation of report content whilst maximising the leveraging of the Puppet ecosystem such as the Puppet DB (an abstracted database with a REST + JSON API). The book goes beyond just implementation of monitoring and reporting but also engages with considerations such as deployment. without 'boiling the ocean' the book provides a very good illustrations of the art of the possible and provides plenty of references to source information so working how you want to implement you own solutions.My only criticism of the book, and it is a minor one at that is a few more diagrams to help illustrate ideas (particularly in the first chapter when discussing deployment considerations) would help get ideas across easily.On the strength of this book, I hope that Michael considers taking on other authoring projects as this has been one of the best written technical books I've read in sometime.Useful Links:Puppet Labs - [...]Puppet DB - [...]Ruby - [...]Michael Duffy - [...] [...]
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Alessandro Franceschi Jun 29, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
This is a very well written book. It explains clearly and from an interesting perspective whatever is related to Puppet's reporting functionalities and it offers a good overview on PuppetDB.Even if these topics are just a part of the whole picture the author takes, at times, the occasion to explain more general Puppet features and functionalities, and he does this in a very well written, clear and well organized way.Experienced users may be familiar find most of the contents but even for them in the very last pages of the book a very interesting concept is expressed which might lead to quite useful use cases: the possibility to use Puppet's reporting as the drive to infrastructure orchestration activities.All in all this is a very good book on a relatively specific Puppet topic. I'd have given 5 stars for a longer and more comprehensive work (it's about 170 pages).
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Thomas Lowry Feb 21, 2016
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Very informative and hits an areas that is not very well documented.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
mle melanie gault Jun 25, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Very interesting book.I learned a lot of usefull tips on puppet management.Dashboard part is the best : I discoverd amazing tools !I missed some more how-to integration parts : logstash/elasticsearch/kibana, or other tools like that.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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