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...