Managing Infrastructure with Puppet

Reporting

Once you have Puppet running in an automated fashion on a number of servers, it becomes fairly important to begin tracking what is happening and when. A default Puppet Master configuration will output plenty of information in the system logs, but this isn’t terribly convenient for archiving or monitoring’s sake.

Puppet provides a reporting tool for keeping track of its run results. There are several output types for these reports. The simplest is configured by setting the report = file parameter in [master] stanza of your puppet.conf on the Puppet Master. This will cause Puppet to output a run log each time it is executed and save the result in /var/lib/puppet/reports/agent.example.com on the Puppet Master. This will generate a readable, but generally very verbose YAML file on every run.

A more featureful way to inspect your reports is provided with the Puppet Labs “Dashboard.” Dashboard is a Rails application that functions as a report processor and presents an easy to understand arrangement of graphs and report results that makes managing large numbers of Puppet agent instances simpler.

The simplest way to get started with the Dashboard on Ubuntu is with the Puppet Labs apt repository packages. In order to add the repository, place the following content in a file at /etc/apt/sources.list.d/puppetlabs.list. You may need to replace oneiric with your current ubuntu version codename:

# Puppet Labs Repository deb http://apt.puppetlabs.com/ubuntu oneiric main deb-src http://apt.puppetlabs.com/ubuntu ...