Preface

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.