Puppet Reporting and Monitoring by Michael Duffy http://www.packtpub.com/puppet-reporting-and-monitoring/book Michael Duffy is an experienced DevOps engineer, and works at Sky.com. Monitoring is not bad, but is old and costs too much time and too much money. Too much time for your administrators and programmers and too much money for you. 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.

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. This book is designed for anyone who wants to learn more about the fundamental components of Puppet reporting.

To get the most out of this book, you should already be familiar with Puppet and be comfortable with its major components such as the Puppet master and Puppet agent. You should also be comfortable with reading code, and in particular, you should be at least passingly familiar with Ruby. Finally, you should be happy working on the command-line in the Linux/Unix flavor of your choice. The metrics that the Puppet agent passes to the Puppet master are very granular and offer a fantastic insight into where Puppet is spending its time, be it fetching, processing, or applying changes. The dashboards can be used with Puppet and take a whistle-stop tour of some of the major features that each of them has. The dashboards can offer some quick and easy reporting options but also have some limitations.

In chapter 6 we can explore the PuppetDB query API. Data is useful only if you have some means to access it, and yet this is a truism that many systems seem to have forgotten, relying instead on developers to come along and fill whatever egregious gaps in data exploration the original product left out. Fortunately, Puppet offers a rich data discovery tool in the form of the PuppetDB API and its associated query language. In the next chapter you can learn how to write “Custom Reports” with PuppetDB and create a menu-driven application.

In chapter 9, the final one, we find a recap of Puppet dashboards and integration with third-party components, looking back at the alerting feature and integration with external alerting systems, analyzing metrics and changes with Graphite, and anomaly detection with Etsy Skyline. Hopefully, by now you are looking at the Puppet reporting tools as a gateway that allows Puppet to communicate with the wealth of systems that you are already using to both monitor and report, and thinking of new ways to use these tools with the additional data that Puppet provides. I've read some Puppet books, this is probably one of the best written. The language is clear and fresh, topics are well expressed and explained. Even if the contents revolve around Puppet's reporting functionalities and PuppetDB, the author takes, at times, the occasion to explain more general Puppet features and functionalities.

In this book, you can find an easy-to-follow guide with extensive examples to explain Puppet's reporting capabilities to facilitate effective implementation of Puppet as a reporting tool in the real world. Experienced users may be familiar with 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.