[Labs-l] displaying puppet status for each host

[Petr Bena]

This is interesting reading
http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/review-puppet-vs-chef-vs-ansible-vs-salt-231308


On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 5:05 PM, Petr Bena <benapetr at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 2:57 PM, Ryan Lane <rlane32 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 2:06 AM, Petr Bena <benapetr at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> This is something I am now trying to set up on my own servers but it
>>> would be useful on labs too.
>>>
>>> I recently started using puppet on my servers too (I like it, unlike
>>> on labs where I rather hate it - because using puppet when you need to
>>> wait weeks / months for every simple config change to get merged and
>>> applied is true nightmare of every sysadmin), however what I am having
>>> troubles with now, is how to check what the puppet status of each node
>>> is, other than sshing there and checking puppet agent logs.
>>>
>>
>> Why start off with puppet now? Why not go with salt or ansible and save
>> yourself the trouble of eventually migrating?
>>
>
> I never heard of salt and such. Is that even better than puppet?
>
>>>
>>> Is there some nice web GUI or something like that, which would display
>>> status of every node, errors, warnings etc. So that I could have easy
>>> to reach overview of all nodes managed by puppet? I think this would
>>> be extremely helpful on labs as well. Nagios can display puppet
>>> freshness, but that isn't very much.
>>>
>>
>> Puppet dashboard exists, but I think it's enterprise only now? There's also
>> a fork of it, but it basically requires puppetdb, which requires puppet 3
>> (which I'd hope you're using, since you're starting from scratch).
>>
>
> No, the thing I downloaded is called puppet dashboard, is open source
> (i cloned it from github), requires only mysql and sort of works.
> However, minimal installation of this board uses 140mb of ram, typical
> installation about 500mb (with 4 + 1 worker processes).
>
>>>
>>> Imagine a nagios-like website where you would have a list of all nodes
>>> maintained by puppet, with detail configuration information, which
>>> manifests are used on each node and if they were successfully applied,
>>> when etc. Is there anything like that? Can we set it up on labs? Can
>>> someone tell me how to do that or link me to some resources? Thanks
>>>
>>
>> This has been done in labs for a while now. Check out the Manage instances
>> view.
>>
>
> Yes I know about this of course, but that only allows you to change
> the configuration, it doesn't parse the puppet reports, so you have
> basically no feedback from node. You can set a class there, but you
> can never check whether and how it was applied on node.