[Labs-l] displaying puppet status for each host

[Petr Bena]

I would first need to know the overall difference, but from what I
read I don't see any huge advantages of salt over puppet.

>From performance point of view, both is written in interpreted, slow
and resource expensive languages, and both seem to use configuration
files with mixed / exotic syntax for me (puppet for example uses weird
combination if INI files and Ruby syntax config files).

>From feature point of view, both seem to offer very similar tools,
even puppet support pushes which make it possible to immediately apply
some change if needed just as salt can.

>From support & stability point of view, puppet seems to be older, thus
better supported on various platforms and likely more stable?

So what are main advantages of salt over puppet? Is there any play to
switch labs to a different system like salt in future?

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 5:09 PM, Petr Bena <benapetr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.