Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

Table of Contents

Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Setting Up Puppet for Reporting

Learning the basics of Puppet reporting

Exploring the Puppet configuration file

Setting up the server

Setting up the Puppet agent

Summary

2. Viewing Data in Dashboards

Why use a dashboard?

The Puppet Dashboard feature list

Understanding Puppet Dashboard

Exploring Puppet Enterprise Console

Event Inspector

Puppet Live Management

Using The Foreman

Reporting with The Foreman

Looking at trends in The Foreman

Discovering PuppetBoard

Summary

3. Introducing Report Processors

Understanding a report processor

Utilizing the built-in report processors

Storing reports with the store report processor

Adding to logfiles with the log report processor

Graphing with the rrdgraph processor

The tagmail report processor

Sending reports with the HTTP report processor

The PuppetDB report processor

Exploring the power of third-party plugins

Getting social with Twitter

Staying on top of alerts with PagerDuty

Summary

4. Creating Your Own Report Processor

The anatomy of a report processor

Creating a basic report processor

Registering your report processor

Describing your report processor

Processing your report

Values of the self.status object

Alerting with e-mail and Puppet

Managing your report processor configuration with Puppet

Monitoring changes and alerting with Puppet

Logging with MySQL

Adding metrics and events to MySQL

Raising issues with JIRA

A final note on third-party applications

Summary

5. Exploring PuppetDB

A brief history of PuppetDB

Setting up the PuppetDB server

Installing PuppetDB

Installing PuppetDB from packages

Increasing the JVM heap space

Installing PostgreSQL

Installing the packages

Creating your database user

Creating the PostgreSQL database

Summary

6. Retrieving Data with the PuppetDB API

Exploring the PuppetDB query API

Understanding the command interface

Understanding the query API interface

A primer on the PuppetDB query language

Exploring endpoints

Using the facts endpoint

Using the resources endpoint

Retrieving details about nodes

Getting the run details with the catalogs endpoint

Understanding the fact-names endpoint

Knowing the status of PuppetDB with the metrics endpoint

Using the reports endpoint

Working with the events endpoint

Using the event-counts endpoint

Applying the aggregate-event-counts endpoint

Using the server-time endpoint

The version endpoint

Summary

7. Writing Custom Reports with PuppetDB

Creating a basic query application

Setting up the basic application

Connecting to PuppetDB

Outputting results

Creating a menu-driven PuppetDB application

Setting up the UI

Querying PuppetDB's facts endpoint

Outputting the hardware report

Querying PuppetDB for report information

Creating the PuppetDB query method

Fetching the event counts

Presenting the events data

Testing our application

Summary

8. Creating Your Own Custom Dashboard

Exploring Dashing

Setting up Dashing

Exploring the default puppetdash directory layout

Running Dashing

Creating our dashboard

Creating our dashboard layout

Feeding data into Dashing

Creating new jobs in Dashing

Adding trends

Adding meters

Summary

9. Looking Back and Looking Forward

Looking back at what we've learned

Rediscovering dashboards

Producing alerts

Using Nagios

Discovering Icinga and Shinken

Compliance monitoring with Puppet

Analyzing metrics with StatsD, Graphite, and Etsy Skyline

Tracking changes with Puppet and Graphite

Using Etsy Skyline to find your normal

Using Puppet to drive orchestration

Summary

Index

Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

Copyright © 2014 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: June 2014

Production Reference: 1100614

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78398-142-7

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Cover Image by Gareth Howard Jones (<garth123@hotmail.co.uk>)

Credits

Author

Michael Duffy

Reviewers

Ugo Bellavance

Johan De Wit

James Fryman

Jason Slagle

Eric Stonfer

Commissioning Editor

Edward Gordon

Acquisition Editor

Llewellyn Rozario

Content Development Editor

Sankalp Pawar

Technical Editors

Taabish Khan

Aparna Kumar

Copy Editors

Insiya Morbiwala

Aditya Nair

Stuti Srivastava

Project Coordinator

Puja Shukla

Proofreaders

Maria Gould

Paul Hindle

Indexer

Mariammal Chettiyar

Production Coordinator

Sushma Redkar

Cover Work

Sushma Redkar

About the Author

Michael Duffy has been working in systems administration and automation for more years than he cares to remember, and is the founder of Stunt Hamster Ltd.; a small but perfectly formed consultancy that helps companies, both small and large, deliver fully automated and scalable infrastructure. He has consulted for companies such as O2 and BSkyB, delivering design, automation, and monitoring of infrastructure for products that serve millions of users.

Michael is a keen advocate of DevOps methodologies and is especially interested in using automation to not only deliver scalable and reliable systems, but also to make sure that people can see what is actually going on under the hood when using reporting tools. If given the chance, he will happily spend hours telling you how fantastic it is that people from the development and operations fields can finally talk and go to the pub together.

I would like to thank my absolutely incredible wife, Beth, and my fantastic daughter, Megan, for enduring more than their fair share of enthused lectures about Puppet reporting and for ensuring that I was fed, watered, and occasionally moved out into sunlight when I became a little too focused on writing. Without your love and support, this book wouldn't have been possible.

I would also like to thank the editors and staff at Packt Publishing; without them, this book would be several hundred pages of extreme gibberish without a gerund verb in sight.

About the Reviewers

Ugo Bellavance has done most of his studies in e-commerce. He started using Linux from RedHat 5.2, got Linux training from Savoir-faire Linux at age 20, and got his RHCE on RHEL 6 in 2011. He's been a consultant in the past, but he's now an employee for a provincial government agency for which he manages the IT infrastructure (servers, workstations, network, security, virtualization, SAN/NAS, and PBX). He's a big fan of open source software and its underlying philosophy. He has worked with Debian, Ubuntu, and SUSE, but what he knows best is RHEL-based distributions. He's known for his contributions to the MailScanner project (he has been a technical reviewer for MailScanner User Guide and Training Manual, Julian Field published by the University of Southampton, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering), but he has also given time to different open source projects such as Mondo Rescue, OTRS, SpamAssassin, pfSense, and a few others. He's been a technical reviewer for Centos 6 Linux Server Cookbook, Jonathan Hobson, Packt Publishing and Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide, John Arundel, Packt Publishing.

I thank my lover, Lysanne, who accepted to allow me some free time slots for this review even with two dynamic children to take care of. The presence of these three human beings in my life is simply invaluable.

I must also thank my friend, Sébastien, whose generosity is only matched by his knowledge and kindness. I would never have reached this high in my career if it wasn't for him.

Johan De Wit was an early Linux user, and he still remembers those days when he built a 0.9x Linux kernel on his brand new 486 computer, which took a whole night. His love for Unix operating systems already existed before Linux was announced. It is not surprising that he started his career as a Unix system administrator.

Johan doesn't remember precisely when he started working with open source software, but since 2009, he has been working as an open source consultant at Open-Future, where he got the opportunity to work with Puppet. Puppet has now become his biggest interest, and he loves to teach Puppet as one of the few official Puppet trainers in Belgium.

Johan started the Belgian Puppet user group a year ago, where he tries to bring some Puppet users together by hosting great and interesting meet-ups. When he takes the time to write Puppet-related blogs, he does so mostly on http://puppet-be.github.io/, the BPUG website. From time to time, he tries to spread some hopefully wise Puppet words while presenting a talk at a Puppet camp somewhere in Europe.

Besides having fun at work, he spends a lot of his free time with his two lovely kids and his two Belgian draft horses, and if time and the weather permits, he likes to rebuild and drive his old-school chopper.

James Fryman is a technologist who has been working on spreading the good word of technology via the greatest mechanism known to man: the beer-fueled rant. He has been working to automate software and infrastructure for the last 10 years and has learned quite a bit about security, architecture, scaling, and development as a result. He currently works for GitHub as an Operations Hacker.

Jason Slagle is a 17-year veteran of systems and network administration. Having worked on everything from Linux systems to Cisco networks and SAN Storage, he is always looking for ways to make his work repeatable and automated. When he is not hacking a computer for work or pleasure, he enjoys running, cycling, and occasionally, geocaching.

Jason is currently employed by CNWR Inc., an IT and infrastructure consulting company in his home town of Toledo, Ohio. There, he supports several large customers in their quest to automate and improve their infrastructure and development operations.

Jason has also served as a technical reviewer for Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide, John Arundel, Packt Publishing.

I'd like to thank my wife, Heather, and my son, Jacob, for putting up with me while I worked on this and other projects. They make even days with critical systems outages better!

Eric Stonfer has spent the last 12 years working as a systems administrator with an emphasis on systems automation and configuration management.

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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.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Setting Up Puppet for Reporting, will guide you through the simple steps to take your existing Puppet installation and make it report.

Chapter 2, Viewing Data in Dashboards, takes a look at the existing dashboards available for Puppet and how you can use them to report on your data.

Chapter 3, Introducing Report Processors, acquaints you with the engine that drives much of the Puppet reporting process—the report processor.

Chapter 4, Creating Your Own Report Processor, deals with creating your own report processor with custom e-mail alerts, MySQL storage, and integration with third-party products.

Chapter 5, Exploring PuppetDB, introduces PuppetDB, a fantastic and powerful system for report storage and analysis. In this chapter, we look at what PuppetDB is, how it's configured, and finally, how you can set it up in your own infrastructure.

Chapter 6, Retrieving Data with the PuppetDB API, explores the fantastically powerful API of PuppetDB; the API allows you to query your reports in a number of different ways. We're going to explore this API for functions that range from basic queries to advanced data integration.

Chapter 7, Writing Custom Reports with PuppetDB, deals with creating easy-to-use custom report applications.

Chapter 8, Creating Your Own Custom Dashboard, deals with creating an attractive and detailed custom dashboard using Dashing and PuppetDB.

Chapter 9, Looking Back and Looking Forward, takes a look at some of the more advanced ways in which you can use Puppet reporting to do everything from alerting to the orchestration of your infrastructure.

What you need for this book

The code and examples in this book have been designed for use with the following software:

Puppet 3.0 and higher versions

Ruby 1.9 and higher versions

Who this book is for

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.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles