Puppet: a few questions and issues

John Jasen — 2011-04-27T20:25:15

As a brief summary, $work had a puppet module call the underlying OS
package manager. The package manager (apt) apparently failed, reporting
a non-zero exit status to puppet, which seems to have aborted the rest
of the puppet run. The systems were left in a half-provisioned state,
which escaped our monitoring system for a few days.

In looking at the matter, we were not quickly able to come up with a way
to detect failed puppet runs. Mining syslog may be an option, but see
the point about that further in. Is there an acceptable external way
(say through nagios) to determine if the last puppet run succeeded or
failed?

Second, it seems that puppetd -t and puppetd -t --noop both log the same
to syslog and also update the state.yaml file. Is there a way to
differentiate --noop or test runs from syslog? Is there a way to make it
not update the state file? If not, should there be? :)

Thanks in advance.

Config management and asset tracking on tickets

John P. Rouillard — 2011-02-25T20:42:08

Hi all:

Here is my senario:

  ticketing system with an asset tracker

  tickets should include info on which hosts (asset) were modified
    for a given ticket so when problems occur I can search for a
    host and see all the recent changes on the host.

does anybody do anything like this? If so, does your CM system supply
you with the asset information or do you add it manually?

In a CM managed environment, do we need a different/enhanced idea of
an asset (e.g. an asset is a service rather than a host) to make
troubleshooting problems easier?

Any quips, comments, evasions, questions or answers welcome.

--
-- rouilj
John Rouillard
===========================================================================
My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.

gmane.comp.configuration-management.users

Puppet: a few questions and issues

Config management and asset tracking on tickets