[Puppet Users] Re: Storing puppet info in a database

Joe McDonagh
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:33:07 -0000

Kenneth Holter wrote:
> Hi all.
> We have a bunch of RHEL servers running Puppet. They are also
> connected to our Red Hat Satellite server.
> Currently we don''t have any master documentation system that
stores
> all relevant information (i.e. type of server, hardware info, linux
> configuration, etc) about the servers. So what I''d like to do is
> implement some sort of system that can hold all this information.
> There are a lot of asset management products that I guess could get us
> a long way (and our organization is probably going to buy one soon),
> but I''m not sure how flexible these would be with regards to
storing
> custom information and such. The asset management product will be
> administred by someone else within the organisation, and having that
> person implement linux specific info (such as puppet) and stuff may
> not be very realistic.
> First of all, how to other people handle this sort of thing? Storing
> info in excel-files is no good, since the information will be outdated
> by the time I press "save". We need a more or less automatic way
of
> doing this, but is asset management products the way to go? Currently,
> our node definition in Puppet holds the most current infomation when
> it comes to confuguration, while Satellite server holds a lot of other
> information. I''m hoping to integrate all our server info
(including
> puppet) into a database (preferably the Satellite server database on
> Oracle), so that we can query it for info.
> I''ve been playing around with two ideas for automating system
> documentation:
> 1) Parse the puppet manifests (and node definitions) and organize the
> info in a database
> 2) Include a logging functionality in the puppet manifests, so that
> when the clients implement the configuration it logs a specific text
> to syslog. The syslog message is sent over to our log host, which can
> parse it and store the information in a database.
> Maybe the first option is allready implemented? Anyway, have anyone
> implemented such mechanisms?
> Best regards,
> Kenneth Holter
>
> >
Look into stored configurations on the wiki. This will take care of #1
entirely, and in the future there will probably be a shiny web app to
manage it.

#2 is handled already because puppetd logs to syslog. If your servers
send to syslog already then well, that''s pretty seamless.

--
Joe McDonagh
Operations Engineer