[Puppet Users] Storing puppet info in a database

Kenneth Holter
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:00:17 -0000

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excel-files is no good, since the information will be outdated by the time I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