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

Ohad Levy
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:27:28 -0000

I also recommend using external nodes and facts as inventory.

if you are looking for an active project (unlike puppetshow and iclassiy)
you might consider gni.
it already does what you want, and more :)
http://wiki.github.com/ohadlevy/gni

cheers,
Ohad

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 1:00 AM, Kenneth Holter
<kenneho.ndu@gmail.com>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 in excel-files is no good, since the information will be outdated by the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
>
> >