Custom report handlers

Puppet can generate data about what happens during a run and we can gather this data in reports. They contain the output of what is executed on the client and details on any action taken during the execution and performance metrics.

Needless to say that we can also extend Puppet reports and deliver them to a variety of destinations: logging systems, database backends, e-mail, chat roots, notification and alerting systems, trouble ticketing software, and web frontends.

Reports may contain the whole output of a Puppet run, a part of them (for example, just the resources that failed) or just the metrics (as it happens with the rrd report that graphs key metrics such as Puppet compilation and run times).

We can distribute our custom report handlers via the pluginsync functionality too: we just need to place them in the lib/puppet/reports/<report_name>.rb path, so that the file name matches the handler name.

James Turnbull, the author of the most popular Puppet books...