PuppetDB ecosystem provides web dashboards that definitely help user interaction:
PuppetDB integrates a performance dashboard out of the box; we can use it to check how the software is working in real time. It can be accessed via HTTP at the URL http://puppetdb.server:8080/pdb/dashboard/index.html
if you set host = 0.0.0.0
on the PuppetDB configuration. Remember that you should limit HTTP access to unauthorized clients only, either by firewalling the host's port or setting host = localhost
and having a local reverse proxy where you can manage access lists or authentication:
From the previous picture, the most interesting metrics are as follows:
The amount of information stored on PuppetDB is huge and precious, and while it can be queried from the command line, a visual interface can help users explore Puppet's data.
Daniele Sluijters, a community member, started a project that has quickly become the visual interface of reference for PuppetDB: Puppetboard is a web frontend written in Python that allows easy browsing of nodes' facts, reports, events, and PuppetDB metrics.
It also allows us to directly query PuppetDB, so all the example queries from the command-line we'll see in this chapter can be issued directly from the web interface.
This is a relatively young and quite dynamic project that follows PuppetDB's APIs evolution; check its GitHub project for the latest installation and usage instructions: https://github.com/nedap/puppetboard.