Creating graphical reports
Let's face it, bosses like pretty pictures. Puppet can produce report data in a form suitable for processing by the RRD (Round-Robin Database) graph library, to produce a graphical representation of metrics such as the runtime on each client.
Getting ready
You will need to install the RRD tools and libraries for Ruby on your system. For Ubuntu, run the following command:
# apt-get install rrdtool librrd-ruby
How to do it…
Add the rrdgraph report type to your puppet.conf as follows:
reports = store,rrdgraph
How it works…
For each run, Puppet will record data in the client's RRD directory (the default is /var/lib/puppet/rrd/<clientname>). It will create graphs in a PNG format for events, resources, and retrieval time, while the raw data is available to you in the .rrd files if you want to process it further using third-party RRD tools.
There's more…
For more detailed reporting and graphing, you can use Puppet Dashboard.
See also
- Using Puppet dashboard in Chapter 9