Web interface to Facter information, system config reporting?

[Forrie]

In our department, we recently bought an install of HP's SIM agent -- it's some hacky configuration reporting and management platform that also facilitates firmware updates, etc.   I don't care for it.

For one, it requires root logins, but it also has agents that report -- it also may have the ability to change the system.

My boss is looking for information that is presented in a GUI and easily reportable.   I'm thinking Facter is a good candidate here - we can tell it what version of software (SSH, etc), OS, etc.   But, it's all command-line.   I'm wondering if there is (or if someone is working on) a web-based GUI that can report these statistics (we don't need the overhead of something like puppet-dashboard).

And for misc things, we can always write custom facts.   Of course, this would only apply to systems that are running puppet.  We have others that are not.

I've seen some other hacks out there that do different types of reporting - if there's some better approach (open source), that would be great to know about.

Thanks.

[Aaron Russo]

I wrote a Mediawiki bot that connects to our puppet master, grabs all of the facter data that has been reported by clients, and shoves that into the host's page on our wiki.

We format the facter data in our wiki by using a custom tag: <bb facter_key/>. Once the bot runs, it expands to <bb facter_key>facter_value</bb>.  I have this set to run every 5 minutes to keep our wiki up to date.

The important code for said bot is here: 

http://github.com/arusso23/bobbie     (bot framework)

https://github.com/arusso23/libpuppet (puppet rest library)

The documentation is admittedly lacking, but if you're interested in using it, feel free to email me off-list.

Cheers,

Aaron Russo
IST Infrastructure Services, Unix Group
UC Berkeley
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Desk:   510-643-5550
Mobile: 510-206-1532
IM:     aru...@berkeley.edu (XMPP/Jabber)

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[Ohad Levy]

While its not limited to inventory only, Foreman [1] can generate pretty looking graphs, and show you all of your facts (including custom) and the ability to search and feed that to any external service via a simple api.

You can disable most of foreman functionality, and simply get facts (and maybe puppet reports if you are interested in puppet state and not just inventory) without all of the other nice features (enc classifications, provisioning, vm, cloud etc).

Hope this helps,

Ohad

[1] - http://theforeman.org

[Forrie]

Thanks for the pointers, I will have a look at it.

[Louis Coilliot]

Hello, the Kermit Web UI does this also. We get the facts on the nodes, but also specific system and application inventories. We use MCollective to trigger the inventories and push them to the Web UI.
We can also query for specific facts whenever we want them.

Here are some screenshots of this :

http://www.kermit.fr/kermit/images/Kermit-Inventory-01.png
http://www.kermit.fr/kermit/images/Kermit-Inventory-02.png

And a screencast :

http://www.kermit.fr/video/kermit-server_details.mp4

Louis Coilliot