PuppetDB: gather nodes changed recently

[ak0ska]

Hello,

Is it possible to (efficiently) gather those nodes from PuppetDB which have changed recently? Either their facts or their catalogues. In case we want to do something with the nodes that have changed, and quickly collect them using PuppetDB.
If I understood correctly, Puppetdb checks if the newly received catalogues/facts are the same as the ones stored, but it seems there's no way to take advantage of that "from outside". The timestamps returned when querying a node's status reflect the times when catalogues/facts were last received, not when they were changed.

[Chris Price]

ak0ska,

You are correct--right now the timestamps we return only indicate the last submission of catalogs/facts.  We don't actually check to see if the catalogs or facts have changed, we just replace the old ones with the new ones.  (We do some de-duplication checks to prevent us from storing tons of identical resources in the db, but we don't actually store any info about what changed on a given host.)

Yet.  :)

We are actually working on some new features as we speak that will allow you to query for "events", rather than just resources.  I believe that our next major release will provide you with the capability that you are looking for.  If you have a second to visit our issue tracker and file a ticket with any specific info about how you'd like to be able to query, that will definitely help us make sure we have you covered!  http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/puppetdb/issues

We don't have an official release date for those features just yet, but it is one of the major things that we are actively working on and it shouldn't be too far down the road.

[ak0ska]

Thanks for the info!
Sounds nice, looking forward to it! :)