How can MCollective replace "puppet kick"?

[Sandra Schlichting]

Dear readers,

I was shocked to see that "puppet kick" will be deprecated in 3.0.0

https://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/15735

How can MCollective replace "puppet kick"?

Hugs,

Sandra

[James Turnbull]

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/mcollective-plugins/wiki/AgentPuppetd

Regards

James Turnbull

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[Sandra Schlichting]

> How can MCollective replace "puppet kick"?

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/mcollective-plugins/wiki/AgentPuppetd

I don't know what MCollective is, and that link doesn't say anything that will explain it or how I can push configs to nodes =(

 

[Nick Fagerlund]

MCollective is a service that runs on every node. It constantly polls a message queue server for real-time messages and sometimes responds to them by performing actions. 

You use a command-line client app to send messages, and you can set filters on each message so only certain nodes or groups of nodes will respond to them. Every node that matches a message will react simultaneously when the message goes out. 

Each node has a set of actions it can run, provided by plugins. The "puppetd" plugin lets you control puppet agent, but it's better than puppet kick: It can trigger runs even if puppet agent usually runs via cron instead of as a service, it can enable and disable puppet runs, and it can fetch last run summaries. MCollective also lets you be smarter about triggering runs because it doesn't limit you to hostnames; you can filter by puppet class, facts, etc. 

Does that help? 

[Sandra Schlichting]

MCollective is a service that runs on every node. It constantly polls a message queue server for real-time messages and sometimes responds to them by performing actions. 

You use a command-line client app to send messages, and you can set filters on each message so only certain nodes or groups of nodes will respond to them. Every node that matches a message will react simultaneously when the message goes out. 

Each node has a set of actions it can run, provided by plugins. The "puppetd" plugin lets you control puppet agent, but it's better than puppet kick: It can trigger runs even if puppet agent usually runs via cron instead of as a service, it can enable and disable puppet runs, and it can fetch last run summaries. MCollective also lets you be smarter about triggering runs because it doesn't limit you to hostnames; you can filter by puppet class, facts, etc. 

Does that help? 

Absolutely =)

Wow! That is impressive.

I have seen the puppet agent taking ~100MB of ram.

Is MCollective also written in Ruby, and therefore take a lot of ram?

[Eric Shamow]

Sandra,

The mcollective agent is written in Ruby, but it's really tiny.  You can use the mco controller plugin to view resource utilization over time, and it's generally infinitesimal.

-Eric

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[Sandra Schlichting]

The mcollective agent is written in Ruby, but it's really tiny.  You can use the mco controller plugin to view resource utilization over time, and it's generally infinitesimal.

Great. Thanks =)

MCollective sounds very useful!

[Johan Kamb]

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/mcollective gives a bit more information on mcollective itself. You don't actually push configs to nodes with it; you have a client which "tells" all machines that matches a fact to trigger a puppet run. The puppetd agent plugin is required for this to work.

[Sandra Schlichting]

http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/mcollective gives a bit more information on mcollective itself. You don't actually push configs to nodes with it; you have a client which "tells" all machines that matches a fact to trigger a puppet run. The puppetd agent plugin is required for this to work.

Thanks for clearing that out =)

It definitely sounds useful for other things as well, so I will install it once I have puppet 3 up and running =)

 

[Dan White]

Is MCollective part of Puppet Enterprise ?

I cannot find documentation that says yea or nay.

[Dan White]

Spoke too soon !

Found it !

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/pe/2.5/orchestration_overview.html

"PE’s orchestration features are built on the MCollective framework"

[Walter Heck]

mcollective is stand-alone software, it doesn't actually require
puppet. It's also free and open source. The only thing you get with PE
is the live management fature in the dashboard, which is essentially a
GUI for mcollective if I'm not mistaken.

cheers,

Walter

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[Eric Shamow]

You get a good bit more than that - PE sets up the ActiveMQ stuff for you and handles key setup/exchange, which is fairly difficult to do by hand the first time if you aren't familiar with the stuff.  As it is, any PE node you add to your PE master automatically gets added to your mcollective environment, which is quite nice.

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