What is the best replacement for Puppet Dashboard ?

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kaustubh chaudhari

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Jan 28, 2014, 8:02:31 AM1/28/14
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Hi All,

As we all know Puppet Dashboard is now EOL, with that said what is the best replacement for the same? We do need a graphical way of managing and reporting!

Any thoughts or suggestion! I am looking at Forman, but havent explored it yet!

-Kaustubh

Thomas Bendler

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Jan 28, 2014, 8:51:42 AM1/28/14
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As far as I know, there is nothing available yet that can compare with foreman in terms of functionality. There are some reporting projects available, but if you want to use the dashboard as an ENC as well, there is know alternative to foreman.

Regards Thomas


2014-01-28 kaustubh chaudhari <kaus...@gmail.com>

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Jason Antman

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Jan 29, 2014, 6:43:01 AM1/29/14
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For the reporting side, I'm using a Python project called PuppetBoard at the moment - https://github.com/nedap/puppetboard - and it does everything I liked about Dashboard, and also loads pages in a not just reasonable but fast amount of time. It pulls directly from PuppetDB.

In terms of the ENC side, I'm currently using a Python/Django ENC ( https://github.com/jantman/nodemeister/tree/develop ) which can itself be installed with a module ( https://github.com/jantman/puppet-nodemeister/tree/install_fixes ). It's feature-complete on the ENC side, including support for inheritance and overrides/exclusions, and actually supports parameterized classes (and global params of any data type you can push into the yaml). We're using it in production, but it's really still proof of concept - there's a bunch of annoying things like selects ordered by ID instead of name, having to input param values and class params as JSON, etc. And its only interface is currently the Django Admin, which is pretty awful looking.

I took over the code from someone else, so I'm in the process of taking it from 0 tests to full-ish coverage, and then building out the long list of features we have. One of those is integration with PuppetBoard, to make this an all-in-one ENC and reporting/dashboard solution.

It's not ready for prime time yet, but if anyone is interested in looking at it or submitting PRs, that would be greatly appreciated.

-Jason

PS - As an aside, we wrote this mainly because we did *not* want Foreman. What we wanted was Puppet Dashboard's ENC features (nodes and groups, and boxes to type stuff in, but no "magic") with support for parameterized classes and deep data structures, class/param overrides at any level, class/param exclusions, and a simple REST API for all of it.

Klavs Klavsen

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Jan 30, 2014, 7:59:33 AM1/30/14
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I use puppetboard too - it's really great, and much lighter on the database. A big improvement on puppet-dashboard.

Only one issue remains, that means I must keep my puppet-dashboard.. There's a bug in the puppetdb-terminus - so nodes which manifest fails compilation fails - does NOT get a report send to puppetboard, so you can't catch failing compilation failures :(

Odlly enough, puppet does send the http reports when there's a failed compilation - so puppet-dashboard knows about them.

Jason Antman

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Jan 30, 2014, 8:38:43 PM1/30/14
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That issue should be fixed "soon", I'm told. The reports do get sent to
puppetboard, but the report processor throws an unhandled exception
because it references one of the 'metrics' hash fields, which is empty
in failed reports (this should be fixed in master to log an error
message instead). However, the bigger issue is that (a) puppet reports
only include per-resource statuses, not an overall status, so there's
nothing in the current report format that indicates that it was a failed
run, let alone why, and (b) there's no place to store that information
in the PuppetDB schema (yet) once it makes it into the reports.

If you're interested in this issue, you should watch the following issues:
[PDB-16] Store status for reports - Puppet Labs Tickets -
https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PDB-16
[PDB-36] Add agent run failure information to reports - Puppet Labs
Tickets - https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PDB-36
[PUP-283] Improve agent error reporting - Puppet Labs Tickets -
https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-283
[PUP-916] Document report format changes for improved agent reporting -
Puppet Labs Tickets - https://tickets.puppetlabs.com/browse/PUP-916

-Jason
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