If you have a puppet network in place you will want to use puppet-dashboard. It is a fairly new project and still has some misssing pieces but overall a good way to tell the health of your puppet network. The thing I really like about it is that you can see when the last check in time is for a client and if it had any errors or warnings during its runs so you can fix them.

The big issue is that out of the box its a bit hard to get running on Redhat/CentOS. No worries I spent some time to make it work and passing it on to you.

Install Rake

rpm -ivh http://mirrors.tummy.com/pub/fedora.redhat.com/epel/5/x86_64/rubygems-1.3.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm

rpm -ivh http://mirrors.tummy.com/pub/fedora.redhat.com/epel/5/x86_64/rubygem-rake-0.8.3-1.el5.noarch.rpm

Install MySQL bindings for Ruby

rpm -ivh http://mirrors.tummy.com/pub/fedora.redhat.com/epel/5/x86_64/ruby-mysql-2.7.3-1.el5.x86_64.rpm

Install git if needed

yum install git

I like to install non-rpmed apps in /opt so that is where I will clone the git project

cd /opt

git clone git://github.com/reductivelabs/puppet-dashboard.git

Now lets config the database. As of writing this, there is an error in the sample configs but one of the authors told me he was doing to fix them. It is in user and pass, they should be username and password

So here is my sample config

cd puppet-dashboard

cat config/database.yml

Here are the contents



development:
    adapter: mysql
    database: puppet_dash
    username: puppet
    password: master
    encoding: utf8
    host: 192.168.100.5 

rake install

/etc/puppet/puppet.conf

report = true

/etc/sysconfig/puppetmaster

#PUPPETMASTER_EXTRA_OPTS=–noca

PUPPETMASTER_EXTRA_OPTS=”––reports puppet_dashboard”

cp /opt/puppet-dashboard/puppet/lib/puppet_dashboard.rb /usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/puppet/reports/

service puppetmaster restart

/opt/puppet-dashboard/script/server

I also wrote a post on setting up a init.d script for puppet-dashboard