We’re going to take a tour of the newly released Puppet Dashboard web front-end.  Puppet Dashboard is (or will be) a web front end that keeps you informed and in control of everything going on in your Puppet ecosystem. It currently functions as a reporting dashboard and an external node repository and will soon do much more, including having better marketing copy.

Fundamentally, Dashboard lets you do two things: configure nodes using parameters, classes and groups for use as an external nodes tool; and monitor the status of nodes through real-time reporting and versioned change tracking. The main dashboard page shows you the status of recent Puppet runs, displays important information like pass/failure statistics, and alerts you of important failures, errors and unexpected events. Let’s take a look at how it does this.

The Dashboard

Puppet Dashboard's main dashboard page

The first page you see when you open the Dashboard is, well, the dashboard (Figure 1). The dashboard shows you the status of recent runs, including a chart of recent run failure percentages, and an activity feed of recent changes to nodes in the system. The dashboard is designed to show you the most important information about your Puppet system at a glance. The first step is determining what this information is.

The dashboard is the area of the system that is most likely to change in future versions to accomodate the needs of our users, so feel free to offer any suggestions on what you would like to see on this page. It is also likely that the dashboard page will be configurable to a certain extent to provide some control over what information is presented to you.

The Node View

Figure 2: The Puppet Node View

The Node View (Figure 2) shows the current configuration of a node, and also the status and report information for all recent Puppet runs on that node. It also shows a graph of run time for recent runs on this node, although this is likely to change based on your feedback. The node view also shows a list of changes. Nodes can be updated or removed using the links in the title bar.

Classes and parameters can be applied to nodes directly or inherited from groups, making complex node configurations easier to create and understand. The export button provides the URI for the YAML exported version of the node, allowing the Dashboard to be used as an external nodes tool. An automated tool to get all the node definitions from your Dashboard is coming soon, which will make it even easier to integrate the Puppet Dashboard into your configuration workflow.

The Report View

Figure 3: The Puppet Dashboard Report View

The Report View (Figure 3) provides basic report information on a given Puppet run. Reports are associated with the node on which they are run. Currently, the reports show benchmark information, information about the number of resources the run affected and full report logs. As the reports generated by Puppet provide more detailed information, that information will be presented here as well.

For those of you interested in specific reporting functionality, this would be a great time to provide us with suggestions in the form of feature or enhancement requests via Puppet Dashboard’s ticket tracker or the Puppet user or dev lists.

To Infinity And Beyond

Puppet Dashboard is currently a very young application and will likely be changing quite a bit in upcoming releases to meet the needs of our community (that means you). We have a number of new features and enhancements planned, including:

• LDAP and ActiveDirectory authentication.
• Role based access controls (RBAC) with administration.
• Better data visualization and information accessibility.
• More node status information (offline status, communication errors, etc.).
• Resource change reporting and tracking.
• Puppet run scheduling.
• Other awesome features requested by the community (that means you).

We hope this brief tour of the latest Puppet Dashboard release shows the progress we’ve already made and, more importantly, gives you an idea of where we’re headed in the future. As always, your feedback is crucial to Dashboard’s development, so please keep sending us feature requests and bug reports, either via the ticket tracker, the lists, or our irc channel (#puppet on irc.freenode.net).

Resources

• Get the code at http://github.com/reductivelabs/puppet-dashboard.
• Submit feature requests and bug reports at http://projects.reductivelabs.com/projects/dashboard.
• Join the Puppet Users list and talk about Puppet Dashboard at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users.

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