last_puppetrun - A small tool for your puppets

To complement last weeks post about getting puppet into your datacenter, here’s a small post on a tool I wrote to monitor your puppets.

The tool will look at /var/log/messages and look for the last successful puppet run for all your nodes (as given by

  $ puppetca -al

). It needs to be run as root.

You can download it from github.

  git clone git://github.com/kschiess/last_puppetrun.git

Not the same as puppetlast

Connaisseurs of puppet will bark: “But there is already puppetlast”. Yes. There is. The information puppetlast gives you is “When did puppet last run on host X”?. That is not at all the same as “When did puppet last successfully run on host X?” – which is the answer provided by last_puppetrun.

If you have a parse error / a doubly defined resource in your puppet recipes, the tool presented here will allow you to see the problem early.