With the proliferation of cloud and container infrastructure, knowing what you have in your overall hybrid environment could be a challenge at times. With Puppet Discovery one can get insights into all their IT resources, what runs on them, packages installed, uptime stat and take action from a Dashboard. This includes standard hosts to containers such as Docker in a hybrid environment. You don't need a Puppet Agent installed on the nodes for Discovery. This could be an alternate to CMDB, with additional features. Also this lets you start/stop services, install Puppet agents. Shows how many nodes have Puppet Agent on them and how many don't. This could also be useful if an organization initially starts with few nodes on CM/Infrastructure automation using Puppet and plans to roll it out across all nodes. You can add sources from on-prem to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. You can also do this by IP address range and see what is on them from one dashboard. For cloud resources, it takes cloud account credentials and scans the hosts under the account. Source authentication credentials are encrypted and stored securely in the vault. It uses SSH, WinRM and public cloud APIs to connect.
Features such as search by package across entire infrastructure would be very helpful. If news breaks on a particular package vulnerability, such search would be useful to identify impacted nodes to patch and bring them up to date.
While this first version discovers compute resources and what is inside those compute resources, this has network resource discovery on their roadmap.
We will be exploring this product further in coming days.
Related links :
Puppet Discovery
Here is one view on how the Puppet Discovery Dashboard looks
