I recently gave a talk titled “Managing Puppet Using MCollective” at the Puppet Camp in Ghent. The talk introduces a complete rewrite of the MCollective plugin used to manage Puppet. The plugin can be found on our Github repo as usual. Significantly this is one of a new breed of plugin that we ship as Read More
I’ve recently been thinking about ways to do graphs on the CLI. We’ve written a new Puppet Agent for MCollective that can gather all sorts of interesting data from your server estate and I’d really like to be able to show this data on the CLI. This post isn’t really about MCollective though the ideas Read More
Most Nagios systems does a lot of forking especially those built around something like NRPE where each check is a connection to be made to a remote system. On one hand I like NRPE in that it puts the check logic on the nodes using a standard plugin format and provides a fairly re-usable configuration Read More
Yesterday I mentioned on Twitter that I was playing with the MongoDB pub/sub features and that it worked quite well for my needs. What I didn’t mention was that the documentation and blog posts were a bit all over the show and the Ruby examples I saw didn’t actually do what they said they did Read More
This ia a post in a series of posts I am doing about MCollective 2.0 and later. Overview The kind of application I tend to show with MCollective is very request-response orientated. You request some info from nodes and it shows you the data as they reply. This is not the typical thing people tend Read More
This ia a post in a series of posts I am doing about MCollective 2.0 and later. We’ve discussed Direct Addressing Mode before and today I’ll show one of the new features this mode enables. Overview MCollective is very fast which is great usually. Sometimes though when you’re restarting webservers the speed and concurrency can Read More
This ia a post in a series of posts I am doing about MCollective 2.0 and later. In my previous post I detailed how you can extend the scope of the information MCollective has available to it about a node using Data Plugins, this was node side plugins today we’ll look at ones that runs Read More
This ia a post in a series of posts I am doing about MCollective 2.0 and later. In my previous post I covered a new syntax for composing discovery queries and right at the end touched on a data plugin system, today I’ll cover those in detail and show you how to write and use Read More
This ia a post in a series of posts I am doing about MCollective 2.0 and later. In the past discovery was reasonably functional, certainly at the time I first demoed it around 2009 it was very unique. Now other discovery frameworks exist that does all sorts of interesting things and so we did 3 Read More
As mentioned in my first post in this series I will be covering new MCollective features that were introduced with version 2.0.0 or later. Today I’ll talk about the biggest new feature called Direct Addressing. The Past – Broadcast Only Mode In the past MCollective only had one mode of communication. It would send a Read More
