Puppet Labs Helps Visualize IT Infrastructure Changes In Puppet Enterprise 3.1

Puppet Labs has released Puppet Enterprise 3.1, which includes several enhancements including a powerful reporting tool that inspects infrastructure changes. Puppet 3.1 also now supports Google Compute Engine (GCE) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4.0, further expanding interoperability with a range of enterprise IT platforms.

The addition of Google compute support enables customers to automatically provision, configure and deploy to GCE cloud nodes with a single command. In terms of cloud support, this is in addition to support for Amazon Web Services and VMware cloud platforms.  The company is mighty close to VMware. and separately announced enhanced integration with VMware vCloud Automation Center 6.0. This should come as no surprise, given ongoing VMware investment into Puppet.

RHEL 4.0 support expands support for enterprise platforms, joining already supported Microsoft, Windows, AIX, Solaris, Debian and Ubuntu. It already supports RHEL 5.0 and 6.0 as well.

Event Inspector is Big Release Addition

Perhaps the big addition Puppet Enterprise 3.1 is the event inspector, an interactive reporting tool that provides a visualization of IT infrastructure changes to system administrators. The new reporting tool allows sysadmins to interactively inspect and change events in multiple ways, providing them with greater insight into infrastructure change

The reporting tool provides actionable insight to troubleshoot and resolve issues, reducing risk of downtime and accelerating time to resolution.

"With the event inspector in Puppet Enterprise 3.1, we're addressing a huge challenge for operations teams managing IT infrastructure changes," said Luke Kanies, founder and CEO of Puppet Labs. "System administrators typically have to sift through numerous log files and use ad hoc scripts to understand changes and their impact. The event inspector delivers an opinionated reporting tool to help them quickly identify the 'what,' 'where' and 'how' of changes, understand the impact, and then take action."

Also new to Puppet Enterprise 3.1 is powerful new capabilities for advanced/power users, including support for rebooting Windows after package installation, and discoverable and configurable classes and parameters from within the Puppet Enterprise GUI console.