Filter your infrastructure data with Estate Reporting in Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise

Would your organization benefit from having powerful, yet easy-to-use filters to inspect your nodes? With our latest Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise release, we’ve updated the filters in the user interface to support more advanced queries. SysAdmins, developers, DataOps, and IT managers will all benefit from having access to these powerful filters.

We know that organizations worldwide are challenged with maintaining a holistic view of their infrastructure inventory. One minute they are focused on the bigger picture—examining the configuration of thousands of nodes reporting to different servers—and the next minute they need to zoom into a particular set of nodes to review configuration issues. For Puppet users, this becomes more arduous if those who need to access their infrastructure data are not Puppet practitioners, are not familiar with PQL, and are pressed for time to learn another query language.

In this blog post we will discuss the latest release of CD for PE 4.11.0 which will equip your teams with powerful filtering capabilities so that they can more efficiently manage your infrastructure.

Powerful queries at your fingertips

In my last blog post about using charts to visualize your infrastructure, I described the challenges that teams face to retrieve data from distributed servers. Previously, it was not possible to build complex queries in the user interface so users relied on forming these in PQL. In CD for PE 4.11.0, we have revamped the visual query builder so that filters are both easier to use and more powerful than before. This allows operators with varying levels of experience to retrieve data with ease, without ever leaving the interface.

Utilizing compound filters

With compound filters, users are able to target specific sets of data in their infrastructure. Basic filters are those with a single element and compound filters are those with multiple elements. These can also be combined using the operators AND or OR, giving you greater flexibility and control of your queries. With these updates it is now possible to ask questions such as: Which RedHat 7.6 or CentOS 6.5 nodes are in the DMZ subnet? Which nodes in my London datacenter are either CentOS 7, CentOS 8, or Scientific Linux and have had recent failures?

These can now be applied in the user interface as:

Accessing your data

Compound filters not only allow you to make advanced queries in the interface, they also make visualizing the filters of each node view easier than before. This update forms a crucial part of Puppet’s efforts to make visualizing and extracting your infrastructure data easier for teams throughout your organization.

At Puppet we are interested in learning how your teams make use of these filters. Share your feedback in our community slack channels such as #continuous-delivery.

Nicole Joe is a Product Manager at Puppet.

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