Have you heard about the Puppet Practice Labs? Our free, browser-based, hands-on labs cover a variety of topics for getting started with Puppet — everything from installing the primary server to identifying server roles using package data collection, and much, much more. You can read more about them in my previous blog post. We’ve designed Puppet Practice labs to make learning Puppet fun, engaging, and memorable for learners of all levels.

Nowadays, staff in organizations are required to access multiple applications in their infrastructure. This can lead to the user having to manage multiple login credentials and passwords. There are many solutions available that provide a single sign-on (SSO) capability — such as Okta, LDAP, and Active Directory — which is becoming common practice across businesses.

The world has changed since I started out on a help desk in Colorado 25 years ago. In those long ago years, a company’s desktop machines actually lived under the desks of many in the organization (and often doubled as a foot warmer!) and configuration was done machine by machine manually, or maybe even by some script that was created to run at login if we were lucky. If there were laptops in use by the business users, they were a lot less mobile and rarer than in today’s business world...

When you write enough Puppet code, you will eventually find yourself in need of a Facter fact or Puppet resource type that doesn’t exist in Puppet itself. Then, if you’re like me, you go to the Puppet Forge and see if someone else has written what you need. Oftentimes, you find what you need, add a new module to your Puppetfile or module metadata, and move on with your life.

You only have to read regular news reports about the multiple outages across household names in banking and financial services, resulting in customers being unable to access their bank accounts, to know that cyber security resilience has never been more important and is on every organization’s radar. The threat of regulatory action, heavy fines, and the potential loss of banking licenses is very real.

A number of improvements have been made to the Puppet Report Viewer add-on for Splunk since it was initially released. The most notable changes added in version 3.1 of the add-on are the tracked metrics, allowing for better troubleshooting of performance issues in your Puppet installation.