Name: Puppet Enterprise
Rating: 8.9 (53 reviews)
Author: Perforce Software

Help Desk

Web and Video Conferencing

Customer Support

Innovation Management

PHP Frameworks

Development

Business Intelligence (BI)

Collaboration

Manufacturing Execution

Payment Facilitation

Quality Management

Enterprise

Accounting

Blockchain Payments

Merger and Acquisition

Payment Hubs

Finance and Accounting

Applicant Tracking

Corporate Learning Management

Employer of Record (EOR)

HR Management

Payroll

Talent Intelligence

Talent Management

Workforce Analytics

Workforce Management

Human Resources

AIOps

Bot Mitigation

Cloud Storage

Container Security

Data Center Outsourcing (Canada)

Data Center Power

Data Replication

Endpoint Security

Firewall

Fraud Detection

Graph Database

Infrastructure-as-a-Service

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS)

LAN Switches

Mobile Data Security

Network Performance Monitoring

Network Troubleshooting

SQL Server Performance Monitoring

Scale-Out Storage

Secure Access Control

Smart Contracts

Testing Services

Information Technology

A/B Testing

Ad Serving & Retargeting

All-in-One Marketing

Content Management

Email Marketing

Grant Management Software

IP Geolocation

Marketing Attribution

Marketing Automation

Social Media Management

Survey & Forms Building

Translation

Web Analytics

Marketing

Project Management

Task Management

Professional Services

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Intelligent Virtual Assistant

Sales Dialer

Sales Training

Sales

Data-Centric Audit Protection (DCAP)

Security

Aviation

Emergency Notification

Fleet Maintenance

Hospital Management

Hotel Management

Retail Analytics

Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)

Shipping

Veterinary

Warranty Management

Vertical-Specific

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### Configuration Management
Users generally praise Puppet Enterprise's configuration management capabilities. They appreciate the automation tasks it handles efficiently, reducing manual efforts and human errors. The ability to manage configurations across multiple instances easily and monitor them effectively adds to its appeal. However, some users find the initial setup tedious and express concerns about dependency on the Puppet master for operations. Despite these challenges, Puppet Enterprise's configuration management features are seen as a valuable asset for streamlining infrastructure management and ensuring consistency across environments.

### Server Deployment
Users generally praise Puppet Enterprise for its effortless server deployment capabilities. The reviews highlight the software's ability to simplify the deployment process, making it easy for users to manage and maintain their servers efficiently. Users appreciate how Puppet Enterprise streamlines the deployment of application code releases, revolutionizing their approach to server management. The consensus among reviewers is that Puppet Enterprise's server deployment functionality is a strong point, enhancing the overall user experience and workflow efficiency.

### Infrastructure Management
Users consistently laud Puppet Enterprise for its robust infrastructure management features, emphasizing its effectiveness in handling the complexities of scaling IT environments. The platform's ability to automate configuration tasks and ensure uniformity across diverse systems has been a game-changer for many organizations. Additionally, the integration with Foreman/Satellite for server management and provisioning further enhances its appeal, making it a valuable asset for mid to large-scale infrastructures. The generation of drift reports and support for custom facts are cited as key strengths that empower sysadmins to maintain optimal server configurations.

### Community and Support
While some users praise Puppet Enterprise's community and support, others express concerns about a decline in community aid over the years. The open source community surrounding Puppet is acknowledged for its contributions, but there are mentions of reduced support in recent times. Despite mixed opinions, the consensus leans towards acknowledging the importance of a robust community and support system for users of Puppet Enterprise.

### Learning and Documentation
Users generally seem to appreciate Puppet Enterprise's learning curve and documentation features. While some find the initial setup and learning process challenging, many praise the extensive documentation provided by Puppet Enterprise. The availability of a declarative language and frequent updates also contribute to a positive learning experience for users. However, there are suggestions for improvement, such as the need for more examples of large-scale implementations and a more intuitive dashboard. Despite some challenges, users acknowledge the value of Puppet Enterprise's comprehensive documentation in facilitating understanding and utilization of its features.

Based on user reviews, there are three common recommendations for Puppet. First, users advise utilizing Puppet Enterprise and consulting professional services for installation to ensure a smoother setup process and access to expert guidance. Second, it is highly recommended to get trained in Puppet and attend the Puppetize Live conference to gain a deeper understanding of the tool and stay updated with the latest developments. Lastly, users suggest exploring the Puppet Forge for pre-built modules and resources, as this library of modules can significantly enhance automation capabilities and simplify complex tasks. By following these recommendations, users can maximize their experience with Puppet and leverage its benefits effectively.

Confusing Execution of Actions: Some users have found the execution of actions in Puppet to be confusing, particularly when it comes to declaring the order of execution for tasks. This has caused difficulties in understanding and managing the workflow within Puppet.

Difficulty with Parallel Execution: Several users have expressed challenges in executing commands across multiple hosts in parallel, which they found convenient in Chef's knife command. The absence of this feature in Puppet has hindered their ability to efficiently manage and control large-scale deployments.

Limitations on Language and Integration: Users have mentioned limitations with Puppet's language and integration capabilities. They have experienced issues with the lack of support for inline Ruby, making it difficult to pull data from a database and incorporate it into a manifest effectively. Additionally, some users feel that implementing Puppet requires a significant shift in thinking and procedures as it may not fit well with existing infrastructure.

Reliable mechanism for deploying infrastructure-as-code: Users have found Puppet to be a dependable solution for deploying infrastructure-as-code, particularly when integrated with source control platforms like Git. Several reviewers have mentioned that it ensures system stability and uptime by effectively managing configuration drift.

Valuable asset for transitioning to DevOps: Puppet is highly regarded as a valuable tool for teams embracing DevOps practices. It empowers development teams to take ownership of their assets and automates repetitive tasks. This streamlines system management and simplifies complex operations.

Seamless integration with other community projects: Many users appreciate Puppet's seamless integration capabilities with various community/open-source projects such as Cobbler and Foreman. This integration enhances its ability to automate software installations and configure software post-installation effectively.

Puppet is a versatile tool that is widely used across organizations to streamline operations and automate various tasks. Users rely on Puppet to maintain configuration and deploy new versions of applications throughout their infrastructure. With variables stored in Hiera, Puppet allows for easy roll-out of configuration changes across all parts of the system. It also serves as a reliable deployment tool, enabling quick and consistent deployment and maintenance of various systems.

One of the key use cases of Puppet is automating redundant tasks and simplifying the deployment of complex system configurations. By automating installations and configuring environments after the initial OS install, Puppet greatly reduces manual effort and ensures consistent configurations. Additionally, Puppet is utilized to automate deployments and ensure configuration consistency across multiple data centers, making it scalable and efficient.

Another important use case is managing server lifecycle and automating provisioning, configuration changes, and removal of dynamic resources. Puppet Data Center Automation is particularly useful in standardizing server deployments, maintaining a uniform configuration, and ensuring timely updates and account provisioning or deprovisioning.

Moreover, Puppet plays a vital role in establishing communication between the master server and other computers, guaranteeing access to up-to-date files. It is also commonly integrated with other open-source tools to automate virtual machines. Furthermore, users have found value in Puppet for solving business problems and supporting open-source software.

Overall, Puppet has proven to be a valuable asset for organizations looking to automate and streamline their operations. Its wide range of use cases, from maintaining configuration to deploying and managing systems, make it a powerful tool for various industries.

Puppet Enteprise is an IT automation and configuration management solution that enables users to manage and automate infrastructure and complex workflows. The vendor states Puppet Enterprise combines both model‑based and task-based capabilities in a way that enables organizations to scale their multi-cloud infrastructure as their automation footprint grows, with more flexibility from both agent-based and agentless capabilities.

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work. CloudFormation takes care of this. After the AWS resources are deployed, users can modify and update them in a controlled and predictable way, in effect applying version control to AWS infrastructure as with software.

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account

Handler Operation

AWS CloudFormation

One Time Price

SolarWinds Kiwi CatTools

Puppet Enterprise

Configuration Management

Demo of Puppet Enterprise

Event Inspector Demo for Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise/AWS Cloudformation Demo

Razor Demo: Bare Metal Provisioning with Puppet Enterprise 3.2

Automate IT: Getting Started with Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Enterprise 2019 Console Walkthrough Demo

Puppe Enterprise Openstack Icehouse Demo

Keep your IT infrastructure in a known good state with Puppet Enterprise

Demo of Puppet Enterprise Supported Modules

Puppet Enterprise Demo - Silicon Valley Puppet Camp 2014

Likelihood to Recommend

Support Rating

Create. Develop. Version everything with Perforce.

Only Perforce products have the Perforce Server - the fast version management platform that powers productive teamwork. Built from the ground up to be scalable and easy to manage, Perforce helps thousands of the world's leading organizations innovate and succeed.

Perforce Software is a privately held company headquartered in Alameda, California; with international offices in Wokingham, United Kingdom and Sydney, Australia.

Join the Perforce User Group:
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Tools and features offered by configuration management software.

Infrastructure Automation

Automate the setup of systems to achieve their desired state using configuration files.

Automated Provisioning

Automatically and systematically deploy, configure, and manage IT infrastructure and resources.

Parallel Execution

Allows for the simultaneous execution of configuration changes across multiple nodes or components.

Node Management

Allows for the administration and oversight of individual devices or systems within a network.

Reporting & Logging

Generate reports and logs to track changes made to configurations, aiding in troubleshooting and auditing.

Inventory Control

Maintain an inventory of all devices, servers, and components in the infrastructure and track the configurations and attributes of each item.

Version Control

Track changes made to configurations over time. Allowing for rollback to previous configurations if needed.

Role-based access control

Implement RBAC to control access to configuration management features based on roles and responsibilities.

Ubuntu

Puppet Enterprise 2022-06-15 07:41:05

Progress Chef

Salt Project, duplicate

Kubernetes

Sr. DevOps

Puppet Data Center Automation 2017-11-01 15:30:18

Atlassian Confluence

Atlassian Jira

Digital.ai Release

Digital.ai Deploy

Release Engineer

Puppet Data Center Automation 2017-11-06 10:12:02

MariaDB Platform

VMware ESXi

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure

IBM Storage Ceph

Elasticsearch

Nutanix Acropolis (module)

DevOps Engineer

Puppet Data Center Automation 2016-05-06 09:54:03

CFEngine

Senior Automation Engineer

Puppet Data Center Automation 2016-05-07 13:41:43

TrustRadius is a technology and business research firm based in Austin, Texas. The company is known as a review platform for verified B2B technology and software reviews through a proprietary algorithm and human verification.

TrustRadius

Learning curve

Steep learning curve

Different sizes

Considerable time

Password management

Larger organizations

Free version

Network connections

Time consuming

Command line

Tell your readers

Detailed examples

Open sourced

Operating systems

Source projects

Infrastructure as code

Easy to install

Open source projects

Source control

Initial setup

Home

Configuration Management Tools

We host and manage 'a lot' of servers. Many years back without automation we used to run scripts to spin up servers and before that, we used to spend hours doing everything manually on bare metal servers. Once automation came in we initially started playing with Ansible to test the waters but what really grabbed our attention was the pull ability of the Puppet compared to the push ability of ansible that really got us into a Puppet. For example, when we were still new we had to push configs to each server, and if there is a change on the box we have to push it manually again to all the boxes. So this was not really scalable for us. That's where we started using Puppets. With puppets agents, all we had to do was maintain a code repo and Puppet will pull the configs from the repo. That was the one feature that we were looking for at that time.

Puppet manages all our server's "state" so if there is an unauthorized change on the server then in a set interval puppet will run and reset the "state" of the server back to a good working condition. this helps us avoid unauthorized change and also maintains a healthy server.
Puppet helps us keep a centralized repo of all the configs that we need to push to the endpoints. Spinning up new servers in AWS/VMWARE/AZURE is a breeze with Puppet.
Puppet servers check into our central repo for changes on the code and if it finds any change it will immediately apply the change to the servers. So as admins we don't need to log in to any of the servers manually to make any changes.

The setup of Puppet is a nightmare compared to ansible. Anyone watching a youtube video can easily set up ansible with minimal IT knowledge. All one needs is the source IP addresses and we are good to go. Setting up Puppet is a more hands-on task and pushing the puppet agents to all the boxes is another issue. If the installation and setup were simplified like ansible that would attract a lot of people to this platform
The syntax of the code for Puppet is not as easy as ansible. Ansible simply follows a YAML format and it's like typing in normal English. Even complicated tasks can be written by just understanding YAML syntax. Perhaps Puppet needs to revisit the lanugage used and try to come up with a much simpler lanugage for writing code. This will make day-to-day usage easier.

The most important feature that puppet offers is its client agents. These tiny programs are the workers that help us maintain our infrastructure. They keep polling the centralized server and maintaining our servers.
Puppet helps us audit all changes that are being done to the server. The reason is once the Puppet agent is installed if there is a change in state, Puppet will automatically revert the change back to the previous state. So the only way to make changes is through the Puppet centralized repo which can even be hosted in Github and sent via Jenkins.
Puppet makes spinning up servers and services very easy. For examply you can write a code to spin up a server once and then you can use the same code a hundred times to spin up the same server. You dont need to do anything via console or through the UI.

With all the DevOps and automation that we have going on, we save a ton of time on the configuration of the server. It's safe to say that configuring servers via console or via UI is a thing of the past.
We try to get all the things done by using a centralized repo (GitHub). Puppet is one tool that actually gets the actual work done.
The small amount that we spent on purchasing premium Puppet is completely justified because of the time and effort that this tool actually helps us save.

Puppet Enterprise

Overview

What is Puppet Enterprise?