MunkiServer Computer Reporting

[rickychilcott]

I've been trying to think about the best way to do reporting for various different items of a system. Right now, I like that we can see printers, system details, the latest report, etc. But it is not extensible. For instance, what if someone wants to see what version of ruby or python is installed? Energy saver settings, security setting values, computer names, etc. There is currently no extensible way to do this.

What I'd like to propose is tackle this utilizing a puppet labs project, Facter (https://github.com/puppetlabs/facter) to gather the data for us and then we report it via the munki client in a postflight script. Then we can have dynamic forms that pull from this information to develop some standard reports. This will allow us to, eventually, provide a way for users of MunkiServer to write their own 'facts' and custom reports, without digging into the MunkiServer internals.

I still think the managed_install_plist logic would still exist, but I think we will move away from the other report you generate, and instead rely on Facter to do the data aquisition for us. This will require us to install Facter for this functionality, but ultimately, I think it is worth it and they package it up for us: https://sites.google.com/a/explanatorygap.net/puppet/.

What are people's thoughts, generally, about this? If they are positive, I can start working on mocking something up. If you need more information, let me know. To give you an idea what postflight script might look like to do reporting, check this out: https://github.com/rickychilcott/munkiserver/blob/facter_integration/script/munki_scripts/postflight.rb.

[jnraine]

I really like this idea. Additional reporting is something that I'd like to press into heavily with munkiserver. The admins will love using munkiserver and the bosses will love the graphs. :p

Having said that, we may need to put this aside until after 1.0 – the goals are quite aggressively timed and we may poorly implement this functionality if it comes before 1.0.

[rickychilcott]

Agreed. Though, I'm not sure this will be a HUGE deal to implement. The hardest thing will getting Facts written for all the data we want to pull and some sort of interface to build new screens. I look forward to working on this.

Ricky

On Oct 30, 2011, at 6:52 PM, Jordan Raine wrote:

I really like this idea. Additional reporting is something that I'd like to press into heavily with munkiserver. The admins will love using munkiserver and the bosses will love the graphs. :p

Having said that, we may need to put this aside until after 1.0 – the goals are quite aggressively timed and we may poorly implement this functionality if it comes before 1.0.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/jraine/munkiserver/issues/93#issuecomment-2572098

[jnraine]

A basic implementation would be fairly simple, though I'd love to bundle this functionality with a custom reporting interface, allowing admins to collect whatever they want to collect, all configurable from the server size. This also complicates what a "munkiserver" client is and how to configure one – it isn't just installing munki tools any more.

I've been thinking on the creeping scope of munkiserver for some time and I don't mind it doing so – I believe it could be useful for many other things. But more on that later.

Good find and great idea, Ricky.