I first heard of Igal Koshevoy at the very first Open Source Bridge. I was organising a panel on open source configuration management tools which boasted the developers and community leads of Puppet, Chef, bcfg2 and CFEngine. Part way through the planning process I got an email from Igal asking if he could represent his own home-grown tool AutomateIT on the panel. After a quick look at the tool I decided he’d be a great addition.

I’ve written a report processor for sending notifications of failed runs to Opsgenie. You can find the module on the Forge and the code on GitHub. Like most of my report processors the instructions are fairly simple: Install puppet-opsgenie as a module in your Puppet master’s module path. Update the key and recipients variables in the opsgenie.yaml file with your customer API key and the recipients for any alerts. Enable pluginsync and reports on your master and clients in puppet.

I’ve just released a Puppet report processor for sending metrics to StatHat. The report sends each of the metrics to StatHat, for example creating: puppet.fqdn.changed_resources puppet.fqdn.config_retrieval_time ... You can find the code on GitHub and a module on the Forge. There are some simple installation instructions: Install the stathat gem on your Puppet master $ sudo gem install stathat Install puppet-stathat as a module in your Puppet master’s module path.

So now the book is done and dusted I wanted to discuss how I wrote it and what tools I used. The book was written in a mix of Markdown with some LaTeX for indexing, formatting and figure placement. The actual writing was done mostly in iA Writer and Vim. I love iA Writer as an interface. It’s clean, simple and has a focus on your putting words down on paper rather than having 10,000 options and functions and menu bars.

The LogStash Book has been released! It’s a new book designed for SysAdmins, Operations staff, Developers and DevOps who are interested in deploying a log management solution using the open source tool LogStash. It’s available for sale on the site as a PDF or an ePub or from Amazon.com as a Kindle ebook.