Puppet and Kestrel

Kestrel is a neat little distributed message queue based on “starling” I’ve been playing with. Like all things I take a look at I added a Puppet report processor that sends logs from Puppet to Kestrel. The report processor is also on the Forge as a module.

It’s simple to install and use, all you need is Puppet and the kestrel-client gem.

1. Install the kestrel-client gem on your Puppet master

   $ sudo gem install kestrel-client

2. Install puppet-kestrel as a module in your Puppet master’s module path.

3. Update the kestrel_server, kestrel_port, and kestrel_queue variables in the kestrel.yaml file with your kestrel server host, port and queue. Then copy the file to /etc/puppet/. An example file is included.

4. Enable pluginsync and reports on your master and clients in puppet.conf

   [master]
   report = true
   reports = kestrel
   pluginsync = true
   [agent]
   report = true
   pluginsync = true

5. Run the Puppet client and sync the report as a plugin

And hey presto you should be sending each log entry from a Puppet run onto a Kestrel queue.