The Puppet Journey

Puppet implementation

Implementing puppet started out as something that I believed would go fairly smooth. However, there were several hiccups along the road that caused me some headaches, most of which were due to my own error and the environment I was working in. Now I think I have got it all fairly buttoned down and have got a basic 3 machine Sensu environment setup that includes a Sensu server, RabbitMQ server, and Redis server (managed with Sentinel). The next step will be to expand this infrastructure to include 3 Sensu server, 2 RabbitMQ servers, and 3 Redis servers (with Sentinel). This 8 machine environment will become the dev environment and will initially serve as a testing platform to get a feel for the ease of use of Sensu and possibly integrate Sensu with Consul later on. Also getting the 8 vm environment up and running (correctly) will mark the next milestone in my project.

Puppet and Sensu

Moving Forward: Implementing Puppet

For the most part I have a fairly decent handle on how Sensu works in terms of how events are routed and managed and different ways to implement checks and handlers. I've decided to move forward with my project and start implementing the Puppet module that is provided by Sensu on Github. This will mean creating Sensu profiles for both the server and client, as well as profiles to manage RabbitMQ and Redis. On a side note after listening in on the Sensu presentation at PuppetConf I've decided to use Redis Sentinel, which will provide clustering management for Redis and failover procedures in the event the Redis master goes down.