Duffy M. - Puppet Reporting and Monitoring

Michael Duffy has been working in systems administration and automation for more years than he cares to remember, and is the founder of Stunt Hamster Ltd.; a small but perfectly formed consultancy that helps companies, both small and large, deliver fully automated and scalable infrastructure. He has consulted for companies such as O2 and BSkyB, delivering design, automation, and monitoring of infrastructure for products that serve millions of users.

Michael is a keen advocate of DevOps methodologies and is especially interested in using automation to not only deliver scalable and reliable systems, but also to make sure that people can see what is actually going on under the hood when using reporting tools. If given the chance, he will happily spend hours telling you how fantastic it is that people from the development and operations fields can finally talk and go to the pub together.

I would like to thank my absolutely incredible wife, Beth, and my fantastic daughter, Megan, for enduring more than their fair share of enthused lectures about Puppet reporting and for ensuring that I was fed, watered, and occasionally moved out into sunlight when I became a little too focused on writing. Without your love and support, this book wouldn't have been possible.

I would also like to thank the editors and staff at Packt Publishing; without them, this book would be several hundred pages of extreme gibberish without a gerund verb in sight.

Ugo Bellavance has done most of his studies in e-commerce. He started using Linux from RedHat 5.2, got Linux training from Savoir-faire Linux at age 20, and got his RHCE on RHEL 6 in 2011. He's been a consultant in the past, but he's now an employee for a provincial government agency for which he manages the IT infrastructure (servers, workstations, network, security, virtualization, SAN/NAS, and PBX). He's a big fan of open source software and its underlying philosophy. He has worked with Debian, Ubuntu, and SUSE, but what he knows best is RHEL-based distributions. He's known for his contributions to the MailScanner project (he has been a technical reviewer for MailScanner User Guide and Training Manual , Julian Field published by the University of Southampton, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering), but he has also given time to different open source projects such as Mondo Rescue, OTRS, SpamAssassin, pfSense, and a few others. He's been a technical reviewer for Centos 6 Linux Server Cookbook , Jonathan Hobson , Packt Publishing and Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide , John Arundel , Packt Publishing .

I thank my lover, Lysanne, who accepted to allow me some free time slots for this review even with two dynamic children to take care of. The presence of these three human beings in my life is simply invaluable.

I must also thank my friend, Sbastien, whose generosity is only matched by his knowledge and kindness. I would never have reached this high in my career if it wasn't for him.

Johan De Wit was an early Linux user, and he still remembers those days when he built a 0.9x Linux kernel on his brand new 486 computer, which took a whole night. His love for Unix operating systems already existed before Linux was announced. It is not surprising that he started his career as a Unix system administrator.

Johan doesn't remember precisely when he started working with open source software, but since 2009, he has been working as an open source consultant at Open-Future, where he got the opportunity to work with Puppet. Puppet has now become his biggest interest, and he loves to teach Puppet as one of the few official Puppet trainers in Belgium.

Johan started the Belgian Puppet user group a year ago, where he tries to bring some Puppet users together by hosting great and interesting meet-ups. When he takes the time to write Puppet-related blogs, he does so mostly on http://puppet-be.github.io/, the BPUG website. From time to time, he tries to spread some hopefully wise Puppet words while presenting a talk at a Puppet camp somewhere in Europe.

Besides having fun at work, he spends a lot of his free time with his two lovely kids and his two Belgian draft horses, and if time and the weather permits, he likes to rebuild and drive his old-school chopper.

James Fryman is a technologist who has been working on spreading the good word of technology via the greatest mechanism known to man: the beer-fueled rant. He has been working to automate software and infrastructure for the last 10 years and has learned quite a bit about security, architecture, scaling, and development as a result. He currently works for GitHub as an Operations Hacker.

Jason Slagle is a 17-year veteran of systems and network administration. Having worked on everything from Linux systems to Cisco networks and SAN Storage, he is always looking for ways to make his work repeatable and automated. When he is not hacking a computer for work or pleasure, he enjoys running, cycling, and occasionally, geocaching.

Jason is currently employed by CNWR Inc., an IT and infrastructure consulting company in his home town of Toledo, Ohio. There, he supports several large customers in their quest to automate and improve their infrastructure and development operations.

Jason has also served as a technical reviewer for Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide , John Arundel , Packt Publishing