Puppet Enterprise Reviews

I like how easy it is to track changes on machines. Also the ability to go back and look at previous reports to see what changes were made during previous puppet runs is really great. Further, the number of modules written for Puppet by third parties show it's maturity in the landscape of configuration management software.

I wish that some of the puppet supported modules would continue support (rather than losing support as they start to be picked up by other vendors). Also, Puppet Enterprise is pretty expensive compared to some alternatives.

Puppet Enterprise is more expensive than other options. It has good software support support. It also has many modules both written and supported by Puppetlabs as well as modules written by third party companies and individuals. I would recommend Puppet Enterprise to individuals or companies that needed to keep a fleet of machines (whether it be hundreds of identical machines or a couple dozen similar machines) configuration settings consistent over time.

We use it to track changes across our fleet of machines and to ensure consistency across our entire environment and datacenters. We have found Puppet Enterprise to be excellent in getting from an unpuppetized environment to close to 100% penetration.

The best thing I like about using puppet is that it reduces the amount of time spent building and deploying software. A team of 3 can do the work of a team of 8 if they properly use puppet.

It is sometimes very hard to move between the community edition and Enterprise edition. Choose carefully when your first starting out.

I would recommend using Puppet just for the community support. The puppet forge has almost any module you can think of to accomplish your tasks. Makes puppet a great product.

We use puppet to deploy and configure all of our infrastructures. It allows us to have a rebuildable stack on any platform (aws, rackspace, data center, etc.)

Puppet enterprise has phenomenal services that allow you to easily bring your infrastracture from a simple CI pipeline to a CD pipeline with the orchestrator and code manager. It's awesome to have PR's that get merged into our production branch make their way from source control all the way to our production nodes without any intervention. It's a huge devops enabler.

The thing i dislike about puppet enterprise is they lack examples of how people in big companies are using puppet enterprise in an automated fashion. Their docs just show and explain examples using clickops in the PE console.

Read the documentation and also read the paper that discusses the differences between puppet and chef posted on puppets website. This will really help shed some light on the true differences and show where puppet really shines.

We are solving the problem of being able to reduce risk in making changes to infrastructure along with preventing lost knowledge from employeers who leave or even tribal knowledge by supporting infrastructure as code practices.

Simple language to design modules.Less work to document my modules, the code is the documentation. Many modules or template available for faster deployment of new features. I use the API to connect to other automation tools. Also usable to deploy settings an application to a local machine without a puppet sever. Quick deployment of test environments. One written modules are portable to other systems and can be shared with the community. Very good community support.

The Puppet Enterprise Dashborad is not my favorite tool. There are simpler and faster ways to manage Puppet. For this i wrote my own Dashboard and use the API. Only one usable IDE to design puppet modules.

Provisioning of new VMs and manage all OS features. Installing predefined environments in less then a half hour instead of do this in 2 days manually. Manage Monitoring Tools to add or remove VMs automatically.

The flexibility and power of PE is great. There are many ways to fit it into an existing infrastructure in ways that work best for different organizations who may have different stages of devops and configuration management objectives in general.

It can be difficult for people from the more "ops" side of the organization, with a more traditional background to adopt and sometimes even see all of the advantages. This improves with exposure to the concepts and product.

Focus on helping staff and users understand and see the value

Consistent deployments of many similar/identical systems that would be hard to confirm/enforce through non-automated methods. Once the target state policy is written and applied, the task of maintaining a large and diverse installation is greatly improved.

The ease of use, quality support, and continued, aggressive, development cycle are some of the strongest attributes that PE offers.

There could be a lot more functionality built into the web interface. What you can do is great, but a lot is missing, for example, renewing the certificate that PE UI uses isn't as trivial as it should be.

continue to add features to the web UI

Primary benefit right now is orchestrate Linux patching

The puppet forge is an amazing resource. Being able to find modules for just about every product is awesome. The ease of mirroring in modules for a quick test is great. The new Tasks feature is a great addition. I was very disappointed when the mcollective interface was removed, I found that quite useful, but it seems that Tasks are going to be a great addition.

I wish the report page in the console was more detailed. It's difficult to find one single resource in the report. As an example looking at the file resources you may have hundreds of resources and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to filter that quickly.

Be sure to look to the forge first. Don't assume that you are the first person to need a module. You can likely find a module that gives you exactly what you need, or a great base to start from.

Being able to show auditors a collection of code that satisfies their needs is great. Shifting from deep troubleshooting sessions to being able to simply deploy new systems to a known good state quickly is starting to make things much simpler for the Ops team.

Being able to manage thousands of servers across multiple datacenters is a hard task, but getting all ours servers into a managed rebuildable state has been infinitely easier with Puppet.

Puppet Enterprise is very resource heavy. Hiera is management is still a mess. Module management in difficult across a large organization, even with things like r10k.

This is better than CFengine and Chef

We moved over from CFEngine as our scale increased. Puppet has helped a lot.

I came from a development background when I went in to operations. I found the way of working in operations to be lacking with regards to version management and staging, which to me are the main things Puppet brings to ops. There are several other tools that do the same, but the community participation for Puppet is excellent and Puppet has a pretty decent presence on the Windows platform. So for me there hasn't been a need to look any further.

Puppet is pretty much geared towards legacy infrastructure, which for me is anything that isn't cloud native. For the forseeable future we're stuck with that and a tool like Puppet, to me, is indispensable. But I'd rather be making a greater push towards cloud native.

You won't go wrong with Puppet Enterprise, and it offers a solid foundation for your efforts towards Infrastructure as Code.

As said, we're bringing al of our server infrastructure under Puppet. This allows us better insight into our infra, and better control of our infra. Through desired state we neigh eliminate configuration drift, which is a great help in being in control.

The puppet community it's really big and the puppet forge (used to share modules) has thousands of modules. This is extremely helpful, since there's is a big chance the automation you need it's already at forge.

Puppet Enterprise is also a great tool, it really simplify Puppet administration and architecture, for example, the client installation it's just a curl call, really simple.

The puppet Infrastructure it's complex, you will need some time to setup it properly and to figure out how it works.

Puppet don't read your code from top to bottom like programming languages. This is a little bit awkward and confuse when you start writing Puppet code.

If you are not a Puppet open source user, I consider trying it first. Only after that you will realize the benefits of Puppet Enterprise.

We are using Puppet as the primary tool for provisioning database servers, mainly Oracle and DB2. Before puppet this job was done in 2 or 3 business hours, now it's just 5 minutes.

Working for a data company, we're always pushing the envelope on data visualizations. We love Reflect's responsiveness in the data management tools that let us push evolutionary changes for specific customers at a moment's notice.

We would love more hosted solutions that don't need ANY engineering on our side.

We use the Reflect tools and platform to reduce the sales cycle for big enterprises.

I am impressed by what Puppet can do. It can install and configure software quickly. It is a simple push to multiple servers and the servers are configured.

The main issue that I have with it is that I need to have a puppet agent installed on each server. I also would like to use this to push deployments of wars and html pages. However, it is not a small feat to accomplish. To deploy to my environments, I had to learn Ruby to get the deployments to deploy in a fashion which I could verify. I can get more details if needed.

I am using Puppet to install Tomcat and Apache and to deploy java applications and static web pages. The benefit is that I can push one configuration out and all the servers are identical.

Stable Releases, Feature delivery each release, Forge is active, Comparable to other products in the market, proven use case at large companies.

Too many commands focus on running locally on the enterprise server. Because the Enterprise server can only run on RHEL/CentOS it deters usages from other OS teams. A competitor product, Chef, works around this by offering a quality client-side binary, knife, and cloud/saas version. The cloud might be Linux only, the enterprise is still a heterogeneous operating system environment.

Release Management/Configuration Mangement for ITLE. Configure/Monitor/Release/Preprod/Create for CICD.

The scope of possibilities it has and the growth in managing different technologies.

Not being too friendly in managing networking devices.

It is really useful tool once you get accustomed to it. Ease of deployment is one of its best factors

Ease of deployment on several range of systems with simple code.

It is straightforward, allows a versatile grouping of coded manifests to build a variety of not only server tiers, but also a variety of server tiers inside a variety of datacenters or environments. It is centralized, works for linux and windows, and makes managing large numbers of servers a snap.

The puppetmaster console is extremely buggy and should be rewritten from the ground up. It also has no way to specify particular roles for users, in the case that multiple applications are managed from the console, all users either have full admin rights over all application classifications, read-only rights, or no rights at all.

There is also a steep learning curve regarding heiradata and its integration with modules vs. profiles.

Make use of the training resources available at Puppet Labs' site.

I work with more than 7 large datacenters, all hosting similar if not identical applications, but with very diverse configuration requirements.

Puppet Enterprise has assisted me in normalizing configuration, simplifying deployment, and making configuration differences a simple issue.

It supports ruby and yaml which are easy to code and maintain. Licensing and GUI is also user-friendly.

Viewing puppet agent run log in debug mode in the GUI is extremely tedious to scroll through.

Middleware Service, Authentication Services, Code Deployment & S/W Management.

Global point of view of your whole infrastructure. Reports.

I feel like upgrade path is going too fast. From version 3.8 to 4.x, and from 4.x to 5.x.

Management of a whole online supermarket infrastructure, with their development and production environments.

Simple scripting to build worksflows. Works with almost any software package with an API.

Not really a ding but another totally new software package to learn as it is quickly infiltrating our entire enterprise. :)

Well, specifically, I am a member of our distributed database team so my view into puppet is a very specific use. We are leveraging it to deploy software packages from Oracle primarily at the moment but it will surely start using it for MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. It allows us to go more hands off when installing software and patches in a consistent manner.

Idem potency, and open source community like puppet forge

As infra grows, the time takes to agents to completes the run also taking time

Security compliance and autdit

It enforces states and is extremely reliable for that. It is the means by which we have treated servers as livestock rather than pets.

It's not easy to learn, and is way more "Dev" than it is "Ops." Not a tool easy for Systems Administrators to adopt, and much of the functionality has been superseded by the (free) ansible, except for the enforcement of states.

We used Puppet 3, but our entire model broke with the advent of Puppet 4. After the disaster of trying to transition everything over, me made the decision to retire Puppet over time.

Puppet Enterprise makes its easy to get rolling. For me, I didn't have the time to piece together all the moving, opensource pieces. This is well done, and allowed me to get up and running in a short about of time.

While you can dig into the under-covers of the language if you want (Ruby), you don't have to. Their "manifest" language is easy to get your head around. I recommend obtaining their Learning VM and playing around with the tech locally.

The big bonus for me is I needed to quickly manage multiple clusters of Elasticsearch and standardize config across all. When I learned that their forge repo had a module already built for it I jumped right in and never looked back. I can now quickly scale and add / modify clusters -- without worrying about setup. I just tell puppet to do it. It's a HUGE time saver and I highly recommend.

I am just starting to scratch the surface here, but their forge contains many opportunities for you to standardize your server configs across your enterprise using pre-built modules that you can tap into. Other tech out there, you have to learn EVERYTHING from scratch. Not with puppet. I am mostly utilizing it on the linux side of the house, but there are plenty of use cases for Windows too. Using their chocolatey module from the community forge, you can "package install" IIS, .net frameworks, and a ton of other roles, features, and software packages -- already ready to go.

I am also able to declare groups of manifests for different environments -- spanning across multiple nodes. I can declare similar or unique configs across the enterprise. So far DEV I have a set, Testing a set, etc. I can also finally manage user accounts in one place. And in my case it's admins - sudoers. But what a relief, knowing I can roll out new admin accounts quickly.

Don't pass up PE. It's very worth it!

Spawning from opensource -- they are in the process of getting their support streamlined for the Enterprise side of the house. So at times, my support experience with them has been a little shaky. However, not to say that it's bad.. it's just they have room to grow right now. The good thing is they are getting much better at it, and are listening to me as a customer. The community is also vibrant so that helps lift the burden a bit and I will also echo that their docs and online examples are good. In summary they are up-ramping their enterprise support and getting better as we go along.

Give it a chance, as it's easy to jump into. Check out their Learning VM first. Learning overhead here was minimal as their pre-buillt modules along with the enteprise web console help get you up and running quickly.

I have been able to get up and running with managing multiple, mission critical Elasticsearch clusters quickly. My configs are standardized -- I can quickly make changes -- and setup new clusters. That was my main purpose for jumping in. And I have only scratched the surface with it.

My plans are to scale it out to not only linux, but to Windows as well. With support for the chocolatey packaging system, I can build out and standardize my app server configs, roles and features.

Ultimately this will put me in a good place to eventually look at containerization. Which we all know is the future. Config standardization / automation leans towards things like Docker and more. And the Puppet folks are not ignoring those other technologies.

It is a best configuration management tool.to automate vm builds and help keep them consistent

It takes good amount of work to implement and

We used puppet to automate our configuration management system,.It helped us to improve configuration management, release new features to market more frequently

The easy way of doing performing Automation. One of the fastest and Agile way to get the Result which makes your End Customer Satisfied. The Reliable workflows gives the continuous output to make the system more Robust.

The Best thing is probably the Reporting part. It gives us clear visibility and transparent Report to trace who, what, when.

More difficult to distribute to nodes, need pulp, git or other distribution technique

Yes will Recommend

Its complete Automation of Building the Blades in ESXi by Puppet - Razor

Puppet Enterprise helped me, automating regular tasks in our environment. It has speeded up our regular administrative tasks.

It is Ruby oriented, I rather had it Python based.

Automating our Linux installation environment; customers can order there required system servers, with there middelware application server.

I like puppet has a ability to manage servers with limited configs

Learning curve is bad...

There is a limit on file size that you can sync with puppet. We have to use rsync to bypass that.

We use puppet to do deployment

Automation is fluid the customizable command allow for a consistent delivery

Requires an in-depth learning curve. Grab your books and a cup of Joe.

Puppet and Jenkins will keep your Systems humming

Automating server maintenance and release cycles

Support on supported modules has been fantastic!

Learning to use the Ruby DSL language and its constraints to develop modules took some getting used to. Had to depend on the standard library to do a lot of heavy lifting with the basic objects like arrays.

The need for immutable infrastructure is obvious, and any configuration management solution is helpful in that regard, especially puppet enterprise.

The overall technology worked well. The dashboard was nice as well.

The price. We used open source puppet for our lab environment and ultimately the benefits of enterprise did not justify the costs.

We were initially trying to do configuration management and automation. We have since moved on to using it primarily for configuration management only while utilizing ansible and other technologies for automation.

Puppet is good at maintaining configuration files.

It just doesn't not have good enough reporting features or abilities to tie into our ticketing system.

Look at blade logic and see the difference in youregards product and add the missing features and you will a very strong competitive tool

Actually nothing we could not do with other existing systems.

The flexibility to create recipe to orchestrate our provisioning.

It can becomes too much flexible and create confusion but this is more a problem from the architect then the product itself.

If you know Ruby from intermediaire-to-expert and you're looking to orchestrate your provisionning; Puppet is definitely a must to have.

Deploying large environment of VMs and pre-installations of tools.

Easy to read and write code, support, online documentation and references

Not much! We had some hurdles when upgrading from older versions and updating our code but overall it was smooth.

Automation first and foremost, Puppet helps us quickly and easily manage our systems configs.

Ease of use, automation and the capabilities to drive consistency and speed to configurable controls

Nothing, except this survey form that requires me to use 40 characters to just say nothing

Automating repetitive tasks

The ease of use for my development teams and the consistency it provides

Nothing really, it fits really well into our tool chain.

Easy to learn and provides consistent configuration.

Automation for baseline software configuration of servers.

Higher learning curve to fully utilize potential.

Standardization of baseline software configuration for server deployment.