Puppet dashboard monitor via puppet

Question

Did anyone else find it strange that puppet labs recommends tools like monit to monitor the dashboard worker processes?

http://docs.puppetlabs.com/dashboard/manual/1.2/bootstrapping.html

Monitoring the Monitor For additional reliability, you might want to use a standard service monitoring tool like god, monit, or runit to supervise the script/delayed_job monitor. You can also look into other ways to run delayed_job workers, as it’s becoming a fairly standard component in the Rails world.

Seems to me like in a puppet environment this would be best managed by puppet! Only I suppose there is no process resource type? Seems like all the process management in puppet revolves around proper services.

That said is there a way to manage the dashboard worker processes via puppet or should I start looking into monit?

Puppet agent would just check to see if the dashboard worker processes are running and if not restart them. — quickshiftin, Sep 17 '13 at 16:38
Hmm, that's a good point, but that argument is there with anything puppet-managed. Take apache for example, is the puppet recommendation to install monit for every process you want to keep an eye on? Or is the monit recommendation only for 'extra special' things like the dashboard? — quickshiftin, Sep 17 '13 at 16:48
I think the point is that puppet is not a _monitoring_ system. — Michael Hampton, Sep 17 '13 at 16:50
How did you install dashboard? The package from the Puppet Labs repo creates a service named `puppet-dashboard-workers` that you can point a `service` resource at. — Shane Madden, Sep 17 '13 at 16:51
@ShaneMadden thanks for this, exactly what I was looking for! — quickshiftin, Sep 17 '13 at 16:52

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 17 '13 at 17:18

Keeping the delayed workers alive through a puppet resource should be able to be achieved with a service resource on the puppet-dashboard-workers service, which may be in place from a package install (or may need to be set up manually).

This is probably fine for something like this where it's not the end of the world if they're not running for a bit, but I'd definitely caution against trying to use the agent to keep services running that are actually important -- Puppet's not built as a monitoring system.

Monit is perfect for this task. – ewwhite Sep 17 '13 at 17:53 — ewwhite, Sep 17 '13 at 17:53

Puppet dashboard monitor via puppet

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