Hi Puppet-dev, I've been working, with a lot of help from some others, on a new project at http://puppet-analytics.org. It is very much in the experimental/development phase and I'm looking for feedback and help.
The goal of this project is to enable module authors and users greater visibility into module use. The architecture is modeled after Debian's popularity contest, where a program on the debian system reports to a central server about package use. This means that Puppet users can submit(through a json/http endpoint) 'hey I've deployed this version of stdlib!'. After a bunch of users have been reporting for a while, module maintainers can see the trends, identify which versions of the modules are being used, etc. Similarly users can see which modules are the most popular, which versions of those modules are the most popular, etc. There is an arbitrary tagging system built in that allows users to report that the deploy is being performed by their ci infrastructure, by a developer doing testing, or by an operator pushing code to production. This allows people viewing the data to see the 'true' numbers, unpolluted by ci systems or runaway webcrawlers. Reporting can be done with curl, or with a script. Right now there is a script and example curl to report to puppet analytics at: https://github.com/nibalizer/puppet-analytics-client. I think everyone's infrastructure looks a little different, so writing a generic tool to report to PA would be pretty hard. I'd like puppet-analytics-client to become a place to put scripts and tools to hit PA. I'm interested in your thoughts an opinions. Especially around the opt-in architecture. Would you be willing to report to PA? Do you think we would ever be able to get enough people reporting that the data would be significant? All the code is open source on github ( https://github.com/nibalizer/puppet-analytics). The website is hosted on digital ocean. I also have the mental model that people would report after every code change to their Puppet infrastructure, i.e. in the post-commit hook if using dynamic environments. Is this a model you agree with? Do you have a different idea? We have had a lot of conversations, on this list, and in person, around 'what are people doing with puppet?' I think a tool like this could really help us figure out which modules are being used the most often. Please note that PA is not nearly done yet. Much of the empty space I expect will be filled in with cool visualizations of the data. It is liable to break at any time, especially with actual users. One of the cool features that is currently in PR is the ability to have shields.io downloads tags come from PA and show up in the ReadMe's of our modules. Thanks everybody, Spencer -- Spencer Krum (619)-980-7820 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to puppet-dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/puppet-dev/CADt6FWPoK7N6pwPj4h6_84p-6WEwtz3N6zJbuJniRkHaMi9HBA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
