Seeing is knowledge – So said Socrates

Today’s infrastructure is incredibly complex. You are juggling a combination of traditional infrastructure, cloud-based resources, containers, and serverless functions. IT organisations aren’t simply a collection of physical machines and VMs anymore.

The movement from traditional infrastructure to the adoption of cloud and container technologies not only increases complexity but also introduces additional risk in terms of knowing what you have so that you know where you might be most at risk. Yet the tools meant to give you the bigger picture haven’t kept up and fall short of helping you identify risk and take action.

To know what you have – you have to see it!

Puppet Discovery will find all of your physical hosts on a network, vSphere VMs, and cloud instances in GCP, Azure, and AWS. As it finds compute hosts, Puppet Discovery will discover the resources that make up those hosts, including the live containers running on them, without requiring any agents be installed. Puppet Discovery can even tell you what composes your live containers, including the files that have changed since the container was launched.

While knowing what you have is exciting in itself, knowing what you have is insufficient. To do more, you need insights.

Gain insights

You can’t take action on what you don’t understand, even if you know it exists. For example, it’s not enough to know that an AWS instance exists. You also need to know what’s on it. What OS is it running? What software is installed and at what patch level? What applications are running on it? Is it being automated? Without this information, it’s difficult to know what can and should be done with the host, if anything.

Puppet Discovery helps you answer these questions. It doesn’t merely discover your hosts, it also helps you make sense of them. You can see what regions your cloud instances live in or the top images your containers were created from. Arguably most important, Puppet Discovery will show you what hosts do not have Puppet installed.

But even knowing and understanding what you have isn’t sufficient. You have to be in control.

Take action

Puppet Discovery connects the dots from what infrastructure resources exist to taking action on them. With Puppet Discovery, you have a single place to execute ad hoc tasks against any part of your infrastructure. For example, you can quickly install and configure Puppet Enterprise agents on hosts that are not currently automated so you truly get to pervasive automation. You can also control system services across all your Linux and Windows hosts.