What's the simplest way of determining if you have any inactive/offline puppet clients?

I've been querying the heck out of puppetdb and got nothing. There must be a fact, like 'last checkin' or something...right?

I do this

old_timestamp=$(date -u -d '-7 days' -Isec)
/opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet-query "nodes[certname]{catalog_timestamp < \"$old_timestamp\"}" | jq -r '.[].certname'

also just for awareness https://voxpupuli.org/docs/pql_queries/ is handy in general

Thanks - so I've installed the cli tools and jq, but I'm getting an error:

old_timestamp=$(date -u -d '-7 days' -Isec)
/opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet-query "nodes[certname]{catalog_timestamp < \"$old_timestamp\"}" | jq -r '.[].certname'

FATAL: Last PuppetDB API response code.

does puppet query work to begin with?

does puppet query work to begin with?

puppet query "nodes{}"

nope, same thing.

guess my cli tools is broke

yep

aight, I think I found the problem. Looks like I need to mkdir /etc/puppetlabs/client-tools/, then create a puppetdb.conf with this in it -

{
  "puppetdb": {
    "server_urls": "https://<PUPPETDB_HOST>:8081",
    "cacert": "/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl/certs/ca.pem",
    "cert": "/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl/certs/<WORKSTATION_HOST>.pem",
    "key": "/etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl/private_keys/<WORKSTATION_HOST>.pem"
  }
}

YUS! It worked! LOL

Well, puppet query works now, but I still cannot see that I do indeed have a puppet client that has been powered down for a couple of days. The puppetdb dashboard on 8080 still shows 3 active nodes, zero inactive, and my query also is not returning anything that I can use that will let tell me when a client is down. I must be missing something.

and yes, I changed my variable - ld_timestamp=$(date -u -d '-7 days' -Isec)

ld_timestamp=$(date -u -d '-1 days' -Isec)

that means you get data from those nodes that you think are 'inactive'

check output of

puppet query "nodes{}"

it should show various timestamps

roger, that gives me my puppet server, and two clients (pupcli_one, pupcli_two)

yea, both clients have timestamps from yesterday.

be great if I could find any that have been down for, say, over two hours. Think I'll fiddle with that now.

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[SOLVED]: CI started failing with following

pdk

error while running tests. Any ideas?

[2023-03-16T15:39:30.859Z] + /opt/puppetlabs/pdk/bin/pdk test unit --format=junit:report.xml --format=text:stdout --puppet-version 7
[2023-03-16T15:39:31.110Z] pdk (WARN): This module is compatible with an older version of PDK. Run `pdk update` to update it to your version of PDK.
[2023-03-16T15:39:31.110Z] pdk (INFO): Using Ruby 2.7.7
[2023-03-16T15:39:31.110Z] pdk (INFO): Using Puppet 7.23.0
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] pdk (ERROR): The spec_clean rake task failed with the following error(s):
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] 
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] rake aborted!
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] LoadError: cannot load such file -- puppet_blacksmith/rake_tasks
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] /data/jenkins/workspace/puppet_control_qa/site/profiles/Rakefile:7:in `require'
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] /data/jenkins/workspace/puppet_control_qa/site/profiles/Rakefile:7:in `<top (required)>'
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] /opt/puppetlabs/pdk/share/cache/ruby/2.7.0/gems/rake-13.0.6/exe/rake:27:in `<top (required)>'
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] (See full trace by running task with --trace)
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] 
[2023-03-16T15:39:39.138Z] pdk (FATAL): Failed to clean up after running unit tests

For puppetdb, is a list of strings or converting the list to a comma separated string better for storage (number of facts/string lengths etc)

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Thank you @vchepkov @natemccurdy... the push to answer the questions led me to figure things out! It turns out the schedule tag in a virtual resource wasn't actually a metaparameter, but a normal parameter. I must have made a typo when I was originally trying to use it. I have decoded (and documented) the spaghetti code left by a predecessor. Basically, hiera sets an array, a proftpd class picks it up and passes to to a passwd class (in a different module, only used by the proftpd class!), which realizes the virtual resource. I suspect metaparameters are never really enforced by defined resources, but by the code that implements them. In this case, all it did was pass the schedule parameter on to the augeas resource which did follow the schedule tag, but all the cpu intensive work done before is frequently not used. I will be rewriting this to be more efficient when I migrate it to a new puppet master. Thanks again!

[SOLVED] @natemccurdy actually, not a class but a resource. Right now passwords for a ftp user are autogenerated via the schedule metaparameter, but that seems to only effect the actual modification of the passwd file. A lot of time is spent generating the random password that won't be used because the schedule isn't triggered. Trying to improve the performance of a class that I'm not totally up to speed on (person who created it, is long gone)

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