How to Schedule Puppet Plans in Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Plans can be scheduled using the Puppet Enterprise console, Puppet Enterprise command line, or the Puppet Enterprise REST API. In this blog post we’ll walk through how to schedule a Puppet Plan in the Puppet Enterprise console.

Table of Contents

• How to Schedule a Puppet Plan from the Puppet Enterprise Console
• How to Review a Scheduled Puppet Plan

How to Schedule a Puppet Plan from the Puppet Enterprise Console

The Puppet Enterprise console provides a simple and easy way to schedule Puppet Plans. Puppet Plans are executed or run by the Puppet Enterprise Orchestrator, and an execution is referred to as a job.

Puppet Plans were added in the 2019.2 release of Puppet Enterprise, and Puppet Enterprise 2019.8.2 extends that functionality by adding support for scheduling Puppet Plans. This enables plans to be run at some point in the future or on a recurring schedule.

1. In the PE console, click on Plans under the Orchestration section of the side navigation menu.
2. Click the Run a plan button in the upper right corner.
3. Select the environment where you installed the module containing the plan you want to run from the Code environment drop-down.
4. Enter an optional description for the plan in the Job description textbox.
5. Select the Puppet Plan to run from the Plan drop-down menu.
6. Optional: To view information about required and optional parameters for the plan, select view plan metadata below the Plan textbox.
7. Provide values for the required parameters in the Plan parameters section. Optional parameters can be added by selecting the optional parameter from the parameter drop-down menu and clicking on the Add to plan button to the right of the parameter.
8. Select the Later radio button and provide the date or time
   • Start date: The date that the first run of the job will be executed.
   • Start time: The time of day that the job will be executed.
   • Time zone: The time zone that the job will be executed. The time can be specified as UTC or the current time detected in the web browser accessing the PE console.
   • Frequency: How often the plan should run. The frequency at which plans can be run are once, hourly, daily, weekly, every two weeks, and every four weeks.
9. Click the Run job button in the lower right corner to schedule the plan.

How to Review a Scheduled Puppet Plan

Once a plan has been scheduled, there is often the need to review information about that plan or other plans. The status of a scheduled plan can be reviewed in the Puppet Enterprise console.

1. In the PE console, click on Plans under the Orchestration section.
2. Click on the Scheduled Plans tab to view the plan jobs that have been scheduled.

You can view information about the job, like when the next time the job will run, how often the job will run, the Puppet plan that will be executed, the description provided when the job was scheduled, and who created the job.

Puppet Plans provide the ability to orchestrate complex processes. The ability to schedule Plans enables you to efficiently manage environments at scale.

Further Reading

• Learn about the best practices for writing plans.
• Enhance your Puppet Enterprise support workflow with pe_status_check.
• Run Puppet plans from the command line.

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