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Getting support

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Puppet Enterprise 2019.0

  1. Puppet Enterprise support life cycle
    1. Open source tools and libraries
  2. The customer support portal
    1. Puppet Enterprise support script
  3. Getting support from the Puppet community

You can get commercial support for versions of PE in mainstream and extended support. You can also get support from our user community.

Puppet Enterprise support life cycle

Some of our releases have long term support (LTS); others have short term support (STS). For each release, there are three phases of product support: Mainstream support, Extended support, and End of Life (EOL).

For full information about types of releases, support phases and dates for each release, frequency of releases, and recommendations for upgrading, see the Puppet Enterprise support lifecycle page.

If the latest release with the most up-to-date features is right for you, Download, try, or upgrade Puppet Enterprise. Alternatively, download an older supported release from Previous releases.

Open source tools and libraries

PE uses open source tools and libraries. We use both externally maintained components (such as Ruby, PostgreSQL, and the JVM) and also projects which we own and maintain (such as Facter, Puppet agent, Puppet Server, and PuppetDB.)

Projects which we own and maintain are "upstream" of our commercial releases. Our open source projects move faster and have shorter support life cycles than PE. We may discontinue updates to our open source platform components before their commercial EOL dates. We vet upstream security and feature releases and update supported versions according to customer demand and our Security policy.

The customer support portal

We provide responsive, dependable, quality support to resolve any issues regarding the installation, operation, and use of Puppet Enterprise (PE).

There are two levels of commercial support plans for PE: Standard and Premium. Both allow you to report your support issues to our confidential customer support portal. When you purchase PE, you'll receive an account and log-on for the portal, which includes access to our knowledge base.

Puppet Enterprise support script

When seeking support, you might be asked to run an information-gathering support script. This script collects a large amount of system information, compresses it, and prints the location of the zipped tarball when it finishes running.

The script is provided by the pe_support_script module bundled with the installer. Running the command executes a single bash script which can be found at: /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/cache/lib/puppet_x/puppetlabs/support_script/v1/puppet-enterprise-support.sh

Run the support script on the command line of any PE node running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems with the command: /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet enterprise support.

Use these options when you run the support script to modify the output:

OptionDescription
--render-as <FORMAT> Specifies what rendering format to use.
--verbose Logs verbosely.
--debug Logs debug information.
--classifier Collects classification data.
--dir <DIRECTORY> Specifies where to save the support script's resulting tarball.
--ticket <NUMBER> Specifies a support ticket number for record-keeping purposes.
--encrypt Encrypts the support script's resulting tarball with GnuPG encryption.
Note: You must have GPG or GPG2 available in your PATH in order to encrypt the tarball.
--log-age Specifies how many days worth of logs the support script collects. Valid values are positive integers or all to collect all logs, up to 1 GB per log.

Information collected by the support script

The support script collects a large amount of system information that can help our Support team troubleshoot issues.

  • iptables info: Is it loaded? What are the inbound and outbound rules for both IPv4 and IPv6?
  • Facter output generated by puppet facts find
  • SELinux status
  • The amount of free disk and memory on the system
  • hostname info: /etc/hosts and the output of hostname --fqdn
  • List of established connections from netstat
  • The output from ifconfig
  • The umask of the system
  • NTP configuration: what servers are available, the offset from them
  • OS and kernel info from uname -a and lsb_release -a (if installed)

  • System package manager configuration files

  • The state of installed PE packages as reported by the system package manager
  • a list of Ruby gems installed by /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/bin/gem and /opt/puppetlabs/puppetserver/bin/gem
  • the current process list
  • a listing of Puppet certs
  • a listing of all services and their state (such as running/stopped, enabled/disabled)
  • current environment variables
  • whether the Puppet master is reachable
  • a list of all Puppet modules on the system
  • the output of puppet module changes (shows if any modules installed by PE have been modified)
  • a listing (no content) of the files in:
    • /opt/puppetlabs
    • /var/log/puppetlabs
    • /var/opt/lib
  • reports the size of the PostgreSQL databases and relations
  • PE PostgreSQL configuration from:
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/9.6/data
    • the output of SELECT * FROM pg_settings;
    • the output of SELECT * FROM pg_stat_activity;
  • The configuration used by PE RBAC to connect with a directory service, excluding sensitive information such as passwords
  • r10k information:
    • configuration files
    • output of r10k deploy display -p --detail
  • The amount of disk space used by Code Manager
  • the output from PE status API endpoints
  • output from the PuppetDB /summary-stats endpoint, which provides non-identifying database statistics for troubleshooting
  • a list of active nodes from PuppetDB
  • a list of active nodes from Orchestration Services
  • a histogram of agent run start times from PuppetDB which is used to detect thundering herds
  • output from the Puppet Server /environments endpoint, which lists available directory environments and module search paths
  • the environment.conf and hiera.yaml configuration files from each environment

It also copies the following files:

  • system logs

  • output from the dmesg command

  • the contents of /etc/puppetlabs/ (being careful to avoid sensitive files, such as modules, manifests, and ssl certs)
  • configuration files for PE services located under /etc/sysconfig or /etc/default and /etc/puppetlabs.
  • the contents of /var/log/puppetlabs/

  • upgrade log files from /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/

  • the contents of /opt/puppetlabs/puppet/cache/state/
  • the contents of /opt/puppetlabs/pe_metric_curl_cron_jobs or /opt/puppetlabs/puppet-metrics-collector, if present
  • the contents of /etc/resolv.conf
  • the contents /etc/nsswitch.conf
  • the contents of /etc/hosts

Getting support from the Puppet community

As a Puppet Enterprise customer you are more than welcome to participate in our large and helpful open source community as well as report issues against the open source project.

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