Configuring and tuning PuppetDB

After you've installed Puppet Enterprise, optimize it for your environment by configuring and tuning PuppetDB configuration as needed.

This page covers a few key topics, but additional settings and information about configuring PuppetDB is available in the PuppetDB configuration documentation. Be sure to check that the PuppetDB docs version you're looking at matches the one version of PuppetDB in your PE.

Configure agent run reports

By default, every time Puppet runs, the master generates agent run reports and submits them to PuppetDB. You can enable or disable this as needed.

To enable or disable agent run reports using the console:

  1. Click Classification, and in the PE Infrastructure group, select the PE Master group.
  2. On the Configuration tab, add the puppet_enterprise::profile::master::puppetdb class, select the report_processor_ensure parameter, and enter the value present to enable agent run reports or absent to disable agent run reports.
  3. Click Add parameter and commit changes.
  4. On the nodes hosting the master and console, run Puppet.

Configure command processing threads

The command_processing_threads setting defines how many command processing threads PuppetDB uses to sort incoming data. Each thread can process a single command at a time. The setting defaults to half the number of cores in your system.

To set the number of threads using pe.conf:

  1. Add the following code to your pe.conf file on your master and set your new parameter. 
    puppet_enterprise::puppetdb::command_processing_threads: <number of threads>
  2. Run puppet agent -t

Configure how long before PE stops managing deactivated nodes

Use the node-purge-ttl parameter to set the "length of time" value before PE automatically removes nodes that have been deactivated or expired. This also removes all facts, catalogs, and reports for the relevant nodes.

To change the amount of time before nodes are purged using the console:

  1. Click Classification, and in the PE Infrastructure group, select the PE Database group.
  2. On the Configuration tab, find the puppet_enterprise::profile::puppetdb class, find the node_purge_ttl parameter, and change its value to the desired amount of time.

    To change the unit of time, use the following suffixes:

    • d - days

    • h - hours

    • m - minutes

    • s - seconds

    • ms - milliseconds

      For example, to set the purge time to 14 days:

    puppet_enterprise::profile::puppetdb::node_purge_ttl: '14d'
  3. Click Add parameter and commit changes.
  4. On the nodes hosting the master and console, run Puppet.

Change the PuppetDB user password

The console uses a database user account to access its PostgreSQL database. Change it if it is compromised or to comply with security guidelines.

To change the password:

  1. Stop the pe-puppetdb puppet service by running puppet resource service pe-puppetdb ensure=stopped
  2. On the database server (which might or might not be the same as PuppetDB, depending on your deployment's architecture), use the PostgreSQL administration tool of your choice to change the user's password. With the standard PostgreSQL client, you can do this by running ALTER USER console PASSWORD '<new password>';
  3. Edit /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/conf.d/database.ini on the PuppetDB server and change the password: line under common or production , depending on your configuration, to contain the new password.
  4. Start the pe-puppetdb service on the console server by running puppet resource service pe-puppetdb ensure=running

Configure excluded facts

Use the facts_blacklist parameter exclude facts from being stored in the PuppetDB database.

To specify which facts you want to exclude using Hiera:

  1. Add the following to you default .yaml file and list the facts you want to exclude. For example, to exclude the facts system_uptime_example and mountpoints_example: 
puppet_enterprise::puppetdb::database_ini::facts_blacklist:
- 'system_uptime_example'
- 'mountpoints_example'
  1. To compile changes, run puppet agent -t