Getting support

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 might 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.

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 receive an account and log-on for the portal, which includes access to our knowledge base.

Note: We use the term "standard installation" to refer to a PE installation of up to 4,000 nodes. A Standard Support Plan is not limited to this installation type, however. Standard here refers to the support level, not the size of the PE installation.

Puppet metrics collector

The Puppet metrics collector can help troubleshoot performance issues with PE components.

Puppet Professional Services and Support use and recommend the tool to help optimize PE installations.

The Puppet metrics collector is available from the Forge at https://forge.puppet.com/puppetlabs/puppet_metrics_collector.

PE 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 and PE diagnostics, compresses the data, 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 support script

Run the support script on the command line of your PE master or any agent 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:

Option Description
--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.

The next iteration of the support script, version 3, is currently under development and may be selected by running /opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet enterprise support --v3. This new version of the support script has more options, which can be used in addition to the list in the table above.

Option Description
--v3 Activate version 3 of the support script. This option is required in order to use any other option listed in this table.
--list List diagnostics that may be enabled or disabled. Diagnostics labeled "opt-in" must be explicitly enabled. All others are enabled by default.
--enable <LIST> A comma-separated list of diagnostic names to enable. Use the --list option to print available names. The --enable option must be used to activate diagnostics marked as "opt-in."
--disable <LIST> A comma-separated list of diagnostic names to enable. Use the --list option to print available names.
--only <LIST> A comma-separated list of diagnostic names to enable. All other diagnostics will be disabled. Use the --list option to print available names.
--upload Upload the output tarball to Puppet Support via SFTP. Requires the --ticket <NUMBER> option to be used.
--upload_disable_host_key_check Disable SFTP host key checking. See Support article KB#0305 for a list of current host key values.
--upload_user <USER> Specify a SFTP user to use when uploading. If not specified, a shared write-only account will be used.
--upload_key <FILE> Specify a SFTP key to use with --upload_user.
Here are some examples of using the version 3 flags when running the support script:
# Collect diagnostics for just Puppet and Puppet Server
/opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet enterprise support --v3 --only puppet,puppetserver

# Enable collection of PE classification
/opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet enterprise support --v3 --enable pe.console.classifier-groups

# Disable collection of system logs, upload result to Puppet
/opt/puppetlabs/bin/puppet enterprise support --v3 --disable system.logs --upload --ticket 12345

Descriptions of diagnostics that can be selected using the --enable, --disable, and --only flags are found in the next section.

Information collected by the support script

The following sections describe the information collected by version 1 and version 3 of the support script.

base-status

The base-status check collects basic diagnostics about the PE installation. This check is unique in that it is always enabled and is not affected by the --disable or --only flags.

Information collected by the base-status check:

  • The version of the support script that is running, the Puppet ticket number, if supplied, and the time at which the script was run.

system

The checks in the system scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to the operating system.

Information collected by the system.config check:

  • A copy of /etc/hosts

  • A copy of /etc/nsswitch.conf

  • A copy of /etc/resolv.conf

  • Configuration for the apt, yum, and dnf package managers

  • The operating system version

  • The umask in effect

  • The status of SELinux

  • A list of configured network interfaces

  • A list of configured firewall rules

  • A list of loaded firewall kernel modules

Information collected by the system.logs check:

  • A copy of the system log (syslog)

  • A copy of the kernel log (dmesg)

Information collected by the system.status check:

  • Values of variables set in the environment

  • A list of running processes

  • A list of enabled services

  • The uptime of the system

  • A list of established network connections

  • NTP status

  • The IP address and hostname of the node running the script, according to DNS

  • Disk usage

  • RAM usage

puppet

The checks in the puppet scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to the Puppet agent services.

Information collected by the puppet.config check:

  • Facter configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/facter/facter.conf
  • Puppet configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/device.conf

    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/hiera.yaml

    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/puppet.conf
  • PXP agent configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/pxp-agent/modules/
    • /etc/puppetlabs/pxp-agent/pxp-agent.conf
Information collected by the puppet.logs check:
  • Puppet log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/puppet
  • JournalD logs for the puppet service
  • PXP agent log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/puppet
  • JournalD logs for the pxp-agent service
Information collected by the puppet.status check:
  • facter -p output and debug-level messages
  • A list of Ruby gems installed for use by Puppet
  • Ping output for the Puppet Server the agent is configured to use
  • A copy of the following files and directories from the Puppet statedir:
    • classes.txt
    • graphs/
    • last_run_summary.yaml
  • A listing of metadata (name, size, etc.) of files present in the following directories:
    • /etc/puppetlabs
    • /var/log/puppetlabs
    • /opt/puppetlabs
  • A listing of Puppet and PE packages installed on the system along with verification output for each

puppetserver

The checks in the puppetserver scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to the Puppet Server service.

Information collected by the puppetserver.config check:
  • Puppet Server configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/code/hiera.yaml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/auth.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/autosign.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/classfier.yaml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/fileserver.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/hiera.yaml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/puppet.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/puppetdb.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/routes.yaml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/bootstrap.cfg
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/code-manager-request-logging.xml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/conf.d/
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/logback.xml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/request-logging.xml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/r10k/r10k.yaml
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/code-manager/r10k.yaml
Information collected by the puppetserver.logs check:
  • Puppet Server log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/puppetserver/
  • JournalD logs for the pe-puppetserver service
  • r10k log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/r10k/
Information collected by the puppetserver.metrics check:
  • Data stored in /opt/puppetlabs/puppet-metrics-collector/puppetserver
Information collected by the puppetserver.status check:

  • A list of certificates issued by the Puppet CA

  • A list of Ruby gems installed for use by Puppet Server

  • Output from the status/v1/services API

  • Output from the puppet/v3/environment_modules API

  • Output from the puppet/v3/environments API

  • environment.conf and hiera.yaml files from each Puppet code environment

  • The disk space used by Code Manager cache, storage, client, and staging directories

  • The disk space used by the server's File Bucket

  • The output of r10k deploy display

puppetdb

The checks in the puppetdb scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to the PuppetDB service.

Information collected by the puppetdb.config check:
  • Configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/bootstrap.cfg
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/certificate-whitelist
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/conf.d/
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/logback.xml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppetdb/request-logging.xml
Information collected by the puppetdb.logs check:
  • PuppetDB log files: /var/log/puppetlabs/puppetdb
  • JournalD logs for the pe-puppetdb service
Information collected by the puppetdb.metrics check:
  • Data stored in /opt/puppetlabs/puppet-metrics-collector/puppetdb
Information collected by the puppetdb.status check:
  • Output from the status/v1/services API
  • Output from the pdb/admin/v1/summary-stats API
  • A list of active certnames from the PQL query nodes[certname] {deactivated is null and expired is null}
pe

The checks in the pe scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to Puppet Enterprise services.

Information collected by the pe.config check:
  • Installer configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/enterprise/conf.d/
    • /etc/puppetlabs/enterprise/hiera.yaml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/installer/answers.install
  • PE client tools configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/client-tools/orchestrator.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/client-tools/puppet-access.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/client-tools/puppet-code.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/client-tools/puppetdb.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/client-tools/services.conf
Information collected by the pe.logs check:
  • PE installer log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/installer/
  • PE backup and restore log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/pe-backup-tools/
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/puppet_infra_recover_config_cron.log
Information collected by the pe.status check:
  • Output from puppet infra status
  • Current tuning settings from puppet infra tune
  • Recommended tuning settings from puppet infra tune
This check is disabled by default. Information collected by the pe.file-sync check when activated by the --enable option:
  • Puppet manifests and other content from /etc/puppetlabs/code-staging/
  • Puppet manifests and other content stored in Git repos under /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/puppetserver/filesync

pe.console

The checks in the pe.console scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to the Puppet Enterprise console service.

Information collected by the pe.console.config check:
  • Configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/console-services/bootstrap.cfg
    • /etc/puppetlabs/console-services/conf.d/
    • /etc/puppetlabs/console-services/logback.xml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/console-services/rbac-certificate-whitelist
    • /etc/puppetlabs/console-services/request-logging.xml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/nginx/conf.d/
    • /etc/puppetlabs/nginx/nginx.conf
Information collected by the pe.console.logs check:
  • Console log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/console-services/
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/nginx/
  • JournalD logs for the pe-puppetdb and pe-nginx services
Information collected by the pe.console.status check:
  • Output from the /status/v1/services API
  • Directory service connection configuration, with passwords removed
This check is disabled by default. Information collected by the pe.console.classifier-groups check when activated by the --enable option:
  • All classification data provided by the /v1/groups API endpoint

pe.orchestration

The checks in the pe.orchestration scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to the Puppet Enterprise orchestration services.

Information collected by the pe.orchestration.config check:
  • ACE server configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ace-server/conf.d/
  • Bolt server configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/bolt-server/conf.d/
  • Orchestration service configuration files:
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/bootstrap.cfg
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/analytics.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/auth.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/global.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/inventory.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/metrics.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/orchestrator.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/pcp-broker.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/web-routes.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/conf.d/webserver.conf
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/logback.xml
    • /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/orchestration-services/request-logging.xml
Information collected by the pe.orchestration.logs check:
  • ACE server log files: /var/log/puppetlabs/ace-server/
  • JournalD logs for the pe-ace-server service
  • Bolt server log files: /var/log/puppetlabs/bolt-server/
  • JournalD logs for the pe-bolt-server service
  • Orchestrator log files: /var/log/puppetlabs/orchestration-services/
  • JournalD logs for the pe-orchestration-services service
Information collected by the pe.orchestration.metrics check:
  • Data stored in /opt/puppetlabs/puppet-metrics-collector/orchestrator/
Information collected by the pe.orchestration.status check:
  • Output from the /status/v1/services API

pe.postgres

The checks in the pe.postgres scope gather diagnostics, logs, and configuration related to the Puppet Enterprise PostgreSQL database.

Information collected by the pe.postgres.config check:
  • Configuration files:
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/*/data/postgresql.conf
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/*/data/postmaster.opts
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/*/data/pg_ident.conf
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/*/data/pg_hba.conf
Information collected by the pe.postgres.logs check:
  • PostgreSQL log files:
    • /var/log/puppetlabs/postgresql/*/
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/pg_upgrade_internal.log
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/pg_upgrade_server.log
    • /opt/puppetlabs/server/data/postgresql/pg_upgrade_utility.log
  • JournalD logs for the pe-postgresql service
Information collected by the pe.postgres.status check:
  • A list of setting values that the database is using while running
  • A list of currently established database connections and the queries being executed
  • A distribution of Puppet run start times for thundering herd detection
  • The status of any configured replication slots
  • The status of any active replication connections
  • The size of database directories on disk
  • The size of databases as reported by the database service
  • The size of tables and indices within databases

Community support

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.