Perforce Puppet Reviews and Pricing

Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

Mar 22, 2015

An advanced automation tool for centralized management

What is most valuable?

The valuable features I found are installing packages remotely and pushing files from a centralized server. Also, we can create users and monitor services remotely.

How has it helped my organization?

We used to have lot of issues related to sudo rights on server. Now, we have centralized sudo file managed by puppet on a centralized linux server. So, any of user requests for addition or removal of sudo access, we make changes on puppet master for specific requested node and changes get pushed to puppet client on next cycle.

What needs improvement?

The features I used so far are quite interesting and helpful.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Puppet for one year now.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

There were no issues encountered during deployment

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was quite straightforward. I reviewed some of the videos on YouTube and they helped a lot for implementation.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it in-house.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user326337Customer Success Manager at PeerSpot

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Oct 10, 2016

Has your experience changed or improved since you wrote this review?

it_user7542

Director of Operations at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

Nov 19, 2013

Internal IT Automation With Puppet

When your company’s growing like a bean stalk on steroids (and weight gain supplements) and you live by Lean principles and practice JIT operations, you need to figure out how to efficiently manage a rapidly growing staff, and the IT infrastructure that comes with it, using a small, capable team of tech ops engineers.

A lot of ops people are rockstars when it comes to automating their production, testing, and dev environments and customer facing infrastructure, and the Conductor team is certainly in that category. But sitting in a standup (yes, sitting, legs were tired) a few months ago, we had this update from Ryan (the engineer who runs our internal IT):

Ryan: “Yesterday I provisioned two machines for new hires. Today I have some more to do.”
Me: “How many are you doing today?”

Ryan: “Two.”

Me: “What about tomorrow?”

Ryan: “Two.”

Me: “And the rest of the week?”

Ryan: “Two, two, and two.”

If you’ve ever managed or worked in a help desk, IT service bureau, or NOC, this should sound familiar. We had 10 new machines to provision that week, and one guy to do them, two per day. Quick math can tell you why this moved my hairline back a millimeter or two:

Ryan can provision 2 computers a day (1 machine every 4 hours).
We need to provision 10 computers a week.
Ryan was our only internal IT resource at the time who could do the work. He was also responsible for all of our other internal systems.

10 computers x 4 hours per computer = 40 hours of work

40 hour work week – 40 hours of work = 0 hours of time to deal with the rest of the internal service requests

0 hours spent on service requests per week = 0 satisfied, productive, fellow employees who made those requests in the first place.

This was an extreme, but if this continued, we would be saturated: not able to cover any of the other, business-critical, internal IT services we provide, and one out-of-band request away from missing our OLAs (Operational Level Agreements). Hiring wasn’t going to slow, and we had to find a way to keep up with our normal ops work and still support the high rate of growth we were seeing.

Everyone in the meeting (almost at once): Hey, why don’t we just automate it?

The answer to the capacity problem came in the form of automation, and automation came in the form of two easy to use, reliable, and proven technologies that many ops engineers use and love already: Puppet and The Foreman.

The Foreman is a complete lifecycle management tool for physical and virtual servers.¹

Puppet Open Source is a flexible, customizable framework available under the Apache 2.0 license designed to help system administrators automate the many repetitive tasks they regularly perform.2

The idea was to stop looking at these purely as server management tools, and to apply the same configuration management principles to our employees computers. This gave us a number of advantages:

Provisioning new employee machines went from a 4 hour process of manually installing various packages and configurations to a 5 minutes process of registering the machine with Foreman and triggering a Puppet run.
Rolling out upgrades across the company became a fully automated process, requiring us only to upload a Puppet module on the Puppet master server and wait for or force Puppet runs on the client machines.
Configuration compliance became a non-issue, since we could manage all sensitive configurations with Puppet modules.
Detailed reporting on the configuration of all employee machines allowed us to troubleshoot issues quickly, and sometimes diagnose and resolve them before the user was even aware of the problem.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user2652Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

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Apr 6, 2014

Nice explanation and example. Puppet has really made life easy for system administrators. It is a very nice automation tool used to build multiple computers at the same time.

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sumodirjo

Senior Site Infrastructure Engineer at Kurungsiku

Aug 8, 2012

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Help you manage your servers so you could sleep better

Valuable Features:

I work with puppet several weeks back, helping a client using puppet enterprise to manage Windows servers. Puppet is solid, the enterprise version have installer wizard that will also install all puppet requirements like MySQL. Puppet could be used in the simplest way. Only one file manifest, or you could split a file per host or you can follow the best practice where you create classes and import that class on a manifest. You can even extend your manifest with ruby. Puppet support Linux, Windows and UNIX. Puppet documentation is also good.

Room for Improvement:

Puppet has steep learning curve so you need to spend some time before you can use puppet on your daily. If you only manage a small number of servers the time to create manifest might be longer than you create, edit and copy configuration manually to each server, but if you’re looking for long-term solution of course this is worth doing. Even that the documentation is good, I can’t find enough manifest sample for some basic usage, have to Google a lot, bumping from one blog to another blog. Puppet Enterprise give you limit to manage only 10 machine, but if you need to manage more machine but don’t want to spend money you can use puppet open source.

Other Advice:

Good tools to automate your servers, the time and effort to learn writing manifest is quiet high but it's worth on the long run

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user2652Project Manager at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees

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Dec 7, 2014

I recently come across a situation where there was a change in DNS IP address and new IP address need to be updated on across 4000 linux servers on the network. Rather than going to each server one by one, we just modified the puppet module and there was updated /etc/resolv.conf file on all of the servers. With the help of puppet, I could do it in just 5 mins rather than spending a lot of days doing manual work.
:)
-KM

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Ramy Adly

HPC & Cloud systems administrator at Brightskies

Dec 12, 2023

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A well-organized automation solution but has difficult troubleshooting

What is our primary use case?

We use public configurations for all nodes. This includes configurations for integrations, networks, packages, software, etc.

What is most valuable?

Puppet Enterprise is well-organized and structured. It is stable and can be managed easily. You can manage everything and organize everything in a very good way. Automation saves time and provides consistency over all the nodes.

What needs improvement?

Troubleshooting Puppet Enterprise can be somewhat challenging. You can make some changes to implement any ad hoc modifications. It might take a little longer.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Puppet Enterprise for around five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The product is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution’s scalability is good. We are using 500 nodes.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have used Ansible before.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is straightforward and takes a couple of days to complete. Two people are required to deploy the solution.

What other advice do I have?

If you have solid Linux systems and experience with Puppet, use the public version. However, if you are new to Puppet or lack Linux expertise, I would recommend starting and then considering migrating to the public version later.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

reviewer2284542

Business Development Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Nov 2, 2023

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A solution with good functionalities that can be helpful for clients from the banking, financial, and insurance industries

Pros and Cons

"Puppet Enterprise has good functionalities."

"Puppet Enterprise is more complex and difficult to configure."

What is most valuable?

Puppet Enterprise has good functionalities.

What needs improvement?

Puppet Enterprise is more complex and difficult to configure.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used Puppet Enterprise for one and a half years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Most of our clients are enterprise companies. A lot of clients that we work with are from the banking, financial, and insurance industry. We've also done some public work in the telecoms industry.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We also provide Red Hat Ansible.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Puppet Enterprise’s pricing is competitive.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I rate Puppet Enterprise a nine out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner/Reseller