We previously published a blog about the rollout of telemetry for Puppet content back in December 2021. (Read that here.) We’d like to follow up with some important news and an exciting announcement.

Moving to informed opt-out in 7.16.0

We are serious about understanding and meeting your content needs, and we want to make sure we are investing in the right places that turn out high-demand content. In our December blog post, we announced that we would be switching to informed opt-out in Puppet 8. However, with the release of Puppet 8 being pushed out further than expected, we have made the decision to move to opt-out in our 7.16.0 release in April so that we can improve your module ecosystem with data-driven development that much sooner.

If you have an existing Puppetserver installation, upgrading will not unexpectedly switch on the telemetry underneath you. If you'd like to opt-in and help improve all of our data-driven development efforts – Puppet, Vox Pupuli, anyone who uses the database – then you will need to opt-in intentionally.

If you opt in by 11 April, we’ll send you a Puppet beanie. We’d love to see opt-ins come through before we switch over to opt-out. Your privacy concerns are important to us, so we’ve made sure that you can see the data collected before you enable the system and you can control which data your Puppet Servers submit. The data is not associated with individuals and is fully aggregated before anyone can access it.

Content usage dashboard

Now onto our exciting announcement! In our last blog, we told you about the BigQuery public database where you could see all the module adoption statistics we are collecting. We’ve kicked it up a notch and are excited to share this epic dashboard that is now available on Vox Populi. Here you can see the aggregate usage rates which will help us help you by focusing our efforts on developing the content that is most used by you. As you can see, there's not yet a statistically significant amount of data in the database, but as reports come in over time, this board will become more and more useful.

How to submit usage data

Start out by double checking the data it will send with puppetserver dropsonde preview in your terminal. If you're okay with the data it collects, then enable reporting, either by installing the module and classifying your primary server, or manually by editing the /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/conf.d/puppetserver.conf file on your primary server and adding or updating the following clause. Don't forget to restart puppetserver afterwards.

dropsonde: {
    enabled: true
}

Then finally validate your work by submitting a report with puppetserver dropsonde submit. If it prints out a URL, then go claim your beanie!

Micah Wilson is the product manager for Forge and Ecosystem at Puppet.

Learn more

• Check out some more technical developer blogs about Puppet telemetry.
• Poke through the client source code.
• See how the aggregation queries work.