Merry christmas to everybody.

We are super excited to announce today the general availability of HDM (Hiera Data Manager) - a webfrontend for vizualising and managing Hiera data.

• HDM
  • Requirements
  • Upcoming features
• Coming soon: HDM Pro
• Community

HDM

We learned from several customers, that most of them have specifc requirements when it comes to managing application data.

Data must be able to be modified by a person which:

• has no knowledge on Git
• has no knowledge on Puppet
• only runs Windows on Workstation

Therefore we decided to develop HDM.

HDM starts with letting you select a desired environment where you want to check or change data.

Next you can select a node. We query PuppetDB to find existing environments, nodes and their facter values:

Now you can see all hiera keys a node has within the environment hiera data:

When selecting a key we show the hierachies and vizualize whether a hierarchy has data for a key and which one is the default:

You can now change data on node level. HDM writes the data back to a file.

Requirements

In the actual state, HDM must run on the Puppet Master. We fetch environments, nodelist and facts from PuppetDB.

HDM needs a file structure where it con store modified data. This file structure must be added to your hiera.yaml configuration file.

Upcoming features

Within the next releases we want to:

• add read-only feature
• provide a Puppet module to install, configure and run HDM
• optimize the web view
• have HDM run on a separate machine
• run HDM as a container

Coming soon: HDM Pro

The Open Source implementation has no login and no access control. This is a feature we are putting into HDM Pro, our commercial release of HDM.

Another planned HDM Pro features is a git based storage backend with review capabilities.

Community

We are looking forward to learn about issues, missing features or any other feedback.

Best, the team of example42.