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Disable the scheduled "refresh-mcollective-metadata" task on agent nodes in Puppet Enterprise

Patrick Grant
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Important: Puppet Enterprise 2018.1 is the last release to support Marionette Collective, also known as MCollective. Future releases of PE will not include MCollective. 

To prepare for these changes, migrate your MCollective work to Puppet orchestrator to automate tasks and create consistent, repeatable administrative processes. Use orchestrator to automate your workflows and take advantage of its integration with Puppet Enterprise console and commands, APIs, role-based access control, and event tracking.

By default, the refresh-mcollective-metadata scheduled task runs at 15 minute intervals on all agent nodes. Depending on your deployment, it might take a long time to run or use too much of the CPU.

You can disable the task and schedule it to run when the OS is not doing CPU intensive tasks using a crontab entry or Windows task if:

  • You use MCollective for occasional ad hoc tasks

or

  • You use MCollective frequently but the facts filtering MCollective jobs rarely change or never change

Version and installation information

PE version: All supported versions
Installation type: All

Solution

Disable Puppet management of scheduling of the refresh-mcollective-metadata task in the console (for all nodes) or in Hiera (for all nodes, node groups, or individual nodes.) Then, schedule the runs when the OS is not doing CPU intensive tasks by editing the crontab entry (in *nix) or task (in the Windows Task Scheduler).

  1. Stop Puppet management of the refresh-mcollective-metadata task:

    For all nodes in the console:

    In the console, click Classification, click PE MCollective, click Classes. Under the puppet_enterprise::profile::mcollective::agent class select the manage_metadata_cron parameter. Change the Value to false. Click Add parameter and then click Commit Change.

    For all nodes, node groups, or individual nodes In Hiera

    On the affected nodes, stop managing manage_metadata_cron. Make changes in the appropriate file by adding:

    puppet_enterprise::profile::mcollective::agent::manage_metadata_cron: false

    For these nodes Edit this file
    All nodes Your hieradata directory’s common.yaml file
    Node groups In your Hiera hierarchy in a .yaml file matching the nodes where you are changing the setting (based on a node group, data center, OS, and so on.)
    Individual nodes The node’s .yaml file

  2. On each agent node where the task is disabled, edit the crontab entry or task.

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Comments

2 comments

Date Votes
  • Juan Leon

    Good morning, after this process is implemented, is there additional document that help to remove the crontab entries for all servers. 

    0
  • Suzie Baunsgard

    Hi, it looks like the team has a request from you on this. Based on the outcome there, we might add some more info here as needed. Thanks so much. 

    0

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