Missing entries in the nodes tab

[cyberm8]

Hi,

I don't know if this is the right place to report my problem because, although the starting point is the behavior of the Puppetboard "nodes" view, it would be more of a Puppet (or PuppetDB) related problem or a misconfiguration on my part.

Context

• Puppetboard version: 4.3.0
• Puppet version: 6.27.0

I have created an environment for testing purposes called "tests". I have assigned some nodes to this environment (using an ENC). They used to be in "production" environment. I let a few days pass for the nodes to update.

Observed behavior

I select the "tests" environment and go to the "nodes" tab.

Only one node appears.

However, when I visit the "reports" tab, I see that many nodes have come forward and made their updates.
Similarly, the "inventory" tab does contain hosts.

Expected behavior

I assumed that nodes that have applied updates due to a change in environment (presence of changed reports) should appear in the nodes tab of the considered environment.

However

Digging a little deeper, I notice that the "catalog_environment" property of the missing nodes is still set as "production", while the node that appears has "tests". This line seems to confirm that this property determines the presence of the node in the "nodes" tab for the selected environment.

What justifies this choice? Indeed, both "facts_environment" and "report_environment" have the value "tests".

Should I suspect a problem on my devices, which despite several "unchanged" reports, still have a "production" catalog? I am 100% sure they are up to date.

Thank you in advance for your answers,

[gdubicki]

Hi @cyberm8!

Sorry for a late reply.

Puppet < 6 has a bug a that causes facts_environment to be set to a wrong value in some cases, so we can't use that.

But perhaps it would make sense to switch to use the report_environment... 🤔

[cyberm8]

Thanks for the clarification.

Well, I understand these values might not be trustworthy.
Since I'm using an old version of Puppet, I'm not going to complain.

For your information, I am using a newer version (7.8.0) of Puppet (on another project), and I have never encountered the problem.