When I wrote the asynchronous chef handler that I presented in the previous post, I had a little idea in mind. being able to track changes made by chef. The idea grew up a little and I now release a little dashboard I wrote. It’s still in a very early stage of development but I’ll try to present the idea behind it.

The changes (including diffs) are pushed in a queue. This queue is consumed by a script and datas are indexed in elasticsearch, an open source search engine. On the top of this I wrote a web interface, based on sinatra and twitter’s bootstrap) that allow you to see the latest runs, filter out runs with no changes and search on criterias (hostname, updated resources and inside the diffs)

To use this you will need a couple of things :

• a STOMP broker (I use rabbitmq, but activemq or stompserver will fit too)
• an elasticsearch instance (or cluster)
• sinatra and its dependencies + the stomp ruby gem

The code is available on github, feel free to get in touch on freenode IRC, you can find me on the #chef-hacking channel (nickname : nico)