Smart Puppet Support

Puppet expertise when the work appears

Smart Puppet Support provides a prepaid pool of consulting time that can be used when your team needs it. The work can be a short troubleshooting call, a design review, pair development on a difficult profile, an upgrade plan, or an implementation that is easier to deliver asynchronously.

There is no need to predict every task in advance. You decide the priorities as your infrastructure changes, and the available time is spent only on work you request.

Typical support activities

• Troubleshooting Puppet code, catalogs, agents, servers, PuppetDB, and Hiera.
• Designing roles, profiles, module interfaces, data hierarchies, and control repositories.
• Developing or refactoring modules, custom facts, functions, types, and providers.
• Improving catalog compilation, agent run time, PuppetDB queries, and server capacity.
• Planning and executing Puppet 7-to-8, Puppet Core, Puppet Enterprise, or OpenVox changes.
• Reviewing CI pipelines, deployment workflows, testing, release control, and environment strategy.
• Supporting migrations between Puppet distributions or between Puppet and Ansible.
• Coaching engineers while working on their real code and infrastructure.

The service is deliberately broad because Puppet problems rarely stay inside one component. A catalog failure might start in Hiera, a custom Ruby function, a Forge module constraint, or a CI deployment. The engagement follows the problem across those boundaries.

Synchronous or asynchronous delivery

Interactive work is done through video calls and screen sharing. This is effective for diagnosis, architectural decisions, pair programming, and knowledge transfer. Your engineers see the reasoning, not only the final command or patch.

For bounded development and review work, example42 can work asynchronously against a repository or a sanitized reproduction. Findings and changes are then reviewed together. Onsite sessions are possible when the scope benefits from direct collaboration with a larger team.

A support model without ceremony

You purchase the number of hours appropriate for your expected workload. The package remains available for one year or until those hours are delivered. Work is scheduled when requested and subject to calendar availability.

The model is intentionally direct: no support tiers, hand-offs, ticket routing, or account-management layer. You work with the consultant doing the technical work.

When a defined service is better

Use Puppet Emergency Support for an active incident. Choose the Puppet Health Check when you need a systematic assessment with a prioritized report. For a new platform, the Puppet Infrastructure Kickstart provides a clearer delivery structure.