CFEngine Enterprise can report on variables, classes, and monitoring data. Being an autonomous system all of the information about promise outcomes is stored locally on the agent. Currently what is stored (on disk) is not user configurable, but can currently be correlated with anything you see in Mission Portal as far as reporting options are concerned. For example, promise handles, promise outcomes (kept/notkept/repaired), the value of a variable, and the existence of classes are good examples but also extends to things like the file a promise is in, which line number the promise was from, and more. You can explore all the options by checking out the custom reports section of the Enterprise Reporting module.

Specifically which information allowed to be collected by the hub for reporting is configured in report_data_select. default_data_select_host defines the data to be collected for a non policy hub and default_data_select_policy_hub defines the data that should be collected for a policy hub. Both body definitions can be found in the masterfiles/controls/<VERSION>/reports.cf. As of CFEngine 3.6.0 a list of regular expressions matching promise meta tags for either inclusion or exclusion are how you control which variables and classes are collected for central reporting. By default we collect variables and classes that are tagged with either report or inventory. Instead of extending this list of tags we recommend that you tag variables and classes with report. If it's desirable to make available in specialized inventory reporting interface then you it should be tagged with inventory and given an additional attribute_name= tag as described in the Custom Inventory Example. By default CFEngine collects information for all promise outcomes. This can be further restricted by specifying promise_handle_include or promise_handle_exclude. Controlling which measurements taken by cf-monitordare reported is controlled via the report_data_select attributes monitoring_include and monitoring_exclude.

Limitations:

There are various limitations with regard to the size of information that is collected into central reporting. Data that is too large to be reported will be truncated and a verbose level log message will be generated by cf-agent. Some noteable limitations are listed below.

• string varibales are limited to 1024 bytes
• lists are limited to 1024 bytes of serialized data
• data variables are limited to 1024 bytes of serialized data
• meta tags limited to 1024 bytes of serailized output
• log messages are truncated to 400 bytes

Please note that these limits may be lower in practice due to internal encoding.

For information on accessing reported information please see the Reporting UI guide.