[chef] Re: Re: Monitoring chef runs

[KC Braunschweig < >]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Tetsu Soh 
<
 >
 wrote:
> One more thing need your attention, exception handler can only handle
> runtime exception but not compile time exception.
>
> If your recipe broke on compile time, the chef-client will stop without
> running and exception handler.

Would people consider this a bug? I (unfortunately) do a lot at
compile-time so dying there is fairly likely and I'd really like to
know about that too. Anyone have a good workaround? Would it be
appropriate to always run exception handlers? Or should there be an
alternate mechanism for compile-time failures?

A couple related points:
- I noticed (probably for the same reason) that when runs die early
you don't get the run duration, which I'd still like to have.
- I've run into this scenario a lot:
  1. Run updates resource X
  2. resource X notifies a restart of service Xd (delay)
  3. An exception happens on resource Y and the chef run dies before
delayed notifications are processed. At this point service Xd hasn't
been restarted which is probably good because that might cause a bad
state since the run failed.
  4. I come along to troubleshoot, fix things and run chef again
  5. chef run (including resource Y) now completes successfully but
the restart of service Xd never happened. Now I have a system that
seems like it should be in a good state but it might not be because
service Xd still has old config in memory and I have no way to know
that and chef will never fix it.

Anyone have a good way to prevent or address the above?

Thanks,

KC