Handle Facter errors as failures

[PaulSD]

Facter errors are currently ignored (not included in any metrics). Count them as failures.

[ekohl]

@bastelfreak I think you've seen more reports in practice. Are there more things we should keep in mind?

[alexjfisher]

This could actually be quite annoying in cases where you have a few older boxes running old versions of puppet and ruby as even if an old system doesn't use 90% of your modules, they will try and evaluate facts from all modules. Personally, I'm quite happy ignoring such errors. Maybe it needs to be configurable?

[PaulSD]

In my case, we had a custom fact that was failing on all of our boxes (due to a logic error in the collector code) and was leading to some misconfigurations.
We regularly look at the "Config Management" page in Satellite to check for any Puppet issues in our environment, but nothing appeared on that page because the failing fact collector didn't count toward any of the metrics. The error did show up if you view the report for a specific puppet run on a specific box, but we don't normally look at those individual reports unless Satellite shows a failure on the "Config Management" page (which it didn't). Hence, we didn't notice the error until someone happened to run puppet agent -t on the command line on a box.
So, for us, it is important for facter errors to be counted, not ignored.

I've added a configuration option.

[ekohl]

@alexjfisher thanks for your input. I'm leaning to enabling this by default. Is the (hiera) parameter sufficient for you?