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_posts/2019-12-24-HDM-released.md

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+---
+layout: blog
+title: Puppet Tip 111 - HDM released!
+---
+
+Merry christmas to everybody.
+
+We are super excited to announce today the general availability of HDM (Hiera Data Manager) - a webfrontend for vizualising and managing Hiera data.
+
+* Table of content
+{:toc}
+
+### HDM
+
+We learned from several customers, that most of them have specifc requirements when it comes to managing application data.
+
+Data must be able to be modified by a person which:
+- has no knowledge on Git
+- has no knowledge on Puppet
+- only runs Windows on Workstation
+
+Therefore we decided to develop HDM.
+
+HDM starts with letting you select a desired environment where you want to check or change data.
+
+![select environment](/img/hdm/02_HDM_env.png)
+
+Next you can select a node. We query PuppetDB to find existing environments, nodes and their facter values:
+
+![select node](/img/hdm/03_HDM_node.png)
+
+Now you can see all hiera keys a node has within the environment hiera data:
+
+![hiera keys](/img/hdm/04_HDM_node_data.png)
+
+When selecting a key we show the hierachies and vizualize whether a hierarchy has data for a key and which one is the default:
+
+![hiera data](/img/hdm/05_HDM_node_data_view.png)
+
+You can now change data on node level.
+HDM writes the data back to a file.
+
+#### Requirements
+
+In the actual state, HDM must run on the Puppet Master.
+We fetch environments, nodelist and facts from PuppetDB.
+
+HDM needs a file structure where it con store modified data.
+This file structure must be added to your `hiera.yaml` configuration file.
+
+#### Upcoming features
+
+Within the next releases we want to:
+- add read-only feature
+- provide a Puppet module to install, configure and run HDM
+- optimize the web view
+- have HDM run on a separate machine
+- run HDM as a container
+
+
+### Coming soon: HDM Pro
+
+The Open Source implementation has no login and no access control.
+This is a feature we are putting into HDM Pro, our commercial release of HDM.
+
+Another planned HDM Pro features is a git based storage backend with review capabilities.
+
+### Community
+
+We are looking forward to learn about [issues, missing features or any other feedback](https://github.com/example42/hdm/issues/).
+
+Best,
+the team of example42.
+