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by bwann 2418 days ago
Yes, but sometimes you can break your configuration management in such a way that it can't recover and need a rapid way to fix things or see the state of the world. It's very handy to have a tool ready to go that can assist. Sure, it's very dangerous when operating on an entire fleet, but break glass in an emergency.

It's also rather handy when you want to run ad hoc queries on your machine, e.g. which kernels are out there, is this leftover rpm installed somewhere, etc.

At a past job we had an in-house tool like this that also logged all of the commands anyone had ever ran with it and saved the stdout/stderr output in a webui+cli output. If you suspected somebody did something clowny, you can go look at exactly what they did, when, and what the result was. This logging was very important, imho and tools like it should have it.