Puppet Labs, the open source data center management project behind Puppet, has acquired the Marionette Collective, growing its services and building out its open source solutions.  The Marionette Collective is, too, an open source project, offering real-time network discovery capabilities.

For Puppet Labs, the acquisition means an improved dashboard, which ties in with the company’s primary offerings around data center automation and configuration management frameworks.  MCollective’s addition will further simplify the use of the Puppet Dashboard, towards scheduling the growing complexities around server activity, tapping into data provided by the Puppet platform.

“Puppet has always focused on the problem of configuration management, but solving that doesn’t make all of your problems go away,” said Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs. “MCollective targets the next layer of change control and orchestration in a small but powerful tool that already integrates well with Puppet. With both Puppet and MCollective, our customers and users have a unified solution that scales from small departments and one-off installations to large server farms running tens of thousands of servers.”

The acquisition marks a major point of growth for Puppet Labs, especially as it seeks out ways in which it can provide a comprehensive cloud management tool that’s steeped in open source ideals.  Many of the larger companies offering inclusive cloud solutions also have a tendency to lock customers into their system, through product and service limitations.  Puppet Labs, and others like Egenera, are building out their tool sets to provide cloud management with less limiations.