My go-to tool for this is CFEngine Enterprise + Ansible. CFEngine Enterprise includes a data warehouse component to support reporting/querying, and Ansible is handy for ad-hoc tasks on a smaller scale. With federated reporting[1] your infrastructure can scale to hundreds of thousands of hosts.
Ansible also has a server backend option with AWX (and it’s Red Hat downstream). Although speaking as a user and lover of Ansible, reporting on the data in its database is not a strong suit.
Sure. Reporting with CFEngine is incredibly powerful. Forgive my enthusiasm, my team (at Vertical Sysadmin) developed an ETL pipeline to aggregate data from CFEngine hubs into a "superhub" which later inspired Federated Reporting in CFEngine Enterprise. It's actually incredibly useful. We'd drop into the Postgres database (CFEngine Enterprise uses Postgres under the hood) and use raw SQL to slice and dice the data. We supported tens of thousands of servers across multiple divisions and organizational silos.
I was answering the OP, "I wouldn't even know where to migrate to for managing full VMs in such a nice way(puppetserver/puppetdb/bolt)", and offering a potential solution for managing full VMs.
As an IT Operations professional, I'm a big fan of "Time Management for Systems Administrators" book by Tom Limoncelli (O'Reilly). See https://www.tomontime.com/ (author's website). That's the system I use to organize my work.
With a bit of "bullet journal" (https://bulletjournal.com/) and Cal Newport style time-blocking sprinkled on top.
I am in Operations. I use it (and pay for it) because the free version seemed to work best for me compared to Perplexity (which had been my go-to) and ChatGPT/OpenAI.
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