Facter is a lightweight program that gathers basic node information about the hardware and operating system. Facter is especially useful for retrieving things like operating system names, hardware characteristics, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and SSH keys. Facter is extensible and allows gathering of node information that may be custom or site specific. It is easy to extend by including your own custom facts. Facter can also be used to create conditional expressions in Puppet that key off the values returned by facts.