Puppet: a few questions and issues

As a brief summary, $work had a puppet module call the underlying OS
package manager. The package manager (apt) apparently failed, reporting
a non-zero exit status to puppet, which seems to have aborted the rest
of the puppet run. The systems were left in a half-provisioned state,
which escaped our monitoring system for a few days.

In looking at the matter, we were not quickly able to come up with a way
to detect failed puppet runs. Mining syslog may be an option, but see
the point about that further in. Is there an acceptable external way
(say through nagios) to determine if the last puppet run succeeded or
failed?

Second, it seems that puppetd -t and puppetd -t --noop both log the same
to syslog and also update the state.yaml file. Is there a way to
differentiate --noop or test runs from syslog? Is there a way to make it
not update the state file? If not, should there be? :)

Thanks in advance.

--

-- 
-- John E. Jasen (jjasen@...)
-- "Deserve Victory." -- Terry Goodkind, Naked Empire