Salt Orchestrate Targeting

Question

I am using reactor to catch certain events, my reactor.conf in /etc/salt/master.d looks like:

reactor:
  - 'health/agent/update':
    - salt://health-checks/reactor.sls

In reactor.sls - I want to get some data from agents and run a certain SLS only on certain salt minions (Not on salt master itself). So I use following block along with tgt to ensure it runs only on those minions. This looks fine based on documentation at. In update_server.sls I produce some managed files.

{% set event_data = data.data %}
{% set target_server_name = data.data.server_name %}
'update server states':
  runner.state.orchestrate:
    - tgt: {{ target_server_name }}
    - mods: health-checks/update_server
    - pillar:
        event_data: {{ event_data }}

But managed files are generated only on salt-master and not on any of tgt minions. What am I missing? What is right way to run a sls on target minions and produce desired results there?

I also tried using salt.state but that results into an error, code

 salt.state:
    - tgt: '*{{ target_server_name }}*'

and error:

2015-12-04 06:37:24,467 [salt.utils.process][INFO    ][17924] Process <class 'salt.utils.reactor.Reactor'> (17989) died with exit status None, restarting...

Answer 1

I think I realized the mistake I was doing.

First of all "runners" should be used for things which you need to do on master and not on remote minions, as clearly stated in Runner documentation at:

Salt runners work similarly to Salt execution modules however they execute on the Salt master itself instead of remote Salt minions.

What worked for me is here:

'update server states':
  local.state.sls:
    - tgt: '*{{ target_server_name }}*'
    - arg: 
      - 'health-checks/update_server'
    - kwarg:
        pillar:
          event_data: {{ event_data }}

This will run the update_server.sls file only on servers filtered by tgt