A lot of our server configuration is managed via puppet. Puppet runs every 15 minutes via cron and applies configuration changes.

If a server has problems I sometimes need to change configuration manually on the server (e.g try different settings, enable more logging). The problem is that puppet then overwrites my manual changes whenever the cron job runs.

What would you recomment to handle this problem?

Maybe deactivate puppet while working on the servers? Could be the risk that I forget to reenable it and then have one server out of sync.