I really want to run MCollective on my fleet of servers however there are a large number of untrusted users on each machine which makes using MCollective not ideal in my eyes. I'm aware that there is some things you can do to take precaution but I'm not familiar enough with ActiveMQ / want something that's a bit more mindful of similar environments to mine outside the box.
I'm looking for a fact collection like tool essentially.
(Tagging under puppet / server since no mcollective tag and I don't have enough reputation to create a new one)
Its perfectly possible to secure MCollective, you can assign each user their own MQ authentication details etc and theres various nice SSL plugins.
What problem exactly worries you with MCollective? What do you want out of an alternative? There's various similar applications but none which duplicate MCollective - all have various ins and outs depending on what you want.
Examples include Func, Fabric, perhaps Control Tier and Capistrano.
One compelling alternative is Salt. Parallel/distributed execution using ZeroMQ as the communications backend, so it maintains its own message queue instead of requiring ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ.
From the description: