Manually sending facts to master when puppet is locked

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I wrote and pushed a 'puppet_locked' fact for my hosts to report when puppet is locked, but quickly realized that this fact is pretty much pointless; the Puppet master will never see the change in fact value because, well, puppet is locked!

There are other ways of inferring that a host is not actively checking in, whether it's calculating deltas from last check in, etc.

However, this leads me to my question: does anybody else account for this, and how? via Facter would be optimal for our other reporting frameworks, though we'd need a way to send facts manually to the puppet master without the agent running on its interval. Is there a way to manually push facts to the master, via something like a cron job?