Osquery uses basic SQL commands to leverage a relational data-model to describe a device.

osquery

using a server is totally the right way to do it. But technically, with something that'll let you cluster out ssh commands (ansible, salt call, etc) you can pass a query to osqueryi and get results out:
```
$ osqueryi --json "select * from etc_hosts;"
[
  {"address":"127.0.0.1","hostnames":"localhost"},
  {"address":"255.255.255.255","hostnames":"broadcasthost"},
  {"address":"::1","hostnames":"localhost"}
]
```