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r/sysadmin • … • u/Gnonthgol

What documentation software would you recommend?

I just want to find out if there is something better out there before I spend too much time on this. Currently I am using RackTables but I have also looked at NetBox a bit. But they do require some serious work in order to do what I want them to do. So I would like to see if there are better tools out there before committing to that work.

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None of those tools handles disks at all. Their focus on network is good but with modern compliance rules I need to be able to account for every single disk that are being used or which have had been used at some point in time. This is one thing we still have in spreadsheets which makes things a bit difficult to manage. It would be nice to have this in the documentation tool so that we can instantly pull up the serial number of a disk in a specific slot and document the replacement of that disk in a single place. It does not fill me with confidence in our documentation when I randomly discover that two disks are documented to be installed in the same slot and it takes a lot of time to track down those disks.

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We also use a lot of tools for configuration management, monitoring and so forth and currently this does not interact with the documentation at all. So doing changes in the setup is often a two step process with you first having to run the scripts that does the change and then you need to document what you did. And there is little checks to see if the documentation is up to date or not. So in a lot of cases the documentation step is deferred and then forgotten. RackTables lacks a REST API which makes it a bit difficult to interact with from other processes. It does have a bit of interactions for example with SNMP and DNS and can link to munin and cacti sites. But adding new interactions is quite time consuming which is not good when you are depending on custom tooling for a lot of things. NetBox does have a REST API but it is not the greatest one at that. At least it is a decent start.

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And last issue I have is that both RackTables and NetBox have a very good understanding of server rooms and network closets but fall flat on their faces when you try to manage things that are located in offices or equipment sitting on a store room shelf. Even though they focus on networking which is truly where the documentation tools is needed the most, they are not able to even model a simple run from a patch panel to a drop in a good way. You are depending on being able to label things in a logical fashion within the tool. And even then you do not have the ability to document which computer, switch or access point in the office landscape is connected to which port. This have at some points caused some irritating moments.

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So is there a tool I have missed that handle these things better? Or should I invest the time into making these tools more capable for my use cases?

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