Keeping track of all this IT crap

Flaherty, Patrick pflaherty at wsi.com
Tue Feb 5 12:13:09 EST 2008


>   Do people know of any good software to keep track of all this IT
> crap?  Users, computers (with make, model, serial, CPU, RAM, etc.),
> patch panels and their jacks, switches and their ports.  Most
> importantly, what is connected to what: User A has computer B plugged
> into jack C which is patched into port D of switch E.  Multiple times
> 100 users, two buildings, and eight switches, and damn things are
> confusing.

I've been using a combination of mediawiki (documentation), groundworks
nagios (monitoring), netdisco / cacti (analysis). I don't have a good
answer for inventory yet. NetDisco discoveres networks based on CDP,
lists switch ports / mac addresses / vlan associations. I wrote a script
to grab all the relationships in netdisco and add them to nagios. I've
also added a graphviz plugin to mediawiki, which I used to diagram
process flows which are clickable (because graphviz is magical and
awesome.)

Patrick



More information about the gnhlug-discuss mailing list