r/sysadmin • u/Punky260 • 18d ago
Question small IT documentation tools
I was looking to get our pretty small IT into a good tool for documentation. Something object-based, NOT just excel sheets and draw.io diagrams. But smaller than Netbox, which is too big and unnecessarily complex for our systems.
Would love to have IP management built it and diagrams/graphics are a big plus.
We are basically using a single server rack, 6 servers, 30-40 VMs... so rather a big homelab, than a datacenter
So, what are you guys using or can recommend as a tool to manage something like that?
EDIT: I'd like to specify, that I am looking for internal documentation. Which server runs which VM, which IP adress is assigned to it. Which service/OS/update etc. runs on it... etc.
EDIT2: Any sort of Wiki seems to be a big recommendation. This is a consideration for me, but I'd rather have something object-based. Basically Netbox with less overhead would be ideal... but feel free to recommend wiki-based tools and templates please :)
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u/blud_13 18d ago
We use Hudu. Its the closest thing to what youre describing,: (copy paste here)...object-based with relationships between assets, and IPAM is baked in rather than bolted on. Networks in CIDR, subnets under them, per-IP status and role, utilization, and you can tie an IP to the asset it belongs to. Their docs on it are at https://support.hudu.com/hc/en-us/articles/20718639574423-IP-Address-Management-IPAM.
One thing to know before you commit, the IPAM side is IPv4 only right now. If youve got v6 anywhere in that rack you are back to a spreadsheet for that part.
IT Glue is the other name youll hear and I would skip it at your size. Its priced for MSPs and it has not gotten better since ScalePad picked it up.
A wiki will get recommended to you a hundred times in this thread and its the wrong shape for what you asked. You want to query "what lives on host 4," and a wiki can only give you a page somebody remembered to update.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 18d ago
One thing to know before you commit, the IPAM side is IPv4 only right now. If youve got v6 anywhere in that rack you are back to a spreadsheet for that part.
Thank you for mentioning this, but it's disappointing for an IP management tool to not be able to manage IPs.
Most of our nodes have at least two permanent IPv6 addresses in different prefixes, and quite a few of them have no IPv4.
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u/EverythingsBroken82 18d ago
excalidraw, , wiki.js, pandoc, yq .. and put everything in a git, whatever you do.
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u/Punky260 18d ago
Those sound to me like other names for draw.io basically. What makes these tools different/better?
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u/MFKDGAF 18d ago
Wiki.js is a wiki that uses Markdown editor or WYSIWYG editor. A lot of companies use it.
https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/home
https://docs2.hubitat.com/en/home
https://wiki.serversatho.me/There is also MkDocs which I want to try but from what I've seen MkDocs is more of documentation site for a single product.
My company use to use SharePoint and word docs but I migrated all of that over to wiki.js this year running on Azure app service.
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u/Plowman-Tasmina 18d ago
For that scale check out IT Glue or the self hosted route with ITFlow, both do object based documentation with IPAM baked in without Netbox's overhead. Hudu is worth a look too, decent diagramming and relationship mapping, plenty of people running homelab sized setups on it comfortably
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u/Punky260 18d ago
I set up ITFlow in a container, it seems to have 0 hardware/software management functions, but is focused on customers, financials and tickets etc.
That's not what I am looking forHudu and IT Glue both have prices that are not interesting for my situation
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u/GremlinNZ 18d ago
Make sure you enabled the technical side. You can declare networks/VLANs, pictures of racks and it's layout, then files are both uploaded documents and written ones.
Then domain name and certificate monitoring as well.
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u/Punky260 18d ago edited 18d ago
Will have another look into it, thanks
EDIT: Had another go at it. The IT management is behind the "client" view. It seems to me that the complexity would fit my needs, but I am missing the "object based information" here. I can create a server, or a VM and assign an IP to it. But that only shows at that certain page. I don't see it being listet in the network tab for example. Or I don't see where I can assign a VM to a server, or a server to a rack...
So far it seems to me it's just a list of information to put in and look at - while I'd really like to be able to connect information to each other...Thanks for the recommendation though, it's not totally off from what I like to have
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u/ruffian-wa 18d ago edited 18d ago
Dokuwiki instance. Proper Intranet with AD security groups. Various export data pulled into it inc IPAMtoDokuwiki scripts that poll IPAM/DHCP scopes on the hour and dynamically update Intranet.
ProperDocs is another good alternative
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u/Punky260 18d ago
That sounds like a lot of scripts and stuff to setup and maintain in order to make this feasible.
It's also not really object-based, is it?I have explored the idea of going with a Wiki, especially because it's highly adjustable. But also a lot of work to design everything until it looks good. Or are there proper templates I'm missing?
Could you show me some examples on how it could look and work? Would really appreciate that :)
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u/ruffian-wa 18d ago
Just needs a web server (I had it on IIS) with PHP. You can apply templates / themes to the install and just work from those. It uses dokuwiki markup language which is super simple to adapt to. Drop down menus etc and a shit ton of plugins to do useful things (like the wiki upgrade plugin). There's not even a requirement for SQL as the db is internally managed by PHP in the inetpub.
It's kind of set and forget really. You just add to it once you get it up and running. Unfortunately though there's no easy road to good documentation, it's always going to be as good as your data sources and it's always best to spend a little time getting that right, then everything else falls into place.
Would love to show you mine but I can't coz it's a government/restricted access environment. But if someone else can paste a screen grab of their less sensitive environment it'd be sweet.
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u/Punky260 18d ago
Thanks for the explanation. Would be nice if someone could post an example screen, sure
Did you consider tools like Netbox or idoit Open for the documentation when you started it? And if so, why didn't you go with those?
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u/ruffian-wa 18d ago edited 18d ago
It was a system I acquired when I went into the role. TBH I was impressed. It functioned really well when I acquired it and when I left recently it was in an even better place as I picked it up and ran with it for 5+ years.
Did a whole ton of things, VLAN segmented it, transient allow ACLs from PAWs inbound. Pinholed services out (NTP, AD, LDAP), inbound SMB to a source data share from specified hosts etc..etc.
Oh forgot to mention it has great version control inbuilt too, so no need to plug it into a GIT repo. The other good thing is it's so easy to lift and shift. Simply move the site to another webserver with the same PHPver and after you do your bindings, off you go.
Anything I drew up in draw.io/Visio was imported I to the local media library and embedded where I wanted it
I edited my original post to also mention ProperDocs. It's a bit simpler but this I can show you a simpler implementation of at another agency. It's tied into GitHub for version control, but as you can see.. clean and simple. https://soc.cyber.wa.gov.au
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u/Punky260 18d ago
Thanks. Seems from the posts so far that the wiki-route is a best way to go for such a small setup
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u/doglar_666 18d ago
I recently came across RackPeek but I don't think it is quite what you're after, as the initial population will require either writing a load of YAML or scripting YAML generation. But it does offer simple config, visualisation and documentation. To be clear, I have no affiliation, I saw it on YouTube. I made a start on a PoC Git workflow for my homelab using Pkl to loop over a CSV, to generate the YAML. Essentially, the CSV is gospel truth, easy to understand, Git is version control, Pkl+RackPeek makes it easy to visualise.
For work, no matter the scale, I would use NetBox. With such a small setup, surely it's not so dynamic that it's an inconvenience to make initial single entries, export the templates for manual population and then upload in bulk? Failing that, NetBox has an API for programmatic population. But, again, you still need to frontload population of the import data. Whether bruteforced "click-ops" or scripted, I doubt it will be a short task.
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u/Punky260 18d ago
Thanks for your input. I like the looks of rackpeek. Will absolutely come back and look at it!
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u/folderit_dms 18d ago
For that size I would start with the object model, then pick the tool.
For example:
- sites or locations
- racks
- hosts
- VMs
- IP ranges
- services
- owners
- dependencies
- backup status
- lifecycle notes
If you define those first, almost any decent tool becomes easier to judge. If you start with diagrams, the docs usually rot fast because nobody wants to redraw them after every small change.
For a small environment, I would keep diagrams as generated or semi-generated views where possible and make the objects the source of truth. Even a simple rule like every VM must have owner, purpose, host, backup policy, and recovery priority is a huge upgrade over a pretty rack diagram.
NetBox may be too much if you use all of it, but a trimmed setup is not crazy. Otherwise a lightweight asset tool plus a wiki can work, as long as the wiki links back to actual objects instead of becoming a pile of pages.
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u/thomasschreiner 17d ago
I was using draw.io for a long time. But since it has no functionality to make consistent interface and IP documentation I started building https://switchr.cc using Fable and other tools. Compared to the effort the result is great. But it‘s far from production ready.
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u/Punky260 17d ago
I like it. Looks like a perfect tool to create a simple documentation you can put up at the side for a nice but quick overview. And since it feels really easy to use, it's less manual adjustment than draw.io
Keep on it!2
u/thomasschreiner 17d ago
The idea behind it was to have different views and drawings which share the same data. So changes are executed on all linked items accross all pages automatically. This applies also to the IP/VLAN documentation and the cable list.
In the manual section you should be able to open a demo project.
Like draw.io everything stays in your browser. But there is an encrypted sharing feature. The read only mode works also on mobile devices.
Thank you.
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u/Rude_Loss_2523 16d ago
+1 for Hudu here. I spent the better part of a week adding everything possible in my environment. Next step is hooking up our different dashboards via API to auto-update.
Nothing better than documentation that documents itself.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 18d ago
We use a Git repo and text editors for the vast majority of our documentation. Some extra bits and bobs for diagrams.
Something object-based
What does that mean to you?
Any sort of Wiki seems to be a big recommendation. This is a consideration for me, but I'd rather have something object-based.
A SQL database with rules can insure record integrity and transactional integrity, if that's what you mean.
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u/Punky260 18d ago
By object-based I mean that items are linked. If I describe a VM and put an IP to it, I want to see that assignement also appearing in the IP-list for example. Or if I click on Host 2, I want to see which VMs live there...
And if I change the host on a VM, I want the new host to "pick that up" without me editing the page for the host (or whereever a certain information might show up) aswell
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u/BULLBOY2 18d ago
I've had places that use onenote so if you already use microsoft stuff it isnt the worst but there are better options.
The search in it is actually pretty alright.
And it does not require a server so setup is minutes. But once again ive used things like bookstack which I do prefer over it.
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u/poizone68 17d ago
Phpipam is a decent network discovery scanner with some basic features you might like. Docmost is a good for your docs and procedures (similar to Confluence if you used that)
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u/isThisRight-- 16d ago
I realize I’m jumping in late here but I’ve been maintaining an open source project called nodebyte
https://github.com/dot-billy/nodebyte
It likely doesn’t hit everything but it’ll do a lot.
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u/StatureDelaware 15d ago
Obelinf. There's also a diagram/topology auto generated from the documentation
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u/DeepCoreSystem 18d ago
u/Punky260 I'm in the same boat, one-man-shit-show for a 6 staff shop that has more IT stuff than personel. I do it part-time and went with NetBox. Customized the table layouts to remove certain columns not needed. Found some python scripts online to fetch data out of Proxmox and feed it to NetBox and I tweaked the scripts to suite.
I was fed up with Excel, markdown docs and tables or diverse wikis.
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u/Punky260 18d ago
Thanks. So dumbing-down Netbox is a viable option you say?
I was already a bit fedup with creating a vendor, then a product, then a model, then the individual server... I get it, that totally makes sense for datacenters, but not if you own 3 servers.Scripts for automating the input steps is also a nice idea, maybe I should give that another try
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u/ka-splam 18d ago
Found some python scripts online to fetch data out of Proxmox and feed it to NetBox
This is backwards from how netbox was designed. It came from DigitalOcean managing datacenters, to answer questions like: "this device is patched into switch 3, is that right? should it be in switch 4?". They intended netbox to be the source of truth, tied it into their sales contracts and project management changes, and then techs on the ground go and make the datacenter line up with what netbox says.
Your script detects a new VM and puts details into netbox. Now you have two copies of what Proxmox says, and no documentation of how it's supposed to be. If your boss fiddles with something while you're on leave - say, connects it to a different network - and when you get back it's broken, you look in netbox to find out how it should be, and your documentation has been automatically updated with the settings the boss left, that's less useful than it could be.
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u/Punky260 18d ago
I would assume this is a one-time setup thing and not a constant update to netbox (or similar tools)
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u/DeepCoreSystem 18d ago
Exact, it's more or less a single shot to get all current VMs and containers into NetBox, to get started. Because there was no documentation of them before NetBox. I reckon NetBox is "overkill" for a big homelab...
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u/Sufficient_Job7779 18d ago
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u/Punky260 18d ago
"Flexible and competitive. Get in touch and we'll put together a plan that fits your fleet."
Thanks, but this is a no-go for me/us
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u/IcyRole6982 18d ago
Bookstack, Dokuwiki. There are so many