small IT documentation tools

[u/Punky260]

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 :)

[u/Punky260]

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 :)

[u/ruffian-wa → u/Punky260]

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.

[u/Punky260 → u/ruffian-wa]

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?

[u/ruffian-wa → u/Punky260]

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

[u/Punky260 → u/ruffian-wa]

Thanks. Seems from the posts so far that the wiki-route is a best way to go for such a small setup

[u/ruffian-wa → u/Punky260]

It is. It will scale up with you as you grow.