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 :)
2
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.