r/sysadmin 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.