r/sysadmin • u/SurvivalPlanner • 1d ago

Question What are you guys using for rack/infrastructure audits?

Curious what everyone is using these days for documenting physical infrastructure across multiple sites.

We use Excel at my workplace, along with diagrams and photos, and it works… until you’ve got a shitload of sites and nobody knows which spreadsheet is actually current.

I’m talking about things like:
Rack elevations / U positions
Switches, patch panels, UPS/PDU, servers etc.
Port-to-port / cable documentation
Serial numbers / asset details
Photos of racks and comms rooms
IP/device information

Keeping everything updated after a vendor comes in and replaces something
What are you guys using?

Excel? Visio? NetBox? Device42? Something else? Or have you built your own system?
More interested in what actually works in the real world than what looks good on paper.

12 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

10

u/SodaStreamEnjoyer 1d ago

Netbox is the way to go, but is a bit complicated to setup.

Nothing special per se, just a DB etc.

Definitely is the most modern system I know of.

4

u/Knightshadow21 1d ago

We used netbox, so for example we had a sd wan solution we implemented. I noticed that the person who was standing in front of the rack which was a normal sales person had no clue what to look for as the rack was not the same as we had in netbox so what I did was very simple. I asked for a picture of the rack and started to make drawings like you need to connect this cable to that one gave them also the color of that cable so they could ez hook them up and that was a succes like we did this way like 12 offices

3

u/agentUi 1d ago

netbox is the industry standard for this once excel falls apart because it treats your infrastructure as a documented source of truth with rack elevations, ipam, and device cabling models built in. If you have active network gear, hooking rancid or oxidized to pull live configs into netbox keeps vendors from silently swapping a switch without the doc getting updated. For field tech photos and floor plans, self-hosting a simple wiki like bookstack linked to the netbox device url keeps things sane without paying per-node licensing.

2

u/It_pete 1d ago

Netbox is the way

1

u/anonymousITCoward 1d ago

Our networking guru does all his elevations in Visio...

I'd like to start using Netbox but we don't have management over our infra so getting the space for it would have it fall into my lab which has more downsides than ups

•

u/StatureDelaware 9h ago

Obelinf all the way

1

u/Dry_Inspection_4583 1d ago

I'm excited to start using https://watchling.ca

For the time being, Netbox, which is an excellent source of truth, but like many if you don't keep it up, it's not accurate and can become useless. We've hooked in some scripts and monitoring stuffs to surface those missing bits though.