Ideas for maintaining Network & Server Documentation

[aasimenator]

I am not sure this is the correct section for this... as there is no General IT section...if so Mods please move it to appropriate section.

Recently I've realized that Documentation is necessary for ease of managing & maintaining Networks/ servers & desktops. And since I have more than 1 network to handle... I was wondering what are the best possible ways to document day-to-day activities and all information of the network. Since I work offsite, I really cant rely on people there to help me find something, the least I expect them to do is to reboot routers / switches.

I know a lot of you guys here are in IT field... So please help me out, What do you guys used? any software for maintaining the information or just old fashion Excel Sheet..

 

[6pack]

the network guys i worked with used excel and some ticketing software for day to day activities, and the documentation part was in word documents which was stored in a central location like a shared network drive. Printouts of these files were kept for reference.

 

[boogeyman]

It depends a lot on your budget and resources. A couple of previous companies I've worked with have proper teams with dedicated people for maintaining the documentation. An important approach is having proper change control procedures and strictness to ensure that if any changes take place, the documentation is thoroughly updated. A few tools which might help you are:

-MS Visio for network diagrams. Absolute must but unfortunately not free.

-Excel is decent maintaining IP addresses and device names.

-For Device logins and passwords you can use Keepass

-There are other document management systems like Sharepoint, Alfresco, Documentum, but you need dedicated resources to maintain them. However, they are much better than a simple file server where all the files are just dumped. If you can maintain proper directory structure and make sure that the users also strictly abide by it, then you can get by

Another approach you can use is a master excel tracker sheet which has links to all the different documents. Just make sure that the paths don't change.