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Ask HN: Which software do you guys use for managing devices in rack

29 points| hummerbliss | 5 years ago

Hello HN,

Which software do you use to keep track of ~100 devices in couple of racks. Need to hold all the information related to the device (power, network uplink information, and anscilloriy information such as licenses/serial numberss etc). Network management software seem overkill for this. I don't need to have network discovery.

8 comments

r007c0n7r0l|5 years ago

https://netbox.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

T3OU-736|5 years ago

Another vote for NetBox.

The REST API of NetBox coupled with how responsive the Digital Ocean team behind NetBox is to feature requests are hugely useful. The (relatively) recent additions of patch panels, and cable paths through them are very awesome for documentation.

Only feature I missed from OpenDCIM is the ability to simulate power distribution panel failures to identify what would power off when a particular power feed goes down. This is something which the end user would have to code.

I coupled NetBox with Ansible (JSON module) or Salt, and built a fair bit of automation like that.

With some scripting in (I used Python), system labels printed with barcodes, and a barcode scanner, rack audits become a lot easier.

Add a cross-check against MAC address records (on-host LLDP against NetBox, and both of those against your network discovery tool like NetDot[1] or NetDisco[2]), and you can get quite clever. There are commercial products which do that (they watch for ARP broadcasts and spanning tree change announcements), but they are pricey.

[1] https://github.com/cvicente/Netdot

[2] http://netdisco.org

(Updated: network tool links)

ollybee|5 years ago

+1 Netbox

The Netbox Ansible inventory is mature, and you can use the netbox webhook feature to trigger Ansible playbooks. It's extremely powerful and is the root of almost all of my admin tasks now..

The governance ansible is excellent, the attention to detail coming from user feedback and pull requests really show when you dig into it.

tardoe|5 years ago

Netbox is becoming the Open Source standard for this. https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox

absurddoctor|5 years ago

I no longer work in data centers, but in the past had success with both https://opendcim.org/ and https://www.racktables.org/. RackTables is probably a little simpler for managing just a few cabinets worth of things.

PaulWaldman|5 years ago

Checkout Prometheus for data collection and Grafana for visualization. Prometheus can also be subsitituted for Telegraf and InfluxDB.

Here is an example demo Grafana dashboard for visualizing Promethus data. https://play.grafana.org/d/000000029/prometheus-demo-dashboa...

enz|5 years ago

One of my previous companies was using Shinken (Open Source Edition). Shinken is like Nagios, it's primarily used for monitoring purposes. However, it includes features to hold information related to devices (the location (multi-DC or LAN), which switch the server is plugged in, ...).

mister_hn|5 years ago

You can look at Nagios for example (https://www.nagios.org/) or something like OSQuery (https://www.osquery.io/)