GUI-Based Asset-Tracking Tools For a Datacenter? 113
toruonu writes "How do you keep track of what's in your datacenter, where it is, what it's connected to and what is it doing right now? I mean I have built a datacenter from scratch over the years and I have machines from Sun, IBM, HP, Supermicro. I have machines that are simple workernodes and machines that are heavy grade storage consolidation machines. Then there are tens of switches, some for interconnect, some for management and don't get me started on the UPSs etc. So how does one keep any kind of decent track of such a system as the current form of twiki pages with various tables just doesn't cut it anymore and I'm looking for a freeware solution that could actually show me a visual representation of the various nodes in the racks, their connections and dependencies. Just to give a simple example, if I'm going to disconnect UPS #3 right now and swap switch #5, which machines should I even consider taking offline?" (The best-looking such system I've seen was being used at OSCON at a display booth for the Open Source Lab, and I think it was home-grown. Anyone who can shed light on that system?)
I use Nagios (Score:5, Interesting)
Human input (Score:3, Interesting)
Rackmonkey (Score:3, Interesting)
http://flux.org.uk/projects/rackmonkey/
This is what I use to keep track of the racks in my work's facility. It allows you to put in a whole lot more than just simple rack location. It's a wonderful tool.
We wrote our own... (Score:3, Interesting)
So you could litterally navigate to a particular building/floor, and then click on the cube/location and it will then show a list of all the equipment in that area. You can add new hardware to that location or click on a piece of hardware and view its information (CPU type/speed, hostname, IP address, MAC address, RAM, etc..) and if it moved to a new location, you click on a "move" button, and it opens up the list of buildings/floor plans and you simply navigate and click on the place where it moved to, and then update the database record.
We add some more sophisticated features like barcodes to cubicles and to the systems themselves and you can go around with a barcode scanner hooked up to a laptop and simply scan the barcode on a cubicle, and then scan all the barcodes of equipment in the cubicle and it would automatically associate all that equipment with that particular location (and if it was a new piece of equipment, it would open the form to add the equipment into the database).
Re:Advanced mind maping software? (Score:2, Interesting)
Still looking, but here's my advice (Score:1, Interesting)
I have used and researched this topic for years, and have been largely unsatisfied. Hopefully my trials will save you some time.
Basic Asset Management tracks the things you usually can't ping or poll -- like rack units, power strips, cables, barcode stickers, purchase and warranty information, etc. Without automation you need discipline to keep these up to date, and that usually means sticking to a process. You also need a way to audit your dataset, including tracking who performed the audit and when, to regularly ensure it's correct and that your change process is working.
Many of the suggestions here are for Operations Management (monitoring stuff, e.g. Zenoss, Nagios, OpenNMS, OpenView, etc), and have some Asset Mgmt features that are truly sub-par. Some trouble ticketing packages like Numara Track-IT and OpsManager try to cram in asset management and look tempting, but my experience with both was disappointing. We ditched Track-IT in favor of Trac, which is fantastic but has no Asset plug-in offerings.
Then you've got the hard-core Asset Management platforms like IBM Tivoli (Maximo) and BMC Remedy. I sat through a week of training for Maximo and was convinced you could spend years just rolling it out to get to a usable state. Who has that kind of time and money. They're also monsters to maintain, sitting on multiple servers and layers of javaware.
Datacenter asset management is starting to come into its own. Aperture has a product (unfortunately) called Vista that wraps a process around graphically populating and interconnecting your rack elevations on the datacenter floor. It's good, but a tad buggy, and we found support to be only mediocre. APC (the UPS people) now have similar product offerings -- I haven't used them, but they appear to have potential. Again though, these are not free but they are highly tailored to datacenters.
Free tools like RackMonkey might get you an 80% solution. I currently use visio for layer-2 and rack drawings, and have considered integrating them with a database or XML back-end for change tracking and auditing (a little-known visio feature). I'm considering writing an inventory plug-in for Trac, which is easy to use and customize, is great for tracking changes, and integrates perfectly with our ticketing, wiki, and subversion docs. I've also implemented Open-Audit to help automate keeping track of what's inside each box, again helping verify the asset system. In the end, it probably won't be one-product-fits-all, but a best-of-breed amalgamation. Best of luck!
I use Zabbix (Score:2, Interesting)
I use Zabbix to monitor everything. It will monitor just about everything out there and isn't just limited to SNMP like OpenNMS. It is much easier to install, configure, and maintain then Nagios and it has much prettier graphs and management tools then Cacti.
The reason why Zabbix stands out from the others to me is because of how well it functions in the server room for monitoring, alerting, and self healing plus when management walks by they are always impressed. The display that sits on the wall is visually appealing to them when they see the graphs and colors and since that system is set up for read access only they can drag time lines around, see other graphs, print reports on trouble systems, and they can do this on their own (aka: they don't pester me for the information!). Meanwhile, Zabbix is off and monitoring things like the DHCP server so that when a MAC it doesn't know shows up, I get a complete nmap scan of the system (tools are supported out of the box, but this is something you setup manually in the discovery section), and the systems activities are tracked and monitored until the box is configured as a trusted server. Zabbix watches things like a proprietary (ugh) program that is known to crash a few times a week and when it does crash, Zabbix flushes the logs, and restarts the program for me; I just get an email "The program crashed; I fixed it." I even have Zabbix monitor SMART information on the hard drives so I can track everything down to the hard drive serial numbers, temperature, and prefail states. Several of the UPS's are fairly intelligent and work well with the OS, so I have Zabbix monitor those (those few that don't even have a port to connect to the computer I still track manually). It does everything from problem finder, to healer, to network watchdog.
The one thing it doesn't do well is the automatic population of server data even though it has manual entry fields for Server Serial Number, MAC address's, ect, ect, ect. However, it was trivial setting up Zabbix to run a script that gathers that information up and dumps it into the SQL fields for that system.