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?)
A spreadsheet (Score:4, Funny)
Rows for hosts, columns for PDU, switch and console ports. Additional rows for asset tag information, unit manufacturer, model number, serial number. Last row for notes on the system, e.g. any historical hardware issues that may be relevant.
Re:A spreadsheet (Score:4, Insightful)
Rows for hosts, columns for PDU, switch and console ports. Additional rows for asset tag information, unit manufacturer, model number, serial number. Last row for notes on the system, e.g. any historical hardware issues that may be relevant.
Because *that* scales well...
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Rows for hosts, columns for PDU, switch and console ports. Additional rows for asset tag information, unit manufacturer, model number, serial number. Last row for notes on the system, e.g. any historical hardware issues that may be relevant.
Because *that* scales well...
Modded troll by someone who has never had to work with a messed up and out of date spreadsheet designed for a 10 node system that has now grown to well over 100 nodes.
Re:A spreadsheet (Score:4, Insightful)
And gets limited to a single user, or passing around the file and worrying about who has the latest copy, etc.
Spreadsheets make piss-poor databases. You could code up a simple app + database system to do that in less than 2 days.
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You could code up a simple app + database system to do that in less than 2 days.
Go on then. Show us how good you are.
Create, Read, Update and Delete (Score:2)
CRUD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhpCodeGenie [wikipedia.org]
1. Download, extract.
2. Twiddle bits
3. Create table space
4. ??
5. Profit
Total time depends on your skills, but really, most of the real work has been done.
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If you're willing to pay me for my time, sure I'll develop it. Unless you honestly think I'm going to donate 12-16 hours of development time to some random guy on Slashdot for the heck of it?
The reality is it takes all of 20 minutes to setup a database that keeps track of as much info as the GP's spreadsheet idea does. If you can't wrap an interface around that in 2 days then I just pity you.
A full fledged application? Yeah, it'll take a bit longer. But something small in place of a half-assed spreadshe
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It works fine for a single digit thousands of hosts and three sysadmins, which is what I use it for. Concurrent write access isn't really an issue since updates are fairly infrequent and it's obvious who should have the write lock on the spreadsheet, that being the guy in the datacenter who's installing or removing equipment.
An app would be nice, but it wouldn't provide any real benefit over the spreadsheet model until it was extended to touch on other areas of datacenter operations. Something like RedHat's
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The best part about this is that you can translate Serial numbers and service tags into quantifiable units and create some pretty good line graphs and pie charts.
TADDM (Score:1)
Advanced mind maping software? (Score:5, Informative)
Might be close enough, I guess...since that's essentially what you want to do, map some aspects of the "electronic mind" that's under your care.
Wikipedia seems to hava a list perfectly adequate as a starting point
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software [wikipedia.org]
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You mean datacenters have several interconnected hierarchies? Mind maps always could model that - apart from the "iconic" tree/star you could set particular shapes or colors for each box, you have another two hierarchies right there. Two trees can sensibly branch from opposing sides of the screen and connect to common boxes. Or the map can simply have a bit of depth, with you choosing which group of connections to show, and which to make more "translucent".
I do not know if available free software can do it
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PS. (Score:2)
And how could I forget to mention that, at least to some degree (where it makes sense), distribution of boxes on a mind map can follow quite closely physical arrangement of you datacenter.
Racktables (Score:5, Informative)
Not sure if it meets his needs exactly, but I've used http://racktables.org/ [racktables.org] in the past and it's worked well for keeping track of a small-ish datacenter (about 400 sqft with 7 full size racks and a couple dozen servers).
Bright Computing Cluster Manager (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.brightcomputing.com/ [brightcomputing.com]
I use Nagios (Score:5, Interesting)
Nagios? Never heard of OpenNMS, I take it (Score:5, Informative)
It does automated network scanning for assets, asset tracking, alerts and notifications, SNMP data collection, reporting, and yes, it has a .svg based network mapper that you can customize with your own graphics. It comes with MIBS for hundreds of devices, but you can easily import your own MIBS for unsupported devices. It's open source, of course. Nagios is just a bunch of disassembled parts. You have to wire it together for each device. Adding new devices is a pain: you have to install the Nagios monitors on each new device. Nagios does not speak SNMP! OpenNMS does speak SNMP, and it will autoscan networks for devices, and devices for capabilities. Adding thousands of devices at a time is a snap. Plus, OpenNMS uses a modular architecture that scales well. We use it on a network consisting of over 2,000 clients at 50 offices, 30 IBM Blade servers hosting hundreds of VMWare virtual hosts, and innumerable network devices, printers, etc.
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I'll second this. Once upon a time I spent weeks trying to get a Nagios setup working the way I wanted until I eventually abandoned it. Recently discovered OpenNMS, and while it's far from perfect it is a huge step up from Nagios. One thing I will warn though, it's a bit of a beast. Full SNMP collection on a few hundred devices requires some decent processing power and a boatload of I/O.
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I've heard horror stories setting up Nagios, but to be honest, my setup was a breeze. I did the smart thing, and wrote templates for each kind of device I'd be using, and then setup Puppet to push new Linux servers into Nagios (and set them up properly) automatically. For my windows computers, AD automatically sets everything up for me (with the exception of adding the server to Nagios, which is done via a shell script). Granted, I have a small system now (
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I switched from Nagios to OpenNMS as well. With OpenNMS, I ran the yum install, put in my IP ranges and community strings, and that was it. It discovered, monitored, and graphed Cisco, Windows, and Linux boxes common services after 2 minutes of configuration (literally). No horror story about Nagios, OpenNMS just scaled better and required no shell scripts or setup really.
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And for the record, Nagios does do SNMP
What the parent was referring to is the fact Nagios itself internally does NOT do SNMP, nor see any SNMP data what so ever outside of a preprocessed result code.
Nagios uses external programs (Mosty perl, but anything that can spit out exit codes and stdout text will work) which are what uses SNMP.
All of my SNMP monitored devices are polled by perl scripts that came with Nagios. All Nagios sees from them is a return code with one of three states, not the SNMP data.
While most people tell you to setup MRTG or
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PNP4Nagios for RRD graphs/trending. It integrates well with nagios for performance data.
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 managemen
Pay for it. (Score:5, Funny)
This problem has several paid solutions, all of which work fairly well, and make maintaining a data center the job of one person, instead of 20 people looking at a spreadsheet and log files. I haven't found an open-source package that is nearly as competent as the integrated solutions offered by HP, IBM and others. Warning: sticker-shock is included. Bonus: PHBs like looking at pretty pictures, and all the commercial tracking software produces pretty pictures. Your PHB looks like a super-hero to his PHBs, and you become an invaluable asset to your PHB for making him look good.
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I finally just wrote my own system for tracking all the connections in the datacenter at my last job, unfotunately that former boss did not wish to OSS it, nor sell the product to outsiders. I wish I had it at my current job.
That being said, it is actually suprisingly simple to write your own system, the only difficult part at all is creating the different templates for all the different objects you use, other than that, its a very simple database of objects, and connections.
Human input (Score:3, Interesting)
OCS inventory and GLPI (Score:2)
GLPI is the asset management DB and OCS Inventory, inventories your inventory.
There are 2 sides to asset management.
What should be.
Reality.
killer app needed. (Score:2)
I've been trying to find something for over a year to do just that.
Nothing meets all my needs yet.
Right now I'm using racktables [racktables.org],Open-AudIT [open-audit.org] and some stuff I wrote to fill in the gaps.
The real problem of course is getting all the techs to actually update stuff when they move it.
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Yeah shocking.
I do think if someone took the time to clean that up it would be a big improvement.
The advantage is, almost anyone could do it, with some directions, it just takes time.
Rackview (Score:2, Informative)
The system used to visualize the OSUOSL lab is called Rackview.
http://rackview.sourceforge.net/
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.
Asset Tracking (Score:2)
PEN AND PAPER (Score:1)
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NOOB! Everyone knows PENCIL and paper is so much more efficient than pen and paper.
Sheesh. Pen and Paper. LAWLS.
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).
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Another vote for the home-brew option.
I built the web interface that we are using at work to track server information. Due to the fact that it was built completely from scratch (using Perl, that language that so many people claim is dying a slow painful death), we were able to customize it to integrate into a number of other systems such as equipment locations, IP address management, Nagios service monitoring (currently monitoring over 13000 services), server bandwidth usage tracking, internal issue trackin
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The problem with home-brew is, we are all inventing the same wheels, over and over again. And what for ?
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The problem with home-brew is, we are all inventing the same wheels, over and over again. And what for ?
Because we were told to "make it work". We weren't given a budget so we couldn't go out and buy something off the shelf. And we didn't see an open source tool that could combine all of those functions into a single easy-to-use interface. Regardless of what existing tool we started with, we would have to hack on several other systems just to make it work. Rather than reverse engineering 4-5 different software tools and hacking them all together into one interface, then figuring out how to connect it to our b
Numara Track-It! (Score:2)
MAM (Score:1)
I work for a descent size bank and we tried Mercury Application Mapping (bought out my HP). It uses nmap which security freaked out over. Once it goes out and finds everything, it draws lines to and from each component. It does this by looking at certain config files in each app (web, app, db, etc.) which was cool but permissions were a hassle. In the long run it took quite a lot of effort to get anything out of the package and we eventually scrapped it completely. It costs big bucks or at least it did for
GLPI (Score:2)
Wiki + Dia + MySQL (Score:2)
What the OSUOSL uses and beyond (Score:4, Informative)
The project you saw at OSCON was called RAIV (Rack And Inventory Viewer). Unfortunately it ran into a dead-end and is currently vapor-ware. Currently we're using an internal CakePHP webapp for basic inventory and customer tracking, but its very buggy and lacks many features.
We are in the midst of working on a completely new project that will cover many of the problems mentioned in this article and beyond. Think of it like an open source datacenter management webapp and backend. Its still in the planning stages, but the intent is to have a plugin based system where you can use the inventory plugin, DNS/DHCP plugin (to replace maintain), virtualization management (deployment and console access), etc all in one interface. The idea is to create an admin interface and a customer interface so that they can access and see information about their environment. We're far from having a demoed project but we hope to have something soon.
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Interesting! Thanks for the reply.
What I liked, being a visual person, was the way that things on-screen were easily matched w/ their physical counterparts. I'm in charge (for good reason) of *nobody's* data center, but I was taken by that system's use of graphics. I would imagine not being impressed by abstract representations and cute names if a certain machine is on the fritz at 3:31 a.m.
timothy
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RAIV wasn't graphical at all, so you must be thinking of the virtual server room tour we put together 2 years ago.
The code for that is here: http://git.osuosl.org/?p=rackview.git [osuosl.org]
however theres no documentation, and likely doesn't work with the latest version of openlaszlo. It wasn't tied into our inventory system at all. I manually merged several different sources into a single xml file. We've since moved away from laszlo in favor of html+css+javascript+svg. Eventually we might rewrite this, but hav
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I would have given you some points if I could. RackMonkey is really a good solution. Although I don't know if it scales to the point where questioner needs it.
We would have taken this software but there was only one problem. We have several devices (like e.g. firewalls) which are only "1/2 U". Meaning we have two devices next to each other. And this could not be represented at the time when we evaluated the software.
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There are a few non-standard racks in my facility too, in that case we added notes to describe what is what. Irritating that it marked me as 'anonymous coward'... I'm logged in!
RFID IT Asset Tracking Solution (tested great!) (Score:1)
I looked at this solution -> We will probably get it:
IT Asset Management (ITAM) is becoming an increasingly important, yet difficult responsibility as the number of IT assets increases exponentially. Trying to keep track of mobile assets adds to the complexity. Surprisingly many organizations still use time-consuming manual pencil and paper, or barcode processes to track IT assets. Not only are these processes extremely labor intensive, they are often prone to human error. RFID technology can be leverage
Visio + Custom DB (Score:1)
This great idea keeps coming back (Score:2)
Automated inventory programs seem like the answer to a prayer. Unfortunately, the reality is that they're kinda disappointing. The big problem with this stuff is that it isn't psychic. Some very important pieces of information (like the physical location of the machine) can't be automatically determined. I see someone getting ready to reply with something about IP addresses; that's not as useful as you might imagine - IP addresses tend to change over time. The best you can do with IP addresses is determini
Use the network (Score:2)
So if you know the network topology to anchor to and enforce discipline in wiring, you can derive specific location from the network (i.e. this is the way xCAT correlates physical location to a logical entity). If you use near-rack edge switches, even if you are weak in your discipline, it at least narrows it down to the rack.
xCAT's approach is straightforward, it tracks either what is attached to an ethernet port or a physical blade bay.
It is by no means a complete 'answer' to the whole problem (it will c
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You've got three problems:
1. Physical.
1a. Location. Could be a room number, a ceiling space in a hall. (leaf switches tend to live here in many buildings) If it's a server room you need rack and level information.
1b. What it is. Size, maker, asset tag number, Stuff you can't find from an ssh login.
2. Topological:
2a. Network connectivity. What wires to what. Some of this can be mapped automatically. Ping, followed by arp gives you the MAC/IP mapping. Most managed switches can give you a MAC/Port m
nVentory (Score:2)
I used a somewhat customized version of nVentory http://sourceforge.net/projects/nventory/ to manage my data center. The nice thing about it is that you can build clients that connect, update and register themselves through a RESTful interface. It comes with a working linux client, other clients are pretty trivial to make using the linux client as an example.
Zenoss (Score:1)
This one works well. Don't use a spreadsheet! (Score:1)
GLPI? (Score:2)
Not graphical mapping but does do inventory.. Hook it to OCS and it will collect some data for you automatically.
try Rackmonkey (Score:1)
Give this a try. It very good at tracking physical assets such as rack/server. It doesn't doe a whole datacenter but we modified the code to give just back rows of racks.
http://flux.org.uk/projects/rackmonkey/ [flux.org.uk]
Now the physical asset track is in one place, for inter-dependency, I create an diagram of the interconnect at a more logical level since I know the physical will be correct. This could be say a set of switches connecting to a distribution switch and etc..
Homegrown LAMP app or Visio. (Score:2)
Price out a full-on Maximo or Altiris implementation, complete with vendor visit. Take this quote and determine how many hours of your workers' time can be covered with that payment.
Define some OSS components to do what you want to do - Monitoring, clickable representations, database connection, provisioning, etc., and write some code to glue them together. Don't forget to version control, and write documentation as you go.
I've done this before, and I've also found a way to make it happen using Visio and A
topology viewer (Score:1)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Tivoli_Storage_Productivity_Center [wikipedia.org]
Racktables! (Score:2)
Racktables.org is a very good, Free / Open Source solution to your problem. From the SourceForge description:
Racktables is a nifty and robust solution for datacenter and server room asset management. It helps document hardware assets, network addresses, space in racks, networks configuration and much, much more!
It lets you lay out racks, assign IP Address to assets, yadda yadda. Live Demo here:
http://racktables.org/demo.php [racktables.org]
Last code update was 2010-02-17, and the guy seems to be good about maintaining it
Capacity Planner (Score:2)
Open Source Asset Management (Score:2)
When working for a big three letter IT company I was tasked to design and implement HW/SW asset tracking system. It's a complex task and my team grew to include about 4 programmers. We automated much of the process as it is the only reliable way to gather the data. In time it also read data from other asset and configuration systems like Zenworks, TCM, TLM and even Citrix (though that was an odd fit).
After I left I decided that it would be a good idea for an Open Source project. I encapsulated and refined
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Thank you for your feed back.
Discipline (Score:2)
The phrasing at least makes it sound like you have some lack of discipline in how it has grown and possibly how it will continue to grow. For some topologies (SAN, network), there are technologies (the best 'generally' scoped ones aren't free) that can mitigate even without sticking to one vendor, but for bulk power topology, you have nothing but discipline to do it. At the end of the day, no matter how fancy, the basic principle will be akin to a relational database that is manually maintained for that.
MachDB (Score:1)
I wrote MachDB for this exact purpose. Had a datacenter of a few hundred machines and needed to keep track of them in a better way than a wiki page. http://www.machdb.org./ [www.machdb.org] It's automated on the back end and presents a web GUI.
not a DC (Score:1)
Then there are tens of switches...
That's not a Data Center, it's a wiring closet.
Come back when you have hundreds or thousands of switches.
Racksmith (Score:1)
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 re
OpenNetAdmin.com might be useful (Score:1)
Opencabling (Score:1)
Asset Tracker for Request Tracker (Score:2)
mySheets (Score:1)
Digg.com rolled their own to do this (Score:1)