How do you handle IT documentation for your clients?
Posted by Far_Yoghurt_9417@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 17 comments
I'm an IT admin at a small company (\~50 users, Windows/VMware environment). We have zero documentation: network topology, server configs, dependencies, nothing. Every time something breaks I waste hours figuring out how things are set up.
How do you handle documentation for your clients? What tools do you use? And honestly, do your clients actually keep it updated or does it always end up outdated after a month?
Intelligent-Joey@reddit
We use dokly.co for our internal and public docs. We used to host it ourselves but after some point it got way to messy to handle
cyr0nk0r@reddit
We use archbee for the wiki part of documentation. And netbox for the topology part.
ISeeDeadPackets@reddit
You might be better off posting this in r/msp.
ImFromBosstown@reddit
This is a bot post
korewarp@reddit
Seems so. But what's the point of a bot to make this post? It doesn't even drop any name brands or links. Or is that incoming?
MedicatedDeveloper@reddit
It's for RL training of AI models.
JLee50@reddit
Honestly, that’s fair pushback.
MedicatedDeveloper@reddit
And it was already deleted from /r/msp
GullibleDetective@reddit
Hudu 》it glue 》 si portal 》 secret server 》 others
Never passportal
skidleydee@reddit
Documentation is just always out of date and it doesn't scale. Networks are easy enough if you can enable LLDP across the board, you can find tools that can build a network topology. But for server configs and things like that your looking for state management, normally people use things like ansible to apply state and maintain it but this is easier said then done.
I'd recommend starting with observability to solve this, You're not familiar think about it like logging, monitoring and scheduled tasks mesh together. It's about getting your time back to do actual work and not just play fireman. Say you have a server that has an error that appears in the logs you don't have time to troubleshoot it all the way to the core but you know a reboot will resolve the issue. You can schedule a task to reboot during off hours, you configure monitoring on the key services for that vm. You'll be alerted if any of the services don't come back up after 5 minutes (or whatever you set it to). Once you've done this enough you get enough time back to start refining what's being monitored, so rather then rebooting a vm you have it restart specific services and monitor the status.
Accomplished_Sir_660@reddit
I have everything excluding passwords in OpenDCIM and love it. We are small and have very few changes so once its done its pretty much done.
Titanium125@reddit
Dedicated platforms like IT Glue work well, but cost money obviously. For the price of a server to host it on you can spin up an instance of Bookstack which works well for documentation, but isn't exactly purpose built for it. Something else like IT Flow is also free, but it doubles as a PSA so you get a lot of unnecessary features with it.
For my homelab I go with bookstack, as I find it works well enough, and honestly my homelab setup rivals many SMBs. It doesn't do passwords though, so you need a seperate password soultion. IT Flow does allow you to enter passwords.
You could also just install an instance of Obsidian on your computer for taking notes, but if you have multiple team members that won't work very well.
DaftPump@reddit
Sadly most clients won't 'pay' for my time to document. I keep my own and will give them footnotes should I get hit by a bus or something.
Went through this last week. Client understood I had to charge a few hours of time to figure out all the changes others have done since my visit.
OpenTomatoSauce@reddit
I used to work at a small IT company. We kept 2 sets of notes. One was on our internal SharePoint and the other was on the client's storage.
Our internal notes were disorganized but very complete. Ther was usually a master doc that had contact information and a basic overview of the client and a summary of the contract. The rest was a few folders with config files, scripts, diagrams, and a cache of any specialty software installers. Depending on how often we touched the client the documentation could be accurate to the minute or a few months old. Some techs are better at documentation then others.
The client side notes were clean and sparse. They included all of the contact information for our people and theirs, a current copy of the contract, a network diagram and a summary of the key systems. The client side documentation was kept up to date but did not have any technical configurations.
Every client had primary sales rep assigned to them and keeping the documents cleaned up was part their job, especially the client side docs. Most of our customers had a Synology and we kept the client side docs on that.
The_Lez@reddit
You're an IT admin at your own company? Are you relying on MSP for documentation?
I was in the same boat when I started at my job and the MSP had essentially 0 shared documentation. I started out in Onenote and then transferred stuff out to Bookstack as needed.
Find a spare computer, and set up docker. Then Bookstack, and or GLPI. I like the look of Bookstack's UI better, so I link to bookstack from GLPI.
Don't stress yourself out with trying to complete it 100% at first, but when you find something that needs to be written down, put it in there. '
If you're anything like me, Docker / Linux is going to be really intimidating, but there are so many resources and tools to at least get you running, and then your first piece of documentation is how you set up the container for bookstack.
Febre@reddit
Hudu > IT Glue > IT Boost
These are primarily MSP tools that support multi-tenancy or multiple separate client environments. Would still work well for one company, I’d recommend starting with Hudu.
hurkwurk@reddit
you are small, start small, start building excel sheets for yourself. excel is nice because cells allow you to expand and add in more data to cover more things quickly.
(replace excel with whatever spreadsheet software or freeware you have, or use google docs if you havent chosen one yet)
you can even build out little diagrams and stuff so you can have your shelves/racks sorta visualzed and pages and keep all your stuff together.
you can do pages where you use connector lines to show how you connect all your switches/routers/servers/PCs
in short, you can have one book that is literally your entire company, with dozens of tabs covering every relationship between devices, and if you "get gud" with spreadsheets, you can connect the cells between the tabs so that if you change the information on the index/inventory tab (the first tab) then on every diagram, etc, it will change for you.