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GUI-Based Asset-Tracking Tools For a Datacenter?
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?)
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.
Not free or open source. I think IBM Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager or TADDM (what a name) can help you discover the machines and dependencis you had there. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/taddm/ But i don't know if it will help ou with your example of the UPS. And it will cost you the left nut and half of the other.
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
One that hath name thou can not otter
Not sure if it meets his needs exactly, but I've used http://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).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
A couple of weeks ago there was this company called Bright Computing, that was pitching their software called Cluster Manager, which looked very cool as they had an excellent interface and could keep track of everything from machines, to routers, switches, power usage etc. Something to look into.
http://www.brightcomputing.com/
I use Nagios for that kind of thing. Don't get me wrong, it isn't "perfect" at it, but it does a decent job once setup. If you use parenting in the configuration files, you can click on "network map", and immediately see each hosts' dependencies. And IIRC there are comment fields that you can write misc information (such as rack position, switch position, model, make, etc)... And it's free...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I don't know your solution, but I can tell you it will involve automatic network mapping and polling of services. You need to find a solution that relies on human input as little as possible. Otherwise documentation gets out of date, no longer trustworthy, leading to lack of incentive to update it, ...
With a big budget, I'd go for RFID on everything, with local readers doing triangulation. That's the only way to really track physical objects. Add that to the maps that network discovery makes and you've got what you need.
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
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,Open-AudIT 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.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
The system used to visualize the OSUOSL lab is called Rackview.
http://rackview.sourceforge.net/
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.
Many of the older IBMs (and probably the newer ones?) came with (by default or as an option) asset tracking capabilities - I know all of my smaller ones had them by default (including the RFID unit) - though my bigger ones do not come with them (I guess because you'd need a few people or a forklift to move them). You may want to look into that for your IBM servers. It included (among other features) RFID tracking to know when/if a machine was moved, moving, being removed, etc.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Pen and paper has been proven to be have the highest ROI, ease of use, enterprise scalability, and most importantly, security, of any inventory solution. It is also an extremely dynamic application, allowing an unprecedented degree of freedom in the form of sketches, diagrams, language flexibility, etc. Also, since manufacturers conform to the process of using ink and paper to print ID tags and model numbers on their equipment, this application will seamlessly integrate. It is extensible with self-adhesive stickers. This Off-The-Shelf software is available at any corner store. Its product lifetime is in the span of hundreds of years. There is no competition that can match it.
Seriously, we looked all over for something, but nothing fit. Grant it, we did this back in 2000-2001 timeframe. We setup a mysql database, and wrote up a website with php which was the interface. We scanned in floor plans of the buildings and setup an image clickmap for all the cubicles/locations on the floor plans and had them all point to a unique location_id. The location_id's were one of the keys in the datbase to track the hardware.
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).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What we'll do is make a device that's about 6" long, maybe 1/4" in diameter. At one end we'll have some kind of a mechanism to enable us to create markings on a surface. Next, we'll come up with thin sheets of material that we can mark up. Just spitballing, maybe we'll call it... pencil and........ paper. Yes, pencil and paper. That was the easy part... the hard part is figuring out where to put all these pieces of paper once they've been marked...
Symantec bought a company called Altiris a couple years ago and Altiris had a pretty good asset/CMDB solution where you could define relationships like this and run reports to see what impact would be seen if you were doing maintenance on a particular piece.
More details at www.altiris.com
I used Numara Track-It! for a few years while doing desktop/server admin. There are some nice auditing tools in there which grab all the hardware and software info automatically. It is highly configurable too. I'm sure there are better solutions out there, but that is what I used.
Though it's not an adequate tool for a wide array of CMDB purposes, if all you need is something to keep track of servers and network layouts, I'd recommend "The Dude"...
http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude.php
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 us and not it sits somewhere not being used...that never happens of course.
Seriously, last datacenter I worked, we had 2 whiteboards along one wall with the whole thing charted in multicolor dry-erase... it worked very well for our day to day needs. Of course there were visio diagrams that got updated regularly in case of accidental erasure of the whiteboard, and everything was tagged with labels indicating what it was and what it was connected to.
Gotta love the captcha: voltage
GLPI, works well for us, and it's GPL, what more can you ask ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
We use a wiki (XWiki) with various tables to match machines to replacement FRUs, diagrams done in Dia (or OmniGraffle), and a homegrown inventory DB in MySQL to track parts & other equipment availability. There's no magic solution. You just need to pick a tool and make your staff stick to it. Here, what works well is distributing responsbility for various subsystems to different admins, so that no one admin is overwhelmed with administrative work. You need an FC controller board, you go talk to the person who 'owns' the SAN subsystem parts-- if they're out, no biggie, because it's all in the wiki. Just update the quantity in the DB and let the person know in case they need to order more stock.
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.
I realize it's not free, but I've found that to get a proper scope/view of what's going on in a large datacenter that implementing a full ITIL solution tends to be the best bet. Here where I work we use Servicedesk Enterprise by ManageEngine/Zoho. If it absolutely must be FOSS, I can't think of a better way to handle it than using Nagios with some of the varied plugins to do auto-tracking/creation of nodes, and something to allow you to do click-based management (click a node, get an SSH window?).
http://www.i-doit.org/
Rackmonkey is a nice open source package that does some of what you ask for...
http://flux.org.uk/projects/rackmonkey/
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 leveraged not only to automate the physical inventory process, but also to provide real-time tracking and security of IT equipment.
Data center staff are typically not employed to maintain IT asset inventories, yet they are ultimately responsible for accounting for hardware and the data they contain.
Specialized RFID tags enable small devices such as blade servers to be read without pulling them out the racks. Data center assets can be tracked by walking around with handheld RFID readers and by placing fixed readers at entry/exit points and other strategic locations to track the movement of equipment.
Some IT vendors such as Dell, HP, IBM and others are beginning to offer services to tag equipment with RFID tags prior to shipping to the customer. This not only eliminates the need for customers to tag equipment, it can help automate the internal receiving, provisioning, and deployment processes.
http://www.inlogic.com/solutions/it.aspx#data_centers
We took measurements of everything and put it in visio to scale. An overhead view and at least a front view of each rack works well. That's for the visual part. For the connections, use a database so it can be easily queried and traced. Full dependency reports may take some SQL wizardry, but can be accomplished if the DB is carefully designed.
GLPI is the asset management DB and OCS Inventory, inventories your inventory.
There are 2 sides to asset management.
What should be.
Reality.
Deleted
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 determining what facility the machine is currently in - if you assign different subnets to each facility. That doesn't get you the detail you want, but at least you can see from the machine's IP address that it's in the data center subnet. That tells you it's in the data center, but not precisely where it's located.
There's also the machines that are shut down or off the network for whatever reason; the automated tool won't find them. And you'll find that these inventory tools can't even reliably tell what services / programs are running on a particular machine - they can only identify the ones that they know about. There's a lot of programs / services in use that will show up as *unknown* if they show up at all.
The big issue: there is much info that you need that can't be discovered by your magical inventory tool. Those things can only be discovered by a human being at the machine so they can write it down and then type it into the inventory program. You might be better off just to stop at the "write it down" stage and keep paper records instead. In either case, the success of the process depends upon the human beings collecting all the manual data accurately and updating those records each and every time they add / move / change a machine or the software running on it as well as make any changes in the network topology that might change the network address of a machine.
I've been the guy that got stuck making something like this work several times; management really wants this information (in colorful presentations) and your accounting department needs to know when you scrap a machine so they don't keep paying property tax on it. What I've discovered time and time again: everyone who touches those machines in any way needs to log everything they do to any machine or the network. In the real world, those folks will be in too big a hurry, forget to log the change, or log the change inaccurately. And the inventory programs are somewhat less than perfect: every one I've tested would miss or incorrectly indentify machines and software. Even better, I've seen phantom machines show up in the inventory program listings. A very popular gotcha: to work around the problem of turned off machines the inventory program will hold onto that listing even though it doesn't detect that machine - it might come back online in an hour or two. What happens in the real world is someone (or something) renames the machine. Now the inventory program see it and thinks it's a new machine and adds it to the database. The old listing is still there and you've got a phantom machine. Keeping track of software licenses sounds good and most of these programs promise to do that. But far too many are unable to tell an Excel viewer from Excel.
Here's what you need to know about these automated inventory tools: if you currently keep accurate paper records and everyone faithfully updates them with every change, then an inventory program can provide some value - as a way to verify the paper records and generate colorful presentations for management. But if (like most companies) you don't have paper records or they're badly out of date or incomplete because people change things and don't record the changes then an inventory program will not work for you; garbage in, garbage out. Remember that those same people will be updating the inventory program with the data it can't find by itself and if they weren't doing it before the program, they won't do it afterwards either. Also, you can not trust the output of the program - i
CRUD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhpCodeGenie
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.
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.
I'm testing Zenoss which tracks SNMP events, SSH commands to linux and darwin nodes like df and ifconfig, and WMI. If you are organized on the switches and hostnames, it can really help! \m/
\m/
http://www.open-audit.org/
http://opennetadmin.com/ OpenNetAdmin provides a database managed inventory of your IP network. Each host can be tracked via a centralized AJAX enabled web interface that can help reduce tracking errors. A full CLI interface is available as well to use for scripting and bulk work. We hope to provide a useful Network Management application for managing your IP subnets and hosts. Stop using spreadsheets to manage your network! Start doing proper IP address management!
http://credme.com/verify/slashdot.org/sixminutemile?60819936046573
Seriously, how many machines can you track on a whiteboard? Go-ups, or come-downs, *maybe*..
Mish-mash of green, black, and red Expo by three different hands?
What happens when Curly and Larry are screwing around and randomly remove data, only to be discovered by Moe, come action time?
Hilarity ensues!!
Not graphical mapping but does do inventory.. Hook it to OCS and it will collect some data for you automatically.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This doesn't seem impossible, just time-consuming to initially produce.
Combination of dmidecode dumps, ripping through certain /etc files (or registry keys on Windows boxen), ability to talk to all switches & routers in the network and look at mac-address-table, etc.. should be able to paint a pretty clear picture of what networking equipment exists, what servers exist and of what type, etc. You have to fill in physical location and that'd be about it.
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/
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..
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 Access. Take some of those scrappy spreadsheets and import them into a new Access Database. Add some of the wishlist items and define some secondary tables - vendor and support contact info, customer data, performance metrics, hardware details (serial number, date of purchase, PO#, etc).
Visio documents can be easily generated from that Access database, if you spend a few days getting familiar with the process. Once that level of mastery exists, it's trivial to templatize your environment and provide a web-accessible graphical tool.
I'm not sure if there is a good free open source tool kit for this sort of thing. I do know that IBM offers a product to handle this sort of thing called TPC. The keyword you'll want to use when searching for a graphical representation of this stuff is "topology viewer".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Tivoli_Storage_Productivity_Center
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
Last code update was 2010-02-17, and the guy seems to be good about maintaining it and adding new features. Its not "sexy" in the sense that your not looking at actual Visio diagrams of the gear in the racks. If you really need that, then I would suggest the RackWise solution (http://www.rackwise.com/), which has two offerings: 1) SaaS, where you pay by rack, at roughly $300 per rack. Its a plug-in to Visio, and your rack models are stored up in the cloud., 2) onsite appliance, where you pay through the nose (!!) but get the added benefit of integrating power management functionality into the solution.. i.e. how much power is this rack drawing, what PDU's is it attached to, etc. Option #2 is for large-ish (100+ rack) datacenters, IIRC.
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 correlate servers to a location, and even track asset tags, model, and serial number and do some other things), but it is a philosophy to apply for physical information derived from a pure 'logical' view of a datacenter.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
VMware's Capacity Planner will find all of the computers on your network and tell you what's inside of them. While it won't inventory UPSes, it can help you inventory your servers. http://www.vmware.com/products/capacity-planner/
No, I will not work for your startup
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 what I learned in the database design and XML (DTDs and XSDs) for data shredders and publishers to make data collection a modular approach and have pretty much finished that stage.
Unfortunately I am yet to implement the GUI as I am still deciding how I will approach it. In my commercial project, previously, we implemented the GUI in a web based PHP which was ok - but had limitations (requiring many stored procedures). I was thinking of using Java for the GUI as a way to spend some more time in Java and gain some experience there (I'm coming from a C background). I've been looking into Hibernate, Spring and Jakata Struts but must confess I am a total noob in these areas and don't even know what sort of pitfalls I'm about to get myself into. I've even considered EXTjs but I think I prefer the Java approach, so if anyone can offer the benefit of their experience here that would be great.
I know my designs are solid as I have used the approach before and I may have an employer who will sponsor me to write the UI as they want/need exactly this software. I didn't really think there would be enough interest in it to have a slashdot story. Lastly I'm trying to figure a funky name - I just don't think a shortened version of Asset Manager - though funny - would cut it ;-)
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Look into a facilities management database (goggle CAFM or CIFM). We have the data centers completely covered from the facilities perspective (electrical, mechanical, etc) and we have lots of expensive assets. It's tied to a read only soft copy of the buildings as-builts, has a PM program that creates/assigns work orders automatically, bar coding system for tools that walk away, etc. Works great for SOX compliance.
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. The danger here is that panic situations and carelessness without discipline will cause the physical reality to drift from your logical view.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
One that hath name thou can not otter
http://www.nocworx.com/
Disclaimer: I work for the parent company.
Might not be exactly what you're looking for but we use it for all the management stuff across three datacenters in the hosting company I work for. It can manage switches/power strips/etc and track inventory. It works pretty well and is actively developed. I have no idea what the cost is though.
I use http://www.open-audit.org/ which has been around for 5+ years now.
What you need is a CMDB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management_database there are a lot of vendors with complete solutions for Asset Management.. with GUI's of course..
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./ It's automated on the back end and presents a web GUI.
"E Pluribus Unix"
u have to understand that there is actually NO universal standards ever made
thus no one such product could ever inventory all of them
u have to keep that "thing" evolving over time...
or u even may need several inventory systems
so to inventory those systems by human
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.
SIGLOST && SIGUNUSED && SIGQUIT
Its still in its early days but you might wanna have a look at http://racksmith.net/. Its aiming help you map multiple datacenters spread over a campus. (servers, patches, cables....) I'm working on it with a group I knew at uni & we're looking to make a stable release within 1 month. Theres an online demo (which is the latest build) and also a screencast of out old alpha release. http://racksmith.net/demo/
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!
Sysaid is a great package and free unless requiring enterprise features. There is a CMDB module (costs) which not only provides a graphical representation of how your hardware is connected it also allows the package to be intelligent about possible implications for devices connecting to a failed device.
There is so much in this suite and it works really well. Good community aswell.
Definitely worth checking out!!!
Bottom line is that asset management can be a huge undertaking to accomplish. You need to find out the most important items you need to keep track of and track them well. It will probably be hard to find one application that will do it all. While primarily an IPAM (IP address management) solution, I would suggest http://opennetadmin.com./ It will track subnets, IPs, DNS etc and build DNS and DHCP server configurations. There is also a plugin for managing rack allocations in a fairly basic way (no connections). I think there is plenty of room for improvements from plugins, maybe something to do graphviz diagrams etc. Figured I'd throw that one out there for whoever could benefit from it.
I think java swing is a very good way to handle this. PHP is very powerful and probably could handle everything you need it to do. Fox Toolkit or QT would work well if you don't mind C++. Not sure about licensing issues mixing QT with an open source project, I haven't had need to research that before.
Doesn't seem to have the kind of visual representation you're looking for though.
But from what I've read it would fit your specs otherwise.
Haven't tried it myself yet. Could be that it's just too focused on ITIL...
Five years ago I started developing OpenCabling ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencabling/ ) with your needs in mind. It helps me document my network, take care of every fibre, cable and port. It still needs some development, but it can solve your problems. Leandro http://visittuscany.dardini.it/
It's called a Configuration Management Database.
Google it.
I worked for a company called nlyte Software who do all data-centre and asset management. It's not open source but it does everything.
www.nlyte.com
Asset Tracker works nice for us and is integrated inside Request Tracker. The web site only has the download item and the software is a little old but it runs surprisingly well.
Doesn't everyone use a spreadsheet?
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.
Guys, check out software called dcTrack. It does all the above! http://dcTrack.com from Raritan.
It is a full data center infrastructure management solution. Tracks assets visually using an AutoCAD or Visio floor plan, does rack elevations, IP address management, visual tracing of connections through multiple hops all controled with a Chanage Management system.
It's really cool :)
Foswiki is kinda twiki (tm), only newer version and not commercial, and much improved. You can draw any data you want with foswiki, and very dynamically. E.g with the DirectedGraphPlugin. It all depends on you. There is a learning curve, for sure, but it's totally worth it. You decide if you relate UPS, switches, servers or services or whatever to each other and how to draw them. Of course you might want a more finished app that does much of the job out-of-the-box but then you don't have all the other stuff that is powerful and good about foswiki. If you are capable and want a really good product. Watch out for version 1.1 due very soon, and 2.0 hopefully later on.
is not the best and might not fullfill your needs, but the ease of deployment and coding capabilities with their own QL surely make it a good candidate www.paglo.com
Thank you for your feed back.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm working to develop a tracking system (web based) with client for all Unix systems, this is version 2 of an internal application we use it to track our servers. The system is very powerful and fully customizable to collect whatever you want and when you want. if you are interested to test it and to help me in the testing phase, contact me at (ahmad .@. altwaijiry.com)
PS: version 2 will be release as Open source project, I expect this within 2 months.
It was on their blog just the other day, coincidentally: clusto@digg
Move sig!