Database of Systems

When I started in my current job about 18 months ago, I was taking over some responsibilities from a guy who had been gone for six months already. Very quickly I learned that what was documented was done pretty well, but there was quite a bit of stuff that wasn’t documented.

Beyond the lack of documentation about how some things had been setup and configured, there wasn’t any real good record keeping on all of the systems we had. We had a wiki page listing most of the servers, and a few columns of data, but it was a wiki page; designed more for documentation and note taking, not so much for entering and tracking the minute details about servers.

So I set about to create a database and web front to track this minute detail. Version 1 wasn’t perfect, but it got the job done. We could track the specifications of the hardware (RAM, CPU, disks, power supplies, etc), what OS was installed, physical location, backup information, reboot instructions, etc. We started to dig in to bringing our network equipment into the mix. The one part that was the most challenging, but most rewarding, was taking the physical location information, and producing a dynamic rack map for our various server rooms. At the time I built v1 out we were really just beginning conversations about virtualization.

A simple payoff came not too long after releasing v1 to the office. In a meeting something was mentioned about how we had roughly 40-50 servers, but I was able to say with certainty that we had nearly 90. It’s almost like one of those guess-how-many-marbles-are-in-the-jar games, except with hundreds of thousands of dollars of server equipment, and they had obviously guessed low.

Jump forward to 2009, and we are now implementing virtual hosts, and migrating some of our services to said hosts. Over the last month I’ve been working on v2 of the systems database, breaking my tables up into clear separations of the physical and software portions of the server. I had originally built it where the “guest install” and the “physical host” were one in the same. I’ve also been able to make further additions for the networking equipment, so hopefully we’ll be able to log that stuff in as well.

I’m still in the development phase of v2, but I’ve made some big strides with it already. With v1 I rolled almost everything by hand. In v2 I decided to take advantage of the magic of jQuery. The results so far have been very nice, but I still have more to go. Over the next while I’ll highlight some of the jQuery stuff that I’m using.