My third post over at thwack, the Solarwinds forums, is up, asking how you keep track of servers, applications, IP addresses, warranties, etc. It could also be titled as “CMDBs Suck.”
This is one area that everybody does differently, and there’s some good stuff going on. There’s also some ridiculous stuff going on. I think people put too much information into their CMDBs, particularly information that the CMDB cannot be authoritative for, so it gets out of sync. On the other hand, CMDBs often don’t have complete information about applications, so a sysadmin gets called for everything when it should really be the app guy.
I want to hear about it, and I thought it’d be a good way to get some discussion going. I really want to hear about what you have done that’s nice in this regard, whether it’s just easy to use, simple to maintain, or something super complex that polls the servers for data. I love hearing stories about ridiculousness, but I also take a lot of the good ideas I hear back to my own life and try to implement them.
My last post on what you hate about the tools you use in IT got almost no discussion. I find it hard to believe that nobody wants to complain about the tools they use, but maybe y’all are just tired of thinking about them. Or maybe you’re shy. Regardless, if you don’t have thoughts on configuration management databases you could go visit that post and gripe a little. 🙂
BTW, I’m disabling comments here — please go over and leave them on the posts in the forum!