Data Center Management Tools?

[bjarvis]

We use nagios for monitoring software & servers, but I need something to help me track & plan hardware location, electrical capacity and such within my data center. Anyone have ideas or suggestions?

Comments

[excessor.livejournal.com]

Excel.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Sadly, that's the answer my project manager has arbitrarily taken.

More precisely, he --without warning or consultation-- threw out the database system we were all using (declaring that he couldn't figure it out) and is now demanding we use his spreadsheet which doesn't do half of the things he declares we must do if he is going to be successful.

I have some ideas myself of how things should work but before I go out and re-invent the wheel, I thought I'd see what other folks are doing.

[excessor.livejournal.com]

I was merely being snarky because Excel is the wrong answer.

I'm dealing with something similar here at work. We have a project tracking system that ties into several other systems so that we can get on-demand reports of staffing, project status, project cost, etc. over the entire 6K+ engineering teams. Cool, huh? Someone decided that my team doesn't need to be in that tool. That same someone now wants all the numbers (costs, rollups, team assignments), that he told us not to put into the system. Idiot.

[cpj.livejournal.com]

Advanced ticketing or issue tracking management systems will come with database solutions for tracking hardware, switch port connections, and stuff like that.

Even some network management tools better than Nagios offer host discovery solutions.

[cpj.livejournal.com]

Excel doesn't scale. A better solution will use a database engine.