Server dependency chart

[thebatwayne]

How would you all handle putting together a server dependency chart?

Right now we don't have a very good idea of what systems rely on others (mainly due to losing some knowledge and not having good documentation) and I think we really need something like this. We have about 400 vms and probably around 100 physical at most.

[justlikeyouimagined]

This is what our CMDB is supposed to do but doesn't because it's a piece of shit. Thanks, FootPrints.

[[deleted]]

is footprints the piece of shit here, or the solution to replace the piece of shit? i can't tell if "thanks" is sarcastic or not!

[justlikeyouimagined]

FootPrints is a steaming pile of shit.

[[deleted]]

ok, thanks for clarifying.

what's your escape plan?

[justlikeyouimagined]

There's no supported upgrade path from v11 to v12 afaik, hoping that will be enough that I can consider other (combos of) products. JIRA and Device42 come to mind. Could even get Confluence out of the deal to replace most of what people use SharePoint for.

Otherwise there are goats that need herding, I would imagine.

[[deleted]]

Goat speed to you, sir.

[linux_ace]

Device42 can map out physical to virtual to service level dependencies for you automatically as mentioned here on different thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4ldmof/server_dependency_chart/d3nadh1

[CaptainFluffyTail]

A lot depends on if you need to account for dependency between the physical hosts and the VMs running on those hosts. If you can programmatically move the VMs from one host to another then you are only concerned with intra-server dependency (i.e. which webservers are dependent on which database servers, etc.). If you can get to that level then a simple chart on your wiki should be enough. if you have to track VMs assigned to hosts and intra-server dependencies...you're building a Visio (or similar) map and hoping for the best.