For years I’ve been using a piece of software that a friend wrote to help me manage servers, switches, routers, workstations, asset tracking, IP address management, and how all my devices are connected to each other. It was a very good piece of software, but even though one of the features was to tell the system when the equipment is located (office, datacenter, etc), I couldn’t tell where in that location it was. So I searched around and found quite a few open source applications that have popped up in the last few years, most of them were garbage, some of them were decent but even if they had a few of the features I wanted, they usually were missing key features.
That’s when I came across RackTables. It’s simply amazing. It let’s me keep track of all my hardware, keep track of my locations (office, datacenter, etc), keep track of where my hardware is located, how my hardware is interconnected, keeps track of all IP subnets and what’s allocated, and much more. Anyone who’s responsible for managing servers, networks or datacenters should definitely check out RackTables. There’s a great demo on their site.
With RackTables you can:
- Have a list of all devices you’ve got
- Have a list of all racks and enclosures
- Mount the devices into the racks
- Maintain physical ports of the devices and links between them
- Manage IP addresses, assign them to the devices and group them into networks
- Document your firewall and NAT rules
- Describe your loadbalancing policy and store loadbalancing configuration
- Attach files to various objects in the system
- Create users, assign permissions and allow or deny any actions they can do
- Label everything and even everyone with flexible tagging system
- And, of course, you can access all that from anywhere in the world. All you need is a browser and internet connection!
