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I work for a shop with 300+ physcial servers and about the same number of VM guests. We use Puppet heavily and are mostly Centos5.5 and about 20% Centos6.2.

We use Google docs for storing various things. We have a rack spreadsheet which has locations, names and switchports. We have an IP spreadsheet with all the subnets and static hosts.

The Google spreadsheets are basic but they work and they don't enforce a heavy process mindset. We've looked at a number of CMDB systems but they are heavy and seem to want to solve a bunch of large enterprise issues that we don't have.

My question:

  1. How do I create a Google spreadsheet that has all of my hosts (hostname, location, MAC, IP, etc) as lines on a page and also create various views to the data.

FWIW, I just spent a couple hours reading about Google gadgets and it's clear I could build this but it seems like this is such a common problem that there must be something I can cargo-cult into a solution.

John Gardeniers
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alan laird
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  • I must be missing part of your question. Are you asking how to use a spreadsheet? Or are you expecting to somehow get puppet or some other tool to create this for you? – Zoredache Aug 09 '12 at 19:07
  • This is mainly an effort to track all the real world touch points. Where the system is racked, it's asset tags, it's hostname, etc. I'm storing these now as cells in a google doc and the data gets out of date or sync pretty easily because there's no validity checking. – alan laird Aug 09 '12 at 19:54

3 Answers3

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Is Google Docs a requirement?

I think it's a stretch to do this in a spreadsheet. I've certainly been in firms where IP's, network definitions and even rack elevation diagrams were represented in Google Docs Spreadsheets.

The process was a bit cumbersome and the eventual solution was to move to a purpose-built inventory-management system like Racktables. I see the recommendation for Open-AudIT as well...

In addition, this has been covered here: What software is available to keep track of hundreds of servers?

Community
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ewwhite
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Example ReportTake a look at Open-AudIT. It should do what you need out of the box.

Caveat - I'm the author.

If you have any questions, fire away and I'll answer them here (or there's always our forums).

Mark Unwin
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Try out this Free and Open Source utility that creates an excel sheet with device and IP info. http://www.device42.com/opendiscovery/ You can then import this into google docs.

Disclaimer: I am one of the developers behind this.

Raj J
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