RackTables, a nifty solution for datacenter/server-room asset management

Racktables is a nifty and robust solution for datacenter and server room asset management. It helps document hardware assets, network addresses, space in racks, networks configuration, etc.

Lots of system and network administrators come to the point where they have to maintain quite complex documentation of the racks, devices, links and network resources they have in control. Most of them end up with putting all that information in some kind of spreadsheet and update that spreadsheet every time they do changes. That may work more or less acceptable until more than one person is doing the job. After that it turns into a nightmare and most of the people find it extremely irritating.

This project aims to provide a complete solution to that problem. We — the authors of this project — are system and network administrators who once had to run a system of hundreds of servers, about 50 racks, thousands of IP addresses, lots of network equipment and other useful stuff lying around in the datacenters and offices of the company we worked for. And as everyone else we were trying to maintain various documentation in spreadsheets and eventually failed to maintain it well. Then we started thinking of a solution.

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.