During my time at my current job, one of the things I've found the most difficult is trying to document changes and keep track of my progress on something due to the wave I have to ride (ie, hopping from one task to the next). What are some methods employed to keep track of these changes outside of a ticketing system?
Posted Oct 9, 2017, 4:59 PM UTC
We use Foreman as an authoritative source for all our systems, devices. As things change we use Python and Wordpress to create/update infrastructure documentation automatically. For everything else we just use TRAC or similar and don't consider anything "done" until it's documented properly.
Oh thats nice....
I wish Foreman was more AzureRM friendly, could use it then and do this.
Au contraire, there appears to be a Foreman compute resource plugin for Azure.
One of the huge benefits of Foreman for us is front-ending multiple, backend compute resources (OpenStack, Docker, Libvirt/KVM etc.) You can spin up VM/compute resources by calling their resource ID in the CLI or via pre-made templates, makes abstracting spurious backend resources really easy and manageable.
a Foreman compute resource plugin for Azure
Yeah the old Azure ASM. Does not work with the new AzureRM currently. I tried it a few weeks ago, was rather disappointed.
According to an issue, he wont support it and instead tells you to go with Fog.io.
https://github.com/theforeman/foreman_azure/issues/4
I will have to look into it I guess. I have never heard of it till now.
Oh, damn. I Hope you get it resolved then.
Documentation? hahahaha...
Seriously though, basic "diary" logs for hardware has been pretty helpful and future proof. We've been through half a dozen ticket systems over the years, and putting long-term stuff in there hasn't worked out -_-
Standardize what you document and how you do it. If you have the extra cash IT Glue is pretty easy to use.
Microsoft Groups has a Wiki built in, I update it on the fly via Teams.
We also keep a word doc up to date as a backup and to hand out sectional to a consultant if we do a big project.
due to the wave I have to ride (ie, hopping from one task to the next)
Stop, find a system that works for you and your supervisor to queue and prioritize tasks but you have to get off the hamster wheel of getting smacked with one things after another. Besides being draining it leads to a lack of documentation and other problems with follow through.
Maybe some day I can find that spot myself.
This rule-of-thumb might help you avoid methods that are too heavyweight to be useful: if it takes you 1 minute to fix someone's problem, it should take no longer than 10-15 seconds to document it.
My group is asked to provide monthly reports on anything we do outside of the Remedy ticket system used by the base. I use something like this to make notes:
#!/bin/ksh
#<logmsg: leave a note somewhere.
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
tag=${0##*/}
case "$PWD" in
*/projects/*) tag=${PWD##*/} ;;
*) ;;
esac
echo "$(date '+%F %T') $tag: $@"
exit 0
If I'm in my projects directory (say, /..../projects/backups), running
logmsg fixed that thing I broke
gives me
2017-10-09 22:29:13 backups: fixed that thing I broke
I have something similar for blogging -- I get popped into a text editor, I write a few lines, save it, and it sends a mail message to a program which handles details like saving it into a format blosxom can handle, etc. 99% of my time is spent on content, not crap like fighting with some badly-thought-out UI just to save some information.
One note & trello for personal tracking/doco. Confluence for team documentation or shared a onenote for a smaller team. Slack for communication.
I used to use OneNote. Create a new page for each day, copy in a list of tasks to complete that day from whatever wasn't done the day before, and as I complete each task make notes of what I did.
I kept a separate notebook for problem resolution, with different sections for each app I had to support. This allowed me to paste in screen shots, relevant sections of logs, etc.
Ticketing in SCSM, public (IT staff and end users) wiki on Cireson HTML Knowledge Base, and my own personal DokuWiki I keep portable and stnc'd on OneDrive.
My daily work is in SCSM, project work we use Microsoft Planner. My authoritative kb data gets written in MD and posted on my DokuWiki, I then take that and post it on the 'public' wiki.
It lets me keep my own wiki of everything I've written, from end user focused articles, to technical mod guides, and /I/ have one place to look when people ask.
We use JIRA and Confluence. Documentation in Confluence, and we add a JIRA gadget to the page that displays the change requests against the JIRA component. The result is change requests become part of the documentation automatically.