Documenting your network - What's best to use?

[maxrebo]

I'm looking at starting to document our network, could anyone share what they use to document this? Do you use Teams Wiki, a word document etc...

 

Thanks

[jthompson]

We're using DokuWiki.

[lmrogers]

The Ultimate IT Documentation Tool - Hudu

 

This is pretty reasonably priced for a cloud hosted solution, or you can host internally.

 

Works really well and has a built in password manager. It has really nice integrations as well with various helpdesk solutions and Office 365.

[pete]

We're also using Dokuwiki with the following plugins:

 

• Bookcreator
  
• Dw2PDF (dump wiki page to PDF)
  
• Move plugin (reorganise wiki while maintaining links)
  
• Orphanswanted (flags up orphaned pages and links to pages that don't yet exist)
  

 

with Azure Application Proxy thrown into the mix for MFA and easy access across schools.

 

I have been eyeing up WikiJS (mostly because it's prettier), but I do prefer DR situations where I don't have to first spin up and populate a database (Dokuwiki is flat files accessible in a text editor).

[jthompson]

We're also using Dokuwiki with the following plugins:

 

• Bookcreator
  
• Dw2PDF (dump wiki page to PDF)
  
• Move plugin (reorganise wiki while maintaining links)
  
• Orphanswanted (flags up orphaned pages and links to pages that don't yet exist)
  

 

with Azure Application Proxy thrown into the mix for MFA and easy access across schools.

 

I have been eyeing up WikiJS (mostly because it's prettier), but I do prefer DR situations where I don't have to first spin up and populate a database (Dokuwiki is flat files accessible in a text editor).

 

There is also this plugin, to provide TOTP MFA - https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:twofactorgoogleauth

 

We host our DokuWiki site externally, so that its availability isn't reliant on the very systems being documented.

[pete]

There is also this plugin, to provide TOTP MFA - https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:twofactorgoogleauth

 

We host our DokuWiki site externally, so that its availability isn't reliant on the very systems being documented.

 

I'd sling it in Azure if I was particularly worried, but I can stand it up in ~5 minutes at any of our sites in a DR event or on a laptop via offsite synced backups.

[Norphy]

If you use Office 365, there are worse places to look than OneNote.

 

It’s not the best in the world, admittedly, but as part of the overall Microsoft 365 experience, integrating into Teams etc, it can be a pretty powerful platform.

 

There are apps for most of the major platforms, it can be used in a browser, multiple people can edit a document at once, it’s a bit more freeform than a word document and it is all hosted at Microsoft so there’s no dependency on local infrastructure.

 

If you don’t have Office 365, I wouldn’t get it just for this but if you do, I’d take a close look at it. My old team in the MAT I used to work for used it (I assume they still do but I hear everyone has jumped ship since I left so who knows?) for network documentation while I was there and it worked well for us.

Edited March 23, 2023 by Norphy

[TechMonkey]

I used OneNote. Great for linking between pages, quick to add. Only annoyance is no code container.

I've started moving to our HelpDesk as we can reference pages in tickets and have public bits and private bits.