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I am looking for any projects integrating functions like monitoring, management and documentation of network/servers/services.

Currently using Orion and Nagios for tasks on monitoring and alerts, the documentation is left to the spreedsheets, and management is of course manual or scripted one-offs on the cli's.

Also this is for a small/midsize ISP/Telco with Cisco, *nix and some Windows Servers.

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Aren't we all? Sadly... there's not 1 all-powerful tool that does everything the way we want. Several have tried... but they all fail in one way or another. – TheCompWiz Jan 6 at 17:34
Well in that case, I would add an addedum. If there is none all-in-one, then which project out there comes close? -thanks – notmyname Jan 6 at 17:37
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+1 to CompWiz, in addition I've found the best combination tends to be a few tools that focus on one area (like Monitoring) and doing it extremely well. – Chris S♦ Jan 6 at 17:37
@notmyname: First... your addendum is just repeating your initial question... which is... "what tool will do my job for me... and make buttered-toast too." The answer is very simple. "The one that does what you need it to do." – TheCompWiz Jan 6 at 17:39
Ask a general question... get a general answer. – TheCompWiz Jan 6 at 17:40
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closed as not a real question by TheCompWiz, Chris S♦, Khaled, Shane Madden, splattne♦ Jan 7 at 8:45

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'One tool to rule them all' probably doesn't exist, and probably isn't even a good idea. For monitoring, Nagios is decent, but you might want to take a look at the Planet DevOps blog... excellent coverage of the state of open-source monitoring software. Newer options such as Graphite, Monit, etc. provide a lot of functionality, and are becoming easier to integrate.

The place you should focus, IMHO, is on supplementing your areas that seem to be weaker: documentation and management. Chef is a wonderful open-source tool for configuration management. It was originally very *nix-entric, but Windows support was added to recent releases. Definitely put an end to one-off scripts.

As for documentation, your documentation and collaboration tools should really be the same, so that documentation can evolve rather than become outdated, etc. A good CMS should allow you to do both. You could also take a look at ChiliProject (a fork of Redmine) which combines features such as an issue tracker, wiki, source repository management, document management, and more into an integrated and easy to install/manage project. I use this every day and it makes life MUCH easier. It also exposes a REST API as well as a plugin architecture that makes it easy to integrate with other systems.

It might take a few tools, but you can easily combine them to have a solid, collaborative system to document, monitor, and manage your infrastructure. But rather than trying to a single, monolithic tool, build the toolkit appropriate for your situation.

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