Last updated: January 10, 2020
A good IT documentation not only includes the inventory of specific applications like Microsoft Exchange or SQL-Server, but also information from infrastructure services. By scanning these components too, you take a big step towards the completion of the IT Documentation in 5 Steps project that aims at creating a comprehensive inventory of your IT landscape.
Documenting basic network services
An IT network without a DNS server is no longer imaginable today, as this service is essential when it comes to how your IT systems communicate with each other. Presumably, most modern networks also use DHCP servers because hardly anyone will still be willing to configure the workstation network settings manually. For this reason, it is very important to properly include the DNS and DHCP infrastructure services in the documentation. For detailed instructions on how to proceed with the inventory of these basic network services, please refer again to the Docusnap User Manual. Please keep in mind that Docusnap only inventories Microsoft products. Here again, the inventory is configured using a wizard. If required, you can schedule recurring inventories using the Docusnap Server.
Besides configuring the server services, Docusnap will record the IP addresses valid at the time of the inventory. This comes in really handy in case you need to verify the IP address used by a certain system on a specific day. The data traffic in your network can thus be allocated to the individual computers and is traceable.
Especially for troubleshooting, it can be particularly helpful to be able to compare a DNS or DHCP server configuration with a previous state. This might make it easier for you to track down the erroneous configuration. A DNS server failure often causes some commotion and confusion in the company as it most certainly results in a complete network breakdown. If this occurs, you will need as much information as possible to narrow down the error.
Proceed with your infrastructure inventory by documenting the DFS roots
If you have configured the Distributed File System (DFS) service in your Windows environment and use it to distribute file systems, this feature should be documented in your IT manuals. Get optimum support for this task from Docusnap. There are two types of DFS implementation: a standalone version and a domain-based version. Here again, you can rely on Docusnap to gather the required information.
The documentation of your data backup system rounds off the infrastructure inventory
The fourth feature for documenting the infrastructure in the Docusnap documentation tool covers the inventory of the Symantec Backup Exec data backup software. This backup solution is widely used in companies of any size. Thanks to Docusnap, you can now scan and document this information as well. This is quite easy: simply retrieve the data from the associated SQL database – its name is usually BEDB. For the configuration, a dedicated wizard is available which also allows you to schedule your scans for repeated execution.