There is a lot of stuff out there for this but I have found that it is important to try and conform to the ITIL standards that are published out there.

A product I found, that will help you be more ITIL compliant(not that I am or my network for that matter…YIKES!) is a product called Service Now (http://www.service-now.com/)

I recommend you guys who have very large installations take a look at this product through the demo which you can find here: https://www.service-now.com/demo/

It is a fully, I mean down to the short hairs, intricate, detailed product if you implement stringent guidelines for use on a daily basis.

The costs for our set up, for it to be a hosted app, was around $2000/yr if I remember. But give them a call they are quite cool and will even hook you up with a 30 day dealio to get the feel for it and you can just go live from there.

A list of passwords. And most of them were dictionary words. Can you imagine how many viruses were running around? Think back to the Blaster worm… Ug.

Network diagrams that looked like they were made up in someones head as “What I wish the network looked like”

It took me years to figure everything out and then slowly change it to where we are at now.

Ask me how much documentation I have… Yeah I will ignore you :)

The important stuff is heavily documented in my personal files like if I was upgrading a box I wrote down all the old settings and what sp’s and patched I was applying.

I requested a technical writer to follow me around but they said it wasn’t in the budget. LOL!

He had this network for five years before I took control, and here is what I found in the way of documentation:
- Approximately 20 “pages” of wiki documentation on the theory of how things work in the network.
- Approximately 700 pages of printed out server logs PER SERVER (for 6 servers). This is stuff like TCP/IP connection requests and security event logs. I have since shredded and recycled all this, as it is totally useless in paper form (I’ll never read it – I leafed through it but there is nothing useful there).
- A building diagram on the wall of my office listing machine names and printer names in their respective locations (more than 50% of which information was wrong).
- Network cables and jacks labeled with roman numerals (XI looks exactly like IX when there is no indication which direction it was written from).
- A note from him telling me to call him with any questions (almost every answer would turn out to be “I don’t remember” or “Google that”.

Now. we’ve also got a rather… unique cabling infrastructure (we are basically playing the TCP/IP version of Ping Pong with our internet access and subnets, bouncing back and forth between buildings). I think there are like 5 extra 24 port switches to accomplish this, where a single ROUTER would do just fine.

This all combines to form the Voltron of clusterfucks when there is a problem.

I have produced over 300 pages of usable documentation since I took charge of this network, however there is no trending data or change logs from before I got here.

I have literally no idea what caused some of the issues we have with DNS and group policy (I believe the DNS issues are causing the GP issues), because the only thing in the event logs is a note that the policy engine has previously logged the cause of the issue, but there are no event logs from prior to like a month before I took control of this network.

A simple change log, and event log archiving regimen would have prevented all the frustration I have experienced over the past 18 months.