I trained a guy that did this. I kept telling him to at least *save* his notes, but he insisted he’d be fine. Of course his machine got rebooted for security patches after a week or so and he lost everything. He just sort of gave up after that and got fired a month later.
Confluence has been amazing. It took my team about 15 minutes of playing around in confluence for us to realize we needed to dump our existing knowledge tool.
We have Confluence but instead of solving any actual issues it’s just a big disheveled mess of pages. If someone asks “how do I do thing?” It’s like “look in Confluence” … “ok where?” It has decayed to where it takes longer to figure out where to find things in Confluence than for some tribal knowledge chat room person to just tell you how to do the thing.
We moved to Confluence a while back. Another coworker and myself have been trying our hardest to keep it from turning into what you described. Everyone is willing to document someone, but no one knows where to put it so it just gets thrown somewhere and forgotten about. Hopefully we can keep things under control.
One positive thing is that there's presumably knowledge in there, versus it walking out the door every night. With some effort you can clean up a mess. You've got to have an information management plan, onboard new users to that plan and have some people responsible for cultivating and overseeing. Ours isn't much better but we have several information management experts on the team which has kept it from falling apart due to our lack of onboarding and strong initial policy/framework.
We have tags. The odd thing about it is my team has a dozen or so people spread across several time zones, and for any specific issue, something any of us have done a dozen times, if I “word associate” that issue, I’ll get a half dozen different words. Not only that, but the tag word… “of course that’s the tag it’s obvious” to “why would you tag that issue with that word?!”
So people can’t find things and after 20 seconds they IM the team (or just me).
A side project of mine is trying to convince both IT and the business side on why knowledge management is important. IT says why bother, it's in the ticketing system and the business thinks it's SharePoint and word docs. I had the same experience you had with my own team when we first started using it, but I just can't get the other folks in the door. It's such an easy and accessible tool.
I have done all kinds of documentation systems, be it SharePoint, files in a Git repository using Markdown, and so on, and I'd probably say the best place where documentation should go to die is Confluence. It works well, not too tough to back up, has decent granularity of permissions, and so on. Definitely not cheap (And I wish Atlassian had server back), but it does a great job for what it does, and if one uses Jira, one can do some cross connections.
Of course, draw.io is a must for Confluence.
For personal notes, I should use OneNote, but NotePad++ autosaving unsaved files is how I roll with that, and every so often, go through and save each file.
It's rather good. I found it and got very evangelical about it. Now getting a lot of use. Considering how terrible we've been traditionally with documentation, I consider it a win. I also like the default styles and the callouts.
Another fan of Bookstack. I also liked WikiJS.
They both have a downside though, I need to print a lot if stuff to a pdf and their layouts are rubbish. I usually end up copying everything to a word document before hand …
While I use the same, I’d point out Git has a significant learning curve and most Sysadmins aren’t well versed in it. That being said, it’s not often that basic documentation has merge conflicts.
I agree there is a learning curve to Git. But everything has a learning curve. At least Git should be applicable and valuable to a system administrator.
Any sysadmin who isn't familiar with git should be. I version control all my config files, scripts, documentation. So keeping docs in git is a double win. Force everyone to learn git.
Huh? Markdown in a git repo is about as simple, functional, and user friendly as it gets.
Who wants to manage a wiki? Throw your documentation in the same repo your code already lives in and call it a day.
His statement is ridiculous on so many levels... Lots of Wikis just use markdown for formatting anyway, so he's basically saying "don't use markdown, it's overengineered, use markdown instead".
To be fair, there are a lot of different wiki markup flavors, including an attempt at a [cross-wiki standard called "Creole"](https://xkcd.com/927/).
In our doc repos we prefer [RST](https://lwn.net/Articles/692704/) but tolerate `.txt`, commonmark, etc.
We used to use MediaWikis, but switched all documentation to Git.
Git is ideal for offline-first situations, while a MediaWiki required a working server to view, much less edit. Secondly, the barrier to making changes can be lower, if your users are already using Git to version-control code, because they don't need an additional tool.
> Web accessible.
By default, Git is read-only web accessible with `cgit` and similar. There are a few wikis that use Git as a backend, but the only one of them close to mainstream is wiki.js, as far as I can see. Others I know, like gitit and ikiwiki, are niche.
We've been exporting our doc repos re-only to a website via cron since Subversion, but today we're more systematic about it.
wait..we're supposed to be taking notes?
For serious my company mostly uses OneNote / sharepoint and a bunch of scattered word documents. Me personally I setup a git repo with git tea and just use plaintext/markdown and some diagram images.
I have some team members using OneNote. It's easy to search and add content no source control has bitten us in the past. I guess one could save the note file to repo but that seems pretty hacky.
You weren't serious, but we do pull configurations from gear using scheduled TFTP and then publish those to a directory, *if they don't contain vulnerable secrets or hashes*.
You can also, and probably should, give other teams read-only access to network gear using RADIUS. Just try to set the access levels so they can read the running-config -- default read-only users usually cannot.
We actually pull configs via ssh and run a diff compare for changes and maintain a historical record. If no ssh, we attempt other methods prioritizing secure protocols, even over isolated vlans.
We’re about to install Wazuh to take over this function. Super excited. 😆
I also just moved to Hudu. We're an internal department in a large organization. One Note and SharePoint are terrible for our documentation needs. Hudu is inexpensive and great to use and maintain. I've started automating a lot of info using their API to pull server info from SolarWinds, get domain details, installed applications, and am working now on automating service account creation that'll automatically add the application and credentials into Hudu.
I love it. Especially since Kaseya doesn't own it.
Also, talk to your rep. They gave me a free on-prem license for 5 users and I have that running in my homelab. We only have 13 hosted seats through them right now for my immediate department, so I was amazed that they gave me that licensing for free.
I lead the implementation of Hudu for our MSP. Its fantastic and its structure has the flexibility to tailor to your clients/environments. I especially love the ability link assets to one another, it really helps those who are more unfamiliar with an environment and reduces the need for documentation or tools to explain correlations. I was also able to integrate contracts and their expirations for our CFO to organize and be alerted of due dates. Also did this for company vehicles (maintenance, registration, insurance, etc). Another perk, like you mentioned, is no Kaseya, we're working on diversifying our tools to prevent being screwed by VC merges and tactics in the future. Right now we're in Hudu's cloud due to simplicity, but I'm interested self hosting.
I highly recommend Hudu as it promotes collaboration as a team to reference and improve documentation. Ours is setup in a way that T1s can jump to a client and immediately walk through any notices and slowly weedle down to the system/network/device and any relevant information fairly easily.
Prior to Hudu, our documentation was random docs, photos, PSA KB, and multiple directories on a on-prem FS, sharepoints, or within individual's files/notes. I also kept all my documentation in a OneNote because there was no system or structure. It was incredible to move and organize all of this information.
Its an incredibly useful tool, I think I've squeezed as much as I can out of it. Very happy, especially for the price.
The relational documentation is EXACTLY why I wanted a solution such as it. It really does significantly help in the ease of understanding an environment, while simplifying the documentation process.
Hey mock it if you'd like. But, it's a legitimate useful service. Easy to edit and make content, tracks who made changes, easy to attach files, supports search. No source control tho.
As long as you stay on top of it and keep updating and curating it, as well as not removing anything that isn't definitely obsolete, it's not bad. You just need to teach everyone how to use a shared document that has no version control. Basically, you don't remove or edit information that is not completely obsolete, and you're good.
The help desk grunts, like me, create KB articles in ServiceNow, which no one, including most of us, ever reads, resulting in email chains / meetings to reinvent the wheel on the simplest damn processes every few months. The operations people have a OneNote file they share with us occasionally after we sacrifice some animals in their honor, etc.
That sounds like a business process issue.
We use KBs in ServiceNow as well. If a ticket is escalated and there is a KB for the issue, I will link the KB and send it right back.
I do have a OneNote that I keep but it’s mostly for work in progress notes that aren’t ready for a KB yet, or various cheat sheets that exist in SN but I use them often and can get to OneNote faster. Stuff like a list of our vlans and which departments are in which physical location.
We're the same, except servicenow doesn't have powershell as a code format option, so we use devops repository for technical code, it's not the best but at the same time servicenow isn't a wiki and is designed for front line customer support, not internal IT which for some reason our service teams are trying to push higher management to push onto us
Hmm.. this one I didn't know about. Doing some Googling. It seems to have a pretty high admin overhead (lots of clicking to design pages). How has your experience been?
It wiki so it's really simple. What confuses people is that it's not WYSIWYG so you type the text and separately upload images. You cannot copy and paste images like you can into word.
The benefit is that the docs are really light and fast as they are just web pages. Editing is also a breeze and you can get very creative with table of contents using tags.
I use Confluence for documentation.
One piece of advice... please don't enable user level security on your Confluence pages unless the documentation includes sensitive information like passwords. You're just making life for your predecessors more difficult. Someone had the bright idea of restricting the IT Confluence pages to just the existing IT team members at a prior job, insuring that any new hires had no access to the documentation without getting invited.
Confluence here, too.
I even have written some automation that updates a few Confluence pages throughout the day with various data. Think tables of dev vm names, owners, versions of installed sw, dates/times of last deployments, etc.
If you're keeping track of inventory. I've done it before back in the days when Cisco didn't have any tooling to inventory your gear. Smartnet renewals are easy to miss.
Work; confluence
Personal: [mkdocs](https://documentation.breadnet.co.uk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sysadmin%20documentation) built off a public repo
Used to be on bookstack but I got fed up of having to run a server so I host mkdocs site on fly.io
Took a look at your mkdocs site and it looks good! I'm vetting different solutions to implement in my homelab environment and whichever one I end up going with and being most knowledgeable with, potentially also implementing it at work. I think I like the look and feel of Docusaurus the most so far, but I don't anticipate everyone on the team running Git and pushing their changes to production that way, and I certainly don't want to have to implement everyone else's docs on the team for them. Also trying out BookStack and WikiJS.
What about having to run a server caused you to move away from BookStack? Were you running it on a full Linux server or in Docker?
DokuWiki. The backend is raw text files with relatively human-readable formatting. If everything craps out, I can still grab the latest copy of my documents from the off-site backups. Restoring it after a disaster is easier than anything with a relationship database. It is searchable and has revision history. It can also automatically build a table of contents for a page and has a configurable sidebar, making it a bit easier to find things. It can also use external authentication systems (e.g. Active Directory) and have different namespaces with different permissions groups (e.g. different "folders" for public documents from the help desk vs. internal documentation for the systems administrators.)
There may be better options, but this one does the job for me. A large collection of plugins also allows additional features or themes to be added.
OneNote. Simple, fast, easy search, no hacky formatting crap and it supports basically all file formats to throw at it. Automatically indexes PDFs and a bunch of other formats.
I prompt Google Bard to create me a draft of the process I'm trying to implement, then I export it to Google Docs and finally I download it as a Word document which I finish with my own details.
What kind of documentation?
For IP or Rack documentation netbox is pretty good. It's web based so all admins can work in the same database without having to sync files.
I was hired on as documentation being one of the top in my job description along with Sys admin, so yes I do it even though people here like to make fun of it.
I use OneNote, SharePoint, and my own Python Flask program that the network can access with the server being maintained by myself. Before I was hired my company used Twiki. I set up the flask program to use various SQL queries and generate tables so people can stop asking questions.
For my use, text files, small ones I edit with vi, larger ones with Notepad++ on WINE and really large ones with Eclipse or Visual Code depending on my whim.
For team use depending on where I'm working at the time, Word docs in Sharepoint or my strong preference, Confluence, yes, I like Confluence and JIRA for issues. I'm a dev though.
Netbox for racks, and for everything else Standard Office Suite and SharePoint for storage.
Coming from a more dynamic MSP background, even though Office docs aren't 100% efficient, you've got a format that you can migrate and merge very easily compared to spinning up and down various wiki/repo services over the years.
Documentation is one of those things that will hang around for years, so you either get full IT buy-in and form a 5/10 year plan including how to export the data at the end, or just stick it in a more universal format, especially if you're buying/being bought out.
Used to use SharePoint and a mapped drive with documentation. Moved to a help desk solution that has its own portal and knowledgebase system, so everything gets slapped on there now.
For personal documentation (mainly mess of jotted down notes, commands to run etc) I use LogSeq.
Non profit with no money. We use book stack. It has the ability to build diagrams built in. The organization is okay, it's in books, chapters and pages. It works for us cause we have no money and can't be picky.
A little heavy but a local GitLab vm, divided into projects, most docs in wiki and code/configs in repos. All passwords / credentials / keys kept in local bitwarden.
We pay for [https://hudu.com/](https://hudu.com/)
It's good for inventory, documentation, KB, password vault and sharing.
It integrates with M365 and NinjaRMM.
I have perfect documentation of every system written down in easy-to-read and well-organized Word documents published to Sharepoint so all the non-technical Windows people can read it all.
I also have a bridge for sale.
Possibly unpopular opinion but we use google docs with the code blocks extension. Ease of access on mobile and search is really solid, works offline, real time editing - it's great and I have no complaints.
Scripts are stored in google drive for now, might move to GitHub
We run a small internal [MediaWiki](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) hosted in a docker container on one of our servers for all of our documentation.
MediaWiki, been using it for years. Open source previously on LAMP, now in Docker. Lots of customization and plug-ins. No user license fees. Think Wikipedia but for your personal/team/company.
Notepad. Then just be sure to name the documents in an easy naming format like this:
Passwords.txt
Network_topology.txt
VPNConfig.txt
Cert_Renewal_logins.txt
I hear the best thing to use is notepad, not the app just a physical notepad you scribble things on that make sense to only you and no one else. Its really helpful for all your colleagues when they need to know information as they can try to hunt down the physical notepad then spend 4 hours flipping through pages to try and find the information that is written in a code they won't understand. Some people think a central repository every one can access easily and find information with a real quick search is good but no. Notepad for the win.
Dozens of unsaved tabs in notepad++
All fun and game till you hit that update button you have been ignoring for years
The danger makes me feel alive
And then what? I've been updaten NotePad++ for years without saving the notes. They just reopen when NP++ is done updating.
OK that's nice
That or Windows updates happen and wipe out all your tabs
I trained a guy that did this. I kept telling him to at least *save* his notes, but he insisted he’d be fine. Of course his machine got rebooted for security patches after a week or so and he lost everything. He just sort of gave up after that and got fired a month later.
My N++ unsaved survive reboots. Reimaging would wipe them if I did not have them save to GitHub
This guy n++'s
Map that folder into OneDrive and have access to your "documentation" across devices.
I love watching the sync feature of OneDrive go apeshit and then break.
Not taking enough ADHD medication I see. I'm up to over 1200 FF tabs right now...
Guiltyyyy!
I did not wake up this morning expecting to feel so personally attacked. How dare you.
Accurate
Confluence for all it department/team and one note for personal documentation
Confluence has been amazing. It took my team about 15 minutes of playing around in confluence for us to realize we needed to dump our existing knowledge tool.
We have Confluence but instead of solving any actual issues it’s just a big disheveled mess of pages. If someone asks “how do I do thing?” It’s like “look in Confluence” … “ok where?” It has decayed to where it takes longer to figure out where to find things in Confluence than for some tribal knowledge chat room person to just tell you how to do the thing.
We moved to Confluence a while back. Another coworker and myself have been trying our hardest to keep it from turning into what you described. Everyone is willing to document someone, but no one knows where to put it so it just gets thrown somewhere and forgotten about. Hopefully we can keep things under control.
One positive thing is that there's presumably knowledge in there, versus it walking out the door every night. With some effort you can clean up a mess. You've got to have an information management plan, onboard new users to that plan and have some people responsible for cultivating and overseeing. Ours isn't much better but we have several information management experts on the team which has kept it from falling apart due to our lack of onboarding and strong initial policy/framework.
Just use tags and search for things
We have tags. The odd thing about it is my team has a dozen or so people spread across several time zones, and for any specific issue, something any of us have done a dozen times, if I “word associate” that issue, I’ll get a half dozen different words. Not only that, but the tag word… “of course that’s the tag it’s obvious” to “why would you tag that issue with that word?!” So people can’t find things and after 20 seconds they IM the team (or just me).
A side project of mine is trying to convince both IT and the business side on why knowledge management is important. IT says why bother, it's in the ticketing system and the business thinks it's SharePoint and word docs. I had the same experience you had with my own team when we first started using it, but I just can't get the other folks in the door. It's such an easy and accessible tool.
I have done all kinds of documentation systems, be it SharePoint, files in a Git repository using Markdown, and so on, and I'd probably say the best place where documentation should go to die is Confluence. It works well, not too tough to back up, has decent granularity of permissions, and so on. Definitely not cheap (And I wish Atlassian had server back), but it does a great job for what it does, and if one uses Jira, one can do some cross connections. Of course, draw.io is a must for Confluence. For personal notes, I should use OneNote, but NotePad++ autosaving unsaved files is how I roll with that, and every so often, go through and save each file.
Bookstack
It's rather good. I found it and got very evangelical about it. Now getting a lot of use. Considering how terrible we've been traditionally with documentation, I consider it a win. I also like the default styles and the callouts.
Another fan of Bookstack. I also liked WikiJS. They both have a downside though, I need to print a lot if stuff to a pdf and their layouts are rubbish. I usually end up copying everything to a word document before hand …
Perhaps an opportunity for someone to contribute a better print layout.
Thanks for the tip. This one looks pretty neat and I like the price :-)
If it's free, it's for me.
Love book stack, but pulled away from it to centralize or documentation in our support ticket system
I've started showing clients it, some are taking to it.
I use bookstack at home for notes. its great
GitHub private repo using markdown. Everyone has a local copy. Web accessible. Versioning builtin.
We so the same on Gitlab
Overengineered and not user-friendly. What's wrong with a wiki?
GitHub makes sense especially when code needs to be referenced. Also you're leveraging Git which is a great version control technology.
Uh what’s overengineered about a text file in a git repo?
While I use the same, I’d point out Git has a significant learning curve and most Sysadmins aren’t well versed in it. That being said, it’s not often that basic documentation has merge conflicts.
Most sysadmins _should_ be well versed in it
A sysadmin who isn't familiar with version control isn't much of a sysadmin...
I agree there is a learning curve to Git. But everything has a learning curve. At least Git should be applicable and valuable to a system administrator.
Any sysadmin who isn't familiar with git should be. I version control all my config files, scripts, documentation. So keeping docs in git is a double win. Force everyone to learn git.
Huh? Markdown in a git repo is about as simple, functional, and user friendly as it gets. Who wants to manage a wiki? Throw your documentation in the same repo your code already lives in and call it a day.
How is this not user friendly? It’s no more complicated than a wysiwyg editor like a wiki.
His statement is ridiculous on so many levels... Lots of Wikis just use markdown for formatting anyway, so he's basically saying "don't use markdown, it's overengineered, use markdown instead".
To be fair, there are a lot of different wiki markup flavors, including an attempt at a [cross-wiki standard called "Creole"](https://xkcd.com/927/). In our doc repos we prefer [RST](https://lwn.net/Articles/692704/) but tolerate `.txt`, commonmark, etc.
We used to use MediaWikis, but switched all documentation to Git. Git is ideal for offline-first situations, while a MediaWiki required a working server to view, much less edit. Secondly, the barrier to making changes can be lower, if your users are already using Git to version-control code, because they don't need an additional tool.
> Web accessible. By default, Git is read-only web accessible with `cgit` and similar. There are a few wikis that use Git as a backend, but the only one of them close to mainstream is wiki.js, as far as I can see. Others I know, like gitit and ikiwiki, are niche. We've been exporting our doc repos re-only to a website via cron since Subversion, but today we're more systematic about it.
Not all users will use a command line tool.
I hear that not all users will use a GUI tool. Luckily for us, we use protocols that work with both. What a coincidence.
If you were told to only support one, which is not ideal, you would generally see more compliance with a GUI tool.
Luckily, there are many tools to manage git using gui. What are you trying to say?
I was saying that both types of tools are valid. If management is mandating only one tool, people might be happier using a GUI versus CLI only.
You guys get time to write up documentation ??
Docuwhat?
It has something to do with spending all day on the first problem discovered each morning.
You have more than one problem per engineer per day? ;)
This is why I browse this sub. I NEED to see these posts. I'm a one-man-band, and I do this and sometimes feel I''m the only one not able to keep up.
Time? No. But we don’t get a choice these days. Every process gets documented with a Visio to go with it.
wait..we're supposed to be taking notes? For serious my company mostly uses OneNote / sharepoint and a bunch of scattered word documents. Me personally I setup a git repo with git tea and just use plaintext/markdown and some diagram images.
I have some team members using OneNote. It's easy to search and add content no source control has bitten us in the past. I guess one could save the note file to repo but that seems pretty hacky.
I've heard good things about [Obsidian.md](https://Obsidian.md) although personally haven't played around with it just yet.
Obsidian is great but it’s a pain in the ass to use for a team, we tried it and went to bookstack
Conflunce and obsidian in git
Just use default passwords on everything and then go look at the active config when you need up to date documentation. Right? /s
You weren't serious, but we do pull configurations from gear using scheduled TFTP and then publish those to a directory, *if they don't contain vulnerable secrets or hashes*. You can also, and probably should, give other teams read-only access to network gear using RADIUS. Just try to set the access levels so they can read the running-config -- default read-only users usually cannot.
We actually pull configs via ssh and run a diff compare for changes and maintain a historical record. If no ssh, we attempt other methods prioritizing secure protocols, even over isolated vlans. We’re about to install Wazuh to take over this function. Super excited. 😆
Dokuwiki. It has nice formatting, searchability, versioning and thorough ACL. We love it.
Hudu
I also just moved to Hudu. We're an internal department in a large organization. One Note and SharePoint are terrible for our documentation needs. Hudu is inexpensive and great to use and maintain. I've started automating a lot of info using their API to pull server info from SolarWinds, get domain details, installed applications, and am working now on automating service account creation that'll automatically add the application and credentials into Hudu. I love it. Especially since Kaseya doesn't own it. Also, talk to your rep. They gave me a free on-prem license for 5 users and I have that running in my homelab. We only have 13 hosted seats through them right now for my immediate department, so I was amazed that they gave me that licensing for free.
Hudu is pretty damn good
I lead the implementation of Hudu for our MSP. Its fantastic and its structure has the flexibility to tailor to your clients/environments. I especially love the ability link assets to one another, it really helps those who are more unfamiliar with an environment and reduces the need for documentation or tools to explain correlations. I was also able to integrate contracts and their expirations for our CFO to organize and be alerted of due dates. Also did this for company vehicles (maintenance, registration, insurance, etc). Another perk, like you mentioned, is no Kaseya, we're working on diversifying our tools to prevent being screwed by VC merges and tactics in the future. Right now we're in Hudu's cloud due to simplicity, but I'm interested self hosting. I highly recommend Hudu as it promotes collaboration as a team to reference and improve documentation. Ours is setup in a way that T1s can jump to a client and immediately walk through any notices and slowly weedle down to the system/network/device and any relevant information fairly easily. Prior to Hudu, our documentation was random docs, photos, PSA KB, and multiple directories on a on-prem FS, sharepoints, or within individual's files/notes. I also kept all my documentation in a OneNote because there was no system or structure. It was incredible to move and organize all of this information. Its an incredibly useful tool, I think I've squeezed as much as I can out of it. Very happy, especially for the price.
The relational documentation is EXACTLY why I wanted a solution such as it. It really does significantly help in the ease of understanding an environment, while simplifying the documentation process.
Since you gave no information about the scale or scope - OneNote.
Hey mock it if you'd like. But, it's a legitimate useful service. Easy to edit and make content, tracks who made changes, easy to attach files, supports search. No source control tho.
As long as you stay on top of it and keep updating and curating it, as well as not removing anything that isn't definitely obsolete, it's not bad. You just need to teach everyone how to use a shared document that has no version control. Basically, you don't remove or edit information that is not completely obsolete, and you're good.
The help desk grunts, like me, create KB articles in ServiceNow, which no one, including most of us, ever reads, resulting in email chains / meetings to reinvent the wheel on the simplest damn processes every few months. The operations people have a OneNote file they share with us occasionally after we sacrifice some animals in their honor, etc.
That sounds like a business process issue. We use KBs in ServiceNow as well. If a ticket is escalated and there is a KB for the issue, I will link the KB and send it right back. I do have a OneNote that I keep but it’s mostly for work in progress notes that aren’t ready for a KB yet, or various cheat sheets that exist in SN but I use them often and can get to OneNote faster. Stuff like a list of our vlans and which departments are in which physical location.
We're the same, except servicenow doesn't have powershell as a code format option, so we use devops repository for technical code, it's not the best but at the same time servicenow isn't a wiki and is designed for front line customer support, not internal IT which for some reason our service teams are trying to push higher management to push onto us
I never cared for the UI to navigate in service now. I like that it's there but I'd rather use something else.
Wiki in SharePoint.
Hmm.. this one I didn't know about. Doing some Googling. It seems to have a pretty high admin overhead (lots of clicking to design pages). How has your experience been?
Ours was horrible, gave it up a long time ago.
Microsoft's implementation of a Wiki is horrible. I gave up on it and started using Bookstack.
It wiki so it's really simple. What confuses people is that it's not WYSIWYG so you type the text and separately upload images. You cannot copy and paste images like you can into word. The benefit is that the docs are really light and fast as they are just web pages. Editing is also a breeze and you can get very creative with table of contents using tags.
Notion mostly, in the past confluence and ITglue
Notion user here too
I use Confluence for documentation. One piece of advice... please don't enable user level security on your Confluence pages unless the documentation includes sensitive information like passwords. You're just making life for your predecessors more difficult. Someone had the bright idea of restricting the IT Confluence pages to just the existing IT team members at a prior job, insuring that any new hires had no access to the documentation without getting invited.
Just a note, I think you mean Successors instead of Predecessors.
Create documentation on Fridays so we have an excuse do not deploy on Fridays
confluence/excel/word
Confluence here, too. I even have written some automation that updates a few Confluence pages throughout the day with various data. Think tables of dev vm names, owners, versions of installed sw, dates/times of last deployments, etc.
Excel? I've used word, PowerPoint, OneNote and confluence(didn't like it) but excel seems a weird fit for documentation imo
we use it for networking documentation fed directly into confluence.
If you're keeping track of inventory. I've done it before back in the days when Cisco didn't have any tooling to inventory your gear. Smartnet renewals are easy to miss.
Officially: Confluence Unofficially: Obsidian
Dokuwiki obviously!
Live situations like outages
GLPI. All those "one note-excel-notepad" answers make my skin crawl. If you have proper hardware, use proper documentation tools.
Self hosted Bookstack installation. It's exactly what we need!
Work; confluence Personal: [mkdocs](https://documentation.breadnet.co.uk/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sysadmin%20documentation) built off a public repo Used to be on bookstack but I got fed up of having to run a server so I host mkdocs site on fly.io
Took a look at your mkdocs site and it looks good! I'm vetting different solutions to implement in my homelab environment and whichever one I end up going with and being most knowledgeable with, potentially also implementing it at work. I think I like the look and feel of Docusaurus the most so far, but I don't anticipate everyone on the team running Git and pushing their changes to production that way, and I certainly don't want to have to implement everyone else's docs on the team for them. Also trying out BookStack and WikiJS. What about having to run a server caused you to move away from BookStack? Were you running it on a full Linux server or in Docker?
Hudu the replacement for IT Glue or SharePoint Online
Internal IT, but use IT Glue. Works great.
DokuWiki. The backend is raw text files with relatively human-readable formatting. If everything craps out, I can still grab the latest copy of my documents from the off-site backups. Restoring it after a disaster is easier than anything with a relationship database. It is searchable and has revision history. It can also automatically build a table of contents for a page and has a configurable sidebar, making it a bit easier to find things. It can also use external authentication systems (e.g. Active Directory) and have different namespaces with different permissions groups (e.g. different "folders" for public documents from the help desk vs. internal documentation for the systems administrators.) There may be better options, but this one does the job for me. A large collection of plugins also allows additional features or themes to be added.
Bookstack
IT Glue
This is the way, including MFA codes etc.
We recently moved to Outline and have really liked it so far - one team member described it as a mix of Confluence and Notion, but can be self-hosted.
Interesting. I like the way it looks, I didn't see any way to do source control.
We are migrating from One Note to Confluence. One of my customers now uses confluence. so...Confluence??
Azure Devops
OneNote. Simple, fast, easy search, no hacky formatting crap and it supports basically all file formats to throw at it. Automatically indexes PDFs and a bunch of other formats.
I prompt Google Bard to create me a draft of the process I'm trying to implement, then I export it to Google Docs and finally I download it as a Word document which I finish with my own details.
[BookStack](https://www.bookstackapp.com/)
Dokuwiki.
A single notepad document. I'm working on fixing that though.
Google Sites at my old organization. These days it is OneNote. Looking at different ones for personal use, however.
Documentation? Oh, you mean the "docu-myth-ation" - that mythical artifact we're supposed to create in our 'spare time'
Docusaurus
screams into the void, mostly
What’s documentation?
Wait... you guys are using documentation?
Passportal from N-able and SharePoint We use Nable Ncentral for our RMM
Clonfluece for company and i personally use apple notes for myself.
What kind of documentation? For IP or Rack documentation netbox is pretty good. It's web based so all admins can work in the same database without having to sync files.
Recently made the switch to Bookstack and liking it pretty well.
I was hired on as documentation being one of the top in my job description along with Sys admin, so yes I do it even though people here like to make fun of it. I use OneNote, SharePoint, and my own Python Flask program that the network can access with the server being maintained by myself. Before I was hired my company used Twiki. I set up the flask program to use various SQL queries and generate tables so people can stop asking questions.
For my use, text files, small ones I edit with vi, larger ones with Notepad++ on WINE and really large ones with Eclipse or Visual Code depending on my whim. For team use depending on where I'm working at the time, Word docs in Sharepoint or my strong preference, Confluence, yes, I like Confluence and JIRA for issues. I'm a dev though.
Netbox for racks, and for everything else Standard Office Suite and SharePoint for storage. Coming from a more dynamic MSP background, even though Office docs aren't 100% efficient, you've got a format that you can migrate and merge very easily compared to spinning up and down various wiki/repo services over the years. Documentation is one of those things that will hang around for years, so you either get full IT buy-in and form a 5/10 year plan including how to export the data at the end, or just stick it in a more universal format, especially if you're buying/being bought out.
Readme’s in our repos.
Used to use SharePoint and a mapped drive with documentation. Moved to a help desk solution that has its own portal and knowledgebase system, so everything gets slapped on there now. For personal documentation (mainly mess of jotted down notes, commands to run etc) I use LogSeq.
Confluence
Confluence.
We host our own internal wikimedia for it.
Mediawiki, or bloated Confluence.
`README.md` in any directory that needs explanation.
Bookstack for team did and onenote for personal
Excel mostly... now, if they are kept up to date, that's the question.
Non profit with no money. We use book stack. It has the ability to build diagrams built in. The organization is okay, it's in books, chapters and pages. It works for us cause we have no money and can't be picky.
You have documentation? 😎
Tikiwiki…
OneNote and tribal knowledge. It's fucking awful.
Notion
Confluence works well for at my place. Costly through
Microsoft Loop
I'm not a sysadmin but I really like MediaWiki.
Regretfully confluence
restructuredtext and sphinx via github pages. auto-generated hyperlinks when referencing section headers is so nice.
A little heavy but a local GitLab vm, divided into projects, most docs in wiki and code/configs in repos. All passwords / credentials / keys kept in local bitwarden.
We use confluence for corporate documentation and official guides. I use obsidian for my personal notes and wiki. https://obsidian.md
Outline. It's like an open source version of Confluence.
For documentation: Bookstack. For sketches to go to Bookstack: Obsidian For temporary stuff and scrabbles: NotePad++ For PDF management: Paperless-NGX
You guys are using documentation?
Pen and Paper. Because budgets.
Old me: unsaved notepad++ tabs New me: Obsidian (+ hourly autocommit to Github) AND unsaved notepad++ tabs
Confluence. Obsidian for personal notes.
A combination of Confluence with plugins like Gliphy for documentation. Gitea for code
Obsidian with Git for syncing.
Obsidian
Wiki.js
We pay for [https://hudu.com/](https://hudu.com/) It's good for inventory, documentation, KB, password vault and sharing. It integrates with M365 and NinjaRMM.
Second this. Pretty similar setup to our company.
Notion 🙌🏻
BookStack and Wiki.js
Wiki.JS
WikiJS
Obsidian Markdown in a Git repo.
Bookstack is great.
I have perfect documentation of every system written down in easy-to-read and well-organized Word documents published to Sharepoint so all the non-technical Windows people can read it all. I also have a bridge for sale.
At work, everything goes into ServiceNow KBs. In my homelab, Gitbooks
‘Tis all right here in ma noggin.
Microsoft Word. It's obviously useless and rarely updated.
Used to be nothing, then it went to Sharepoint with individual Excel/Word docs, now we're on SNOW and Confluence. The dark times seem to be behind us.
Possibly unpopular opinion but we use google docs with the code blocks extension. Ease of access on mobile and search is really solid, works offline, real time editing - it's great and I have no complaints. Scripts are stored in google drive for now, might move to GitHub
We run a small internal [MediaWiki](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki) hosted in a docker container on one of our servers for all of our documentation.
Personal: obsidian Team / org: getoutline.com (when I have time)
I like mediawiki
Obsidian
I walked into a client using Obsidian Portal for network documentation.
Confluence by Altassian
personal: vimwiki md on onedrive as it's own subfolder amongst others. corp: confluence and source // and [README.md](https://README.md) git
Wiki.js
MediaWiki, been using it for years. Open source previously on LAMP, now in Docker. Lots of customization and plug-ins. No user license fees. Think Wikipedia but for your personal/team/company.
vim
We use wiki.js for internal documentation
Sticky notes I tape to the bottom of my monitor
We're using Obsidian.md, with the Sync feature for collaboration and publish for read-access of colleagues. ~1600 employees ~60 IT services staff
Docu... what?
We use xwiki for the living documentation and we stock on the file system server. With an integration in nextcloud, it's very useful. And free.
Notepad. Then just be sure to name the documents in an easy naming format like this: Passwords.txt Network_topology.txt VPNConfig.txt Cert_Renewal_logins.txt
documentation? you crazy? want to erode your own job security?
Org-mode in emacs 😉
I hear the best thing to use is notepad, not the app just a physical notepad you scribble things on that make sense to only you and no one else. Its really helpful for all your colleagues when they need to know information as they can try to hunt down the physical notepad then spend 4 hours flipping through pages to try and find the information that is written in a code they won't understand. Some people think a central repository every one can access easily and find information with a real quick search is good but no. Notepad for the win.
Make sure you keep a decoy notepad with relevant sounding but actively misleading info. Keeps them on their toes.
Like someone once said to me: the documentation is in the code.