[Discuss] Change Management / Server Room auditor/logger recommendations?

[Richard Pieri]

On 2/8/2015 1:25 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile) wrote:
> I thought manually tracking changes to machines and environments was
> outdated.

Depends on your environment. If you have a heterogeneous environment 
then tracking all of the changes through a configuration management 
system ends up being more work than tracking and implementing changes 
manually. At the very least it means having another one-off, the 
configuration system itself, to manage. At worst... I never personally 
got to "worst" when I tried to apply Puppet to my environment. I 
abandoned the attempt when it became clear to me that managing my 
environment through Puppet would take around twice as much work as 
managing it manually.

Append-only tracking makes more sense for environments like this. While 
RT does work this way I wouldn't use it for this purpose. RT is a 
ticketing system. Turning it into change log system would require more 
effort than I think it's worth. A wiki can work for a small admin team. 
Wikis aren't append-only but they have modification histories that can 
be used to backtrack if someone mangles a change log. Or text files, one 
per node, on Git-backed storage. Similar results without being locked 
into a given wiki's database or having to deal with web-based bullet 
point BS.

-- 
Rich P.