Using tags for something interesting

Hello all

Thought I would try and share a bit of what I have been working on internally for a while now. As we are an organization that is still does not have all processes and data management in place I have been working on rewriting an Python based page I hacked together with a colleague to list information about initially virtual machines but it grew to include DNS, physical machines, NAT relations as well as relying on ARP data to resolve MAC to IP where needed. I finished version 1.0 of this new system written in Django 1.10 a few weeks back and am already working on a 1.1 release with a few feature requests.

Now the system grew out of a need to identify people and relations around virtual machines in our infrastructure and today heavily relies on Tags in the web client. We were already using tags to include VM’s in backup jobs in Veeam (something I can highly recommend doing!).

So what and how do we do it? We use 5 tag categories with the names Owner, Department, SysAdm, AppAdm and Service. These 5 tag types give a lot of information directly on the VM on who to contact and what service the VM belongs to. This information is then on a daily basis exported to the new system in the form of a CSV file at the moment. This CSV file along with a file from our NAT device, on from the datacenter routers with ARP, a list of DNS records, a CSV file from our Racktables installation for physical machines where the 5 tag categories are also defined and a list of systems with the SCOM agent installed.

The data is then imported into a data model defined in Django’s Object-relational mapping that tries to correlate some of the information from the different files. The end result is a web page where all systems and DNS records in theory are listed and can be searched, filtered, sorted etc. Where one can find a system(physical or virtual) based on the IP, DNS record (A, CNAME or MX), name, type, OS, you name it. This has some of the characteristics of a CMDB or CMS but instead of showing what it should be it is showing what it actually is at the time of the latest export. We have used this to help ourselves in the Infrastructure department as well as allowing some supports to find information to help route incidents and service requests to the correct groups in our service management system.

Below I have included a blurred screenshot from the system to show one of the views defined. A cut out from a simple system list. Note that the last 5 columns are the tag categories from vSphere/Racktables with the danish names we chose for them.

So that is an example of how we use tags in our day to day operations. We still in some cases miss the old Custom attributes (I know they are still in the API but not exposed in the web client) with the option of inputting variable information like expiry dates etc. Having to do something like that with tags would in my opinion be a mess (imagine a tag for every single date of expiry).

A bonus of doing this you can actually correlate this information with information from vRops via e.g PowerCLI. As an example one could send an email based on an alert in vRops to the addresses set via the SysAdm tags.