Working for a large company with over 500 IT staff and over a 1,000 servers, with each server running its own business applications, we have a tremendous information and co-ordination challenge in knowing which IT staff member to contact for which server. The problem of co-ordination is compounded with different IT staff being responsible for different layers of the IT stack. E.g., there are different teams who are responsible for hardware, virtualization, operating systems, application servers and the applications themselves.
Considering this challenge, within DevOps there is a requirement to define and document all the components that constitute the various technology stacks within an IT environment. Traditionally this might have been accomplished with a propriety CMDB solution.
I've investigated typical CMDB solutions such as BMC Atrium and others for this purpose, the problem however is that they stop at the level of documenting IT assets themselves, at a high level, as per the ITIL framework, but to do not address documentation of the IT Technology Stack in detail. I have also investigated tools such as Puppet, Ansible and Salt, but these tools focus more on software deployment and configuration, and not on the people co-ordination around software.
A workable solution for example, would define the various concepts, along with the key attributes important to these concepts:
- Hardware
- Virtualisation
- Operating Systems
- Application servers
- Applications
These concepts would then be associated with one another in terms of their relationships in order to form solutions. E.g., an application would depend on an application server, which would depend on an operating system, etc., Together this solution would be defined at the "Finance System". Having defined a system, all the metadata associated with these systems would be captured in order to facilitate co-ordination for each layer in the stack. I.e. the co-ordination of the technical support staff for each layer.
The purpose of such a solution would to do various queries against technology stacks, such as:
- To determine who supports which components
- Which components are out of date
- Which components need to be patched
With this in mind, what open source tools exist to define all the components of an IT technology stack, including their relationship to one another, in a graph database such as Neo4J?
