Engineer Builds Ansible Tool to Auto-Document Infrastructure After IP Hunt Chaos

A DevOps engineer grew frustrated after spending 20 minutes manually probing IP addresses just to provision three virtual machines, due to unreliable documentation split across a neglected NetBox instance and multiple conflicting spreadsheets. The core problem was that no single source reflected live network reality — existing tools either relied on manually declared data or monitoring agents that only tracked already-known hosts. To solve this, the engineer built a tool called Auto-Doc: an Ansible playbook that scans given subnets, SSHes into every reachable machine, and collects system facts using basic shell commands. The output is flat JSON files describing each host's OS, CPU, memory, storage, and network details — sourced directly from the machines themselves, with no caching or stale entries. The project addresses what the author calls a common but uncredited category of infrastructure work: tasks annoying enough to waste an afternoon yet never quite urgent enough to formally fix.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.

Discussion (0)
Log in to join the discussion and vote.
Log in