Math Faculty Inventory System

Intro Computer Science Computing Facility (CSCF) Math Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF) …Totaling 28 full-time staff CSCF split in 2003 from MFCF after CS faculty became a School within the Faculty of Mathematics. I work for Lawrence Folland, in the Research and Special Projects Group of CSCF. Equipment management is central to the work of both CSCF and MFCF. So we’ve put a lot of effort into a custom inventory system to smooth the workflows.

Summary Who uses our inventory system? What do we do with it? Demo Manually record equipment changes Assert authoritative information used elsewhere View relevant information from external sources Demo Learnings

Who uses our inventory? Inventory’s users are: CSCF and MFCF staff very busy; wide range of responsibilities MFCF – has client-billing process based on types and counts of equipment under support CSCF – subscriptions billing process, includes desktops MFCF bills clients for support based on the kinds of equipment they need. So it’s critical that inventory is correct regarding clients. CFCF operates under a different billing model, “subscriptions” by faculty members and research groups. Some faculty members have subscriptions for desktop support, which similarly requires an accurate inventory count.

What do we do with it? Workflows for both CSCF and MFCF: Everyday searches for equipment: age; software age; physical location of hardware Integration with our home-grown service desk tool: Service Tracker (ST)

What do we do with it? (MFCF) MFCF uses command-line tools to set and query inventory client-billing process regular automated checks for renewing service contracts Automated deployment using SaltStack and Inventory API to generate inventory records and push updates to DNS

What do we do with it? (CSCF) Integrating systems and automating workflows DNS fields: automatically pushed to Infoblox Service monitoring: pushed to Nagios Subscription billing code: used by billing app Equipment acquisition: .csv export/import DHCP data: pulled from inventory for specific CS networks

Demo As support-staffer: visited by faculty member and grad student with a machine problem. Search their user id. (bernard) Search results page: sort… (scs) [Give people a chance to absorb; describe sections] Item page: show services; DNS update; ST Loan item Asset disposal

Future directions Automating configuration management SaltStack, tftpboot, pxeboot Equipment hierarchies: X contains Y

Learnings Inventory app has been ~.2 FTE last 7 years (myself and co-ops) Time spent: learning and improving workflows software development improving development process (gradually more PM, more Agile) Communicating changes Catalog of system dependencies Critical: communicating with all clients. Last term: big co-op project to allow multiple host-names per record. This changed the database schema; I announced the change in advance, but not blatantly, and without client buy-in; meaning two things: 1) we dropped some “unneeded” columns that MFCF was relying on in their cron-jobs. 2) We discovered we didn’t have a complete catalog of other systems that depend on inventory. Some MFCF scripts relied on the old schema, which we had to scramble to fix in production.

Questions?