1. Math Faculty Inventory System

2. 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.

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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)

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

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

10. 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.

11. Questions?