Use Cases#

In this section you will find guidance on the advanced use of i-doit, both to further refine your IT documentation and to better support IT service management processes.

The following use cases are described:

Mapping Customer Locations#

Customers often have multiple locations that should be displayed hierarchically with IT components assigned to each one.

Workstations#

IT workstations can be documented in i-doit. This way, you always have an overview of which employee has which IT components and where they can be found.

Automatic Contract Renewal#

A tenant's contract has passed the last cancellation date and needs to be renewed. To renew the contract, we use the extend-contracts command.

Custom Translations#

Using custom translations, you can change the labels of desired fields or add new languages with just a few mouse clicks.

Uploading and Linking Files#

A comprehensive IT documentation often includes documents in the form of files. Whether operating manuals, emergency plans, contracts, installation protocols, or drivers: important files should be linked to objects in i-doit.

Documenting Databases#

With version 1.xx of i-doit, we introduced an additional method that can be used to document databases within i-doit.

Populating Excel Spreadsheets with Data from i-doit (deprecated)#

With just a few lines of Visual Basic, you can read any content from i-doit and display it in Microsoft Excel. In this article, we explain the procedure using reports.

Geo Coordinates#

Every object in i-doit can be assigned geographic coordinates in the form of latitude and longitude.

i-doit - Patch Manager Bridge#

In this use case, we show how to open the Patch Manager Launcher from within i-doit with a single click and navigate directly to the corresponding object. This makes it easy to switch between tools, for example to go from the i-doit documentation directly to the Patch Manager overview.

IP Address Management (IPAM)#

A key element of IT documentation is the management of IP networks, addresses, and various network components. This is called IP Address Management, or IPAM for short.

Cable Patches and Pathways#

A comprehensive IT documentation sooner or later leads to documenting the cabling infrastructure. This article provides an introduction to cabling hardware objects together.

Complex Reports#

The Report Manager already allows you to generate many useful reports via the query editor. For more complex cases, the underlying SQL can be edited. This lets you use MySQL/MariaDB-native functions, for example to query time intervals.

Prod to Test Database Synchronization#

Regularly synchronize the productive i-doit database to a test system -- via shell script (mysqldump) or via console.php (system:tenant-export / system:tenant-import). Including cronjob setup, checklist, and troubleshooting.

Managing Passwords#

In daily work, a system administrator handles dozens of passwords. Keeping them all in memory seems unrealistic. i-doit comes with a simple password management feature that keeps your head clear and helps you find needed credentials faster.

Location-Based User Rights#

In i-doit, very fine-grained user rights can be defined to grant certain user groups only restricted access to the IT documentation. This includes user rights that apply only to specific locations.

Locations#

The placement of hardware and more is an essential component of i-doit. This article explains how to document locations and place objects there.

Switch Stacking#

With the object type Stacking, it is possible to define a stack group with multiple members that exchange information with each other. Although stacking can be used for different object types, the original concept for this object type and the associated category Stack Members traces back to switch stacking. The object type can be found under the object type group Other starting from version 1.7.

Variable Reports#

Variable reports can be used to display object-specific information, unlike regular reports which always produce static results. Object information is viewable in reverse through variable reports, e.g., you can navigate from Object A to Object B and then back from Object B to Object A.

Provisioning VMs (deprecated)#

In this article, we explore the use case of provisioning virtual machines (VMs) through i-doit. We leverage a well-maintained IT documentation, combined with a few scripts, to make this automation a reality.