How to Create a Network Documentation

Many network administrators ignore to create a network documentation. Reasons for that: "I don't have time", "I know its useful, but I don't know how to do that", "Other people should do that". Practically there are no networks that work flawless. Errors could have different causes and could appear any time. You don't want to reach the point where you cannot sleep because you don't understand how to solve a problem and users need to work with no delays.

All you can do is to take all measures you can, you know, to prevent problems and quickly solve them when errors appear. An invaluable help could come from a well maintained network documentation. This can be a large project but is just a necessary step to administer properly a computer network.
If you have a contract with a system integrator or with a consultant to help you implement new things on your network you should ask him to do a documentation of everything he does. You cannot remember all details and later you will appreciate a good and clear documentation when you need it.

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Steps

1. 1
   Ask for help. Common sense will tell that if you are a new employee and you need to understand how the network works you can ask for a documentation from your new colleagues. If you don't find such a documentation maybe you are lucky to find a colleague that wants to give you details. You can have the surprise to find people that don't want to share information with the rest of the team: sad situation but real.
2. 2
   Work out the format. If you want to create yourself a network documentation from scratch you probably understand the necessity and usability. You need to establish the format in which you will store the documentation and other aspects such as people who will work and access and update it.
3. 3
   Think what information you need to collect in that documentation; suggestions could be: number of physical locations (where your company works), how those locations are connected (wireless, wired), number of routers, switches, firewalls, servers in each location (with passwords, types of operating systems, update management, types of hardware, types of RAID, period of guarantee offered by vendors for hardware and software, rules in firewall), a contact list with people responsible with administration, helpdesk, a contact list with companies that offers support for hardware and software, documented and tested procedures for disaster / recovery scenarios, places to store backups (on site and off site), procedures for trial restores. You must understand how your network works in order to establish what information you will need to help you when trouble arise.
4. 4
   Make it as simple or as complex as you need. If you want something simple, you can download a network documentation software from the internet and you need to make sure that you have the proper access to install the software and to access the servers and subnets on the network. After you will run the software you will gain a drawing which will have a scheme of servers, computers and other network devices connected. Key words for this step could be: proper rights and permissions to install / run this network documentation software.
5. 5
   Analyze that drawing and see if you are satisfied with the details for each device. If you work in a network with many servers and other network devices you can use this software, but if you have a simpler and smaller network it's good to create some schemes yourself.
6. 6
   Have a picture of how devices are connected, but also know exactly how to reach physically each device. That's necessary because let's say a server is down and you don't know the reason for that and one reason could be that after applying some updates (for example) something goes not quite well. You can also have hardware failures (other example) and of course one can find a list of other reasons for that.
7. 7
   Improve compliance. If you have a good network diagram you can prove compliance with policies, security standard and that will help not only you but by proving compliance with policies your managers will be much more confident in the IT department.

Tips

• It doesn't matter if you understand or not well how network devices work together. You can gain this knowledge, little by little, working day by day. The important thing is to actually do this effort.
• if you manually try to elaborate a network diagram you can do this task step by step; if you are too busy you can collect information for one device today and tomorrow for other device and so on;
• it's important to understand that this is not a task for one day. If you think that will require too much work, probably you will be discouraged. So once again, little by little. Otherwise you will say what others say: "I don't have time" or "I don't care" and you will give up.
• you will save time and money if you limit the number of documents that need updates and if you use specialized software that can update diagrams if you will make some changes in network devices;
• you can have something very nice if you use mind mapping software; each node could be a device on your network and you can store there information about that device; commercial versions of mind-mapping software offer the possibility to attach files to nodes.

Warnings

• A network documentation is a much more complex task than simple drawings offered by software dedicated for network documentation.
• You can maintain an electronic version of that documentation and a version on paper. You should be careful to establish clearly who should have access to that documentation and where you store it and where you store backups.
• Be aware that you should update that documentation whenever something changes, so you will have this task added to your other work related tasks; if your company uses a specialized type of software for tracking employees activities, you will add this task there; it's necessary to do that because some managers don't have a real understanding of the complexity of network administration tasks and that way will help them understand much better how you use your time at work and you will prove that you are a serious IT Professional. Some people tend to have the impression that members of the IT stuff come to work for nothing, or if they do work they don't do much.
• If you run a specialized software for network documentation you will find that not everything runs smoothly, so it's possible to encounter some problems, so your drawings might not be as accurate as you want. You need to troubleshoot that.