I’m relatively new to the IT world. I just started working at fairly small IT firm after working at a small company for 3 years where I was the only IT employee and was pretty much a jack of all IT trades.
They have me taking over their (outdated) documentation. They are pretty much giving me complete reign over how I want to redesign their documentation and I’ve begun to draft a plan to integrate their documentation with all their disparate monitoring systems.
I was thinking that the best idea would be to create a central database that regularly queries all of our monitoring systems, like spcieworks. I was thinking this would be easier than having to either constantly make reports in all the different monitoring systems and kinda try and make them all fit together or often having to input data manually into Excel spreadsheets. And then eventually implementing it by creating ODBC connections in our Excel spreadsheets and Visio documentation and maybe developing an ASP/JSP site as another way of accessing the information.
Now as far as implementing this I only have a broad idea and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions. I was thinking of making ODBC connections between the different databases for all of our monitoring programs and a central database that will query all the information in the monitoring systems at regular intervals.
Any suggestions on avenues to look at for designing and implementing this solution (What database servers, programming languages, apps that might help, etc.)? Is it a bad idea in the first place? This is the first time I’ve worked on anything this big.